Illustrations by Joel Benjamin

This is an acknowledgment of a man I never met, never knew, perhaps never even saw (or if I saw him I didn't know it was him). The only thing I know about this man is that he lived across the street from me, three houses down, on the second floor of a two-story house, and that he killed himself last Sunday.

It was my neighbors who told me. They had come to pick up their dog, who plays with my dog.

"He shot himself about an hour ago," they said. "You didn't hear it?"

"No," I said.

I looked out the window, down the street, and could see the red glow of a fire truck and the blue glow of a cop car. Later, when I went out to walk my dog, the fire truck had gone but the cop car was still there: Its lights still flashing noiselessly.

Fucking idiots, I thought, about the crowd of people who stood on the sidewalk, rubbernecking the house.

But then I too stopped to look, just like them. All of the lights were on inside and I could easily see in the windows. I stopped every three feet of the walk to see it from every angle until it was way behind me. On the way back I stopped a lot too.

I could see a number of plants inside, healthy and big. I thought, He took really good care of his plants. Outside of the house still hung a holiday wreath. It seemed sad and strange to me that he had made an effort to get one.

On the porch were what looked like wind chimes. It dawned on me that I never thought anyone with wind chimes would kill themselves. I could also see, through the window, a big set of ugly, orange plaid curtains. They were nothing I would ever choose and made me feel that the man was different than me, that we had nothing in common. I don't know why it was the curtains that separated us, though that's what did it.

But later, I began to feel eerily less separate. I felt sorrow for his suffering. I wondered what kind of emotional and psychological darkness he had been living in that he felt as though he had no other choice. I know darkness. Perhaps there are 100,000 forms of darkness, 100,000 forms of what they call depression. I know one or two of them.

Some people describe depression as a sadness. Others define it as a total lack of feeling. For me, depression is best described as a terror: a terror both of living and dying. It is a terror of dying so intense that it makes life unlivable. It is a terror of dying so nauseating that it makes me want to be dead.

I can also describe it as a screaming and a suffocating: a shrieking inside my head and a heavy tightness in my chest. If I had to guess at the cause of the shrieking, I would say that it is because nothing makes any sense. I would say that it is a scream into nothingness and a scream about nothingness. Sometimes it's loud and terrifying. During those phases I feel as though reality has no bottom. There is no context upon which to hang any other thing. Other times I do not hear it at all. I forget about it. I build a bottom out of bullshit, or I build it out of meaningful shit, or the right person says the right thing, or my meds are adjusted, or something just changes, and the bottom, thankfully, magically appears.

The following day, I told a friend of mine how upset I was about this stranger's death.

"Don't project," the friend said. "You don't know his story. You've said yourself that there are times when it's understandable for a person to end their life. Maybe he had cancer?"

This made me feel better, though I don't know why. If he had cancer, he was still suffering. There is no suffering scale, no way to compare the suffering of one human being, or one illness, to the suffering of another. And yet, for whatever reason, it made me feel better to think that he had cancer.

We are told that suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Surely I have seen my own episodes of suicidal ideation, and those of many others, wax and wane. I have spoken with a lot of people over the years who survived their attempts and are now grateful to be alive. But ultimately, I have no idea how much pain my neighbor was in. I don't know whether he might have been OK if he had just hung on one more day or how much he had already been through. I don't know what he could or should endure. I know nothing.

I don't think it is my place to tell anyone to be "strong," as though those who take their lives are weak. I don't think it is my place to call the living among us brave. I am not brave. I never asked to be brave.

Now when I walk my dog, I don't look inside the windows. Someone has left the lights on in his house and it scares me. From my kitchen and living room windows I can see right in there. I keep my curtains closed.

I feel haunted, as though the ghost of this man is watching me. Why would he haunt me? Perhaps he is angry that I've stayed alive. Perhaps it is survivor's guilt.

My friends tell me to burn sage: in front of my house, in my windows and on the street. But I can't burn sage inside me. Sage will not remove what has always lived deeply inside of me—that which is only reflected by my imagined experience of this man.

All that I can do is say to this man and to myself, and perhaps to all of us: I am sorry for your suffering. Please forgive me for everything. Thank you for your life. I love you.

So Sad Today: Personal Essays will be released in March from Grand Central Publishing. Pre-order it here.

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The US Army wasted millions on reconstruction in Afghanistan, like a $6 million program to import goats, a report claims. Photo via Flickr.

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

US News

US to Unveil New Visa Rules to Block ISIS
The Obama administration will announce new visa rules for European visitors who hold dual nationality in Iran, Iraq, Sudan or Syria, or who have gone to those countries in the last five years. The changes are aimed at making entry more difficult for Europeans involved with ISIS. —The New York Times

Pharma Bro Pleads the Fifth Amendment
Former Turing CEO Martin Shkreli has invoked the Fifth Amendment in refusing to produce documents subpoenaed by a Senate committee investigating drug-pricing practices. Shkreli, who is set to testify next week, tweeted: "I have constitutional rights." —NBC News

Snyder Releases Toxic Water Emails
Michigan Governor Rick Snyder has released 270 pages of emails related to the toxic water crisis in Flint. They show the state's Department of Environmental Quality knew about elevated lead levels in children's blood as far back as August 2015. —ABC News

Pentagon 'Wasted' Millions on Goats
Investigators have attacked a Pentagon agency for "ill-conceived" spending in Afghanistan, including a $6 million program to import Italian goats to boost the country's cashmere industry. One investigating senator called it a "terrible waste of taxpayer money." —USA Today

International News

Vigils Held for Pakistani Students
Pakistan is observing a day of national mourning for the 21 people killed when armed gunmen stormed a northwest university. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has promised a "ruthless" response to the massacre, while the Pakistani Taliban has blamed a small faction within its group. —The Guardian

Zika Outbreak in Brazil
New figures from Brazil have shown a rise in the number of babies born with abnormally small heads to mothers infected with the Zika virus. There have been 3,893 cases of microcephaly since October. Zika is transmitted by the bite of the Aedes aegypti mosquito. —BBC News

Vietnam's Communists Pick New Officials
Vietnam's ruling Communist Party has begun an eight-day congress to choose a new set senior officials. Leader Nguyen Phu Trong said some transfer of power is important because "corruption and wastefulness remain serious problems, causing discontent in the public." —AP

Tajikistan Orders 13,000 Beards Shaved
Police in Tajikistan have shaved nearly 13,000 people's beards and closed 160 shops selling Muslim clothing in the past year, as the country fights against "radicalism." Tajikistan's secular leadership wants to stop "unwelcome" traditions coming from neighboring Afghanistan. —Al Jazeera

Mos Def. Photo via Wikimedia.

Everything Else

Yasiin Bey Retires
The rapper and actor formerly known as Mos Def, detained last week for attempting to leave South Africa with a "world passport," has announced his retirement. Yasiin Bey shared the news with a freestyle posted on Kanye West's website. —Billboard

Eagles of Death Metal to Play Free Gig for Bataclan Survivors
Eagles of Death Metal has offered free tickets to next month's return gig in Paris to survivors of the attack. One survivor who claimed a ticket said she is "happy to go and get the (closure) we deserve." —Newsweek

Planet Earth's Hottest Year Ever
Last year was the hottest year yet recorded, according to NASA and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Global temperatures in 2015 jumped 0.23 degrees Fahrenheit. —Motherboard

Female Musicians Attack PR Boss
Heathcliff Beru, one of the industry's most prominent PR people, has been accused of assault by several female musicians. Berru has been called a "scumbag" and a "monster" by women sharing their stories on Twitter. —Broadly

Done with reading today? Watch our video 'Inside America's For-Profit Bail System'

Detail from the box art to 1991's 'Sonic the Hedgehog'

2016 marks the 25th anniversary of the release of Sonic the Hedgehog for the Sega Mega Drive. The 16bit-era sequels that followed are remembered fondly, but can be unfairly regarded as all style and no substance. The commonly held view is that they were all hold-right-to-win affairs, where entire levels were treated as giant time-attack modes with little depth behind the bright colors and flashing lights. But that's so far from the complete picture.

Certainly, the games were a lot faster and more frantic than many of the other platformers available at the time. (The first person to mention Zool gets a lollipop.) Compared to Sonic, Mario's adventures through the Mushroom Kingdom were positively sedate affairs, and going from Nintendo's mascot to Sega's new, blue figurehead for the first time felt like embarking on a narrow boat vacation only to find that a wizard had turned your barge into a jet ski. Sonic flung himself around the courses, to the point that the screen could barely keep up once you had unlocked Super Sonic, introduced in Sonic 2. Shooting smoothly through shuttle loops and curving pathways was, thanks to the relative power of the Mega Drive and some very clever programming, utterly unlike anything that gamers had seen before.

Yet Sonic, almost from the very beginning, wasn't exclusively about speed. Granted, some levels were light—the first in the original Sonic can be beaten in under 30 seconds, and the opening stage of Sonic 2 can be just about be completed in less than a minute while blindfolded and using your feet¹. But as you go deeper into the Mega Drive-period games, they reveal some deviously tricky platforming that remains challenging to this day, with multiple routes through zones and jumps that require Jedi-like reflexes to get right the first time. After a quarter of a century of playing video games, Sonic 2 remains one of my favorites, and 2015's 3D re-release on the Nintendo 3DS was a gorgeous way of making something familiar feel fresh and new.

Unfortunately, time hasn't treated the old hedgehog too kindly. With each iteration of the Sonic series, Sega seemed to veer further away from the magic that'd made their explosive erinaceidae so appealing in the first place. While the Mario games managed to change with the times, Nintendo constantly reinventing their iconic plumber for new audiences and technology while retaining that unmistakable "Mario-ness," Sonic appears to have gotten stuck in an uncomfortable rut.

"The Sonic Cycle" has become a byword for the anticipation and disappointment fans go through prior to each new game's release. Even 2010's Sonic 4, released to coincide with the series' 20th anniversary, felt flat and lacking. Its controls were wrong, the world was bare, and the whole thing came across as a strange cargo-cult emulation of what Sonic used to be.

With all this in mind, it would be easy to become cynical and jaded. There are already countless articles saying that Sonic should be dragged outside and shot—look, here's one that VICE made earlier. And once you click away from these pages, it won't take you long to find a piece claiming that Sonic has lived way beyond the seven-year lifespan of your average hedgehog, fancy sneakers, or otherwise, and that it's time Sega just packed the whole thing in and wrote off what was once the company's greatest character asset.

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch VICE talk film with Mike Leigh

For the longest time, I felt the same way. I found myself getting actually angry because a series of games were coming out that didn't reflect "my" Sonic; that there were people out there whose first experience with the series wasn't the glorious, pixelated romp of my youth, but instead a buggy nightmare of hollow cityscapes and horrific cross-species relationships with human women. This is, of course, a completely mad way to live. It all came to a head when I played the demo for 2011's Sonic Generations and started to nit-pick over tiny details. The jumping wasn't quite right. There weren't enough of the classic levels. I was so obsessed with not being handed an exact slice of my childhood that I failed to appreciate it for what it was: a sincere, well-intended love letter to a series that wasn't designed to cater solely for me, but instead to appeal to anyone who had ever played a Sonic game. It introduced younger players to Sonic's origins, while offering jaded old guys like me a chance to experience an old favorite in a totally different way.

This is why I'm cautiously optimistic about whatever Sega has planned for Sonic's 25th anniversary. Generations demonstrated that it is still possible to make a good Sonic game. More than that, it's possible to make a Sonic game that actually relies on platforming, rather than raw speed. A lot of the more recent games have felt like a clumsy version of Wipeout with occasional bothersome bits of jumping, which was never what Sonic was about. Yes, in 1994's Sonic 3 you can blitz through some stages, and that can be tremendously satisfying; but there are others which require skills that would give even a seasoned Shovel Knight player pause for thought. And that's what I want to see more of.

Related, on Motherboard: Shoot Your Own Amateur Porn With 'Sonic Dreams Collection'

I want to see a Sonic game that respects the series' history while recognizing that this medium has changed a lot over the past 25 years. The resurgence of indie titles has shown that people will lap up a platform game that can be punishingly hard, so long as the mechanics are solid and failures are fair. Games like Super Meat Boy and N++ have vigorously scratched the itches of masochists the world over, and still garnered critical acclaim. On the other end of the spectrum, Freedom Planet² demonstrated that it's entirely possible to make a scrolling platform game that's colorful and rich and filled with nostalgia, while also being inventive and fun to play.

Sega's logo for Sonic's 25th anniversary

On release, Generations was praised for being a nice combination of 2D side-scrolling and frantic whizzing around a three-dimensional plane, but there's much more to be done. Sega needs to stop being afraid of slowing Sonic down. The series won't implode if players are allowed to move at a pace where they can see what's going on, rather than pinging along in a blur and intermittently slamming to a halt because they didn't have time to react to an enemy. Make the 2D sections into a(nother) solid platform game. The Wii U's Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze showed how great "old" games can be with a fresh lick of paint and some revamped mechanics. This would allow the 3D sections to be full on, balls-to-the-wall twitch gaming, like some unholy combination of rhythm action affairs, endless runners, and FAST Racing Neo.

The contrast between these two styles would allow both sets of strengths to shine—the fast-paced, adrenaline-fueled thrills of the 3D games highlighting and emphasizing the careful, methodical platforming of the 2D titles, and vice versa.

Of course, all that's been released so far is a spiffy new logo, with a podgy hedgehog and a background distinctly similar to Green Hill Zone. It could be in support of a game (that isn't the 3DS-exclusive Sonic Boom: Fire & Ice, which has been coming for a while), but it could just as easily be artwork for a retrospective documentary about the series. I hope, though, that Sega does have an anniversary game planned, and that they've learned from their past mistakes. The time is right for a Sonic game that truly reflects the best of both dimensions he's inhabited. He deserves it. We all do.

¹ Yes, I have taught myself to do this. No, it generally wasn't worth it.

² Incidentally, Freedom Planet had one feature that, if implemented by Sega in a new Sonic game, could immediately put a stop to a huge amount of bitching about the series: the ability to turn off cutscenes. Large numbers of Sonic fans are livid about the idea of story polluting their games, and positively foam with anger at the inclusion of Sonic's ever-growing roster of friends. With one simple checkbox, Sega could put an end to this. Play for the gameplay and nothing else, or explore the backstory and motivations of a motley crew of assorted mammals and lizards—leave the choice to the player and we're all happy.

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Wild mushroom pickers are exactly what you'd imagine them to be like IRL. Meet more of them this Sunday on CityTV.

In the summer of 2015, thousands of people flocked to the remote forests of the Northwest Territories in search of a crop potentially worth a lot of cash. These nomadic pickers didn't come to harvest weed. Rather, they were involved in another kind of undocumented commerce which, it turns out, is also big business.

The mysterious morel mushroom is an ingredient sought-after by some of the finest restaurants and French chefs in the world. For reasons scientists, climatologists, botanists and seasoned pickers can't quite explain, the morel mushroom magically appears on the scorched earth the year following a forest fire. In 2014, 385 wildfires charred 3.4 million hectares of Northwest Territories' boreal forests making it one of the worst wildfire seasons in documented history. As a result, thousands of mushroom hunters flocked like prospectors during the Klondike Gold Rush.

VICE sent Adam Gollner to Northern Canada to investigate the underground market of the elusive morel and see why these nomadic pickers have a reputation for being wilder than the mushrooms they hunt.

Tune in to VICE on CITY this Sunday to watch the full length of Shroom Boom (or Bust).

Charming. Screenshots via Douchebags of Grindr.

They read more like signs you'd see affixed to the doorway of a 60s-era American diner than messages you'd encounter on a modern dating forum. "No blacks"; "no asians"; "WHITES ONLY!!" And that's a relatively benign selection.

Welcome to the special hell that is being a visible minority on Grindr.

While straight women of colour are certainly not immune from encountering racist bullshit when dating online (and IRL), I can't say I've come across a Tinder or OKCupid profile that explicitly—or even implicitly—disqualified an entire racial group from getting in touch. Things are different on Grindr.

The hookup app, owned by a straight Chinese billionaire, has grown exponentially since its 2009 launch and now has a reported five million monthly users in 196 countries around world. It's hardly a surprise that some of those people are racist, given the sheer size of the user base, but the brazenness with which bigoted messages are displayed, often in the form of disclaimers that sit front and centre on a person's profile, is unsettling.

"More into Vanilla and spice than chocolate and rice" reads one of thousands of profiles featured on Douchebags of Grindr, a blog dedicated solely to calling these people out, while another says, "Not into chopsticks curry." Some of the offending posts are less cutesy e.g. "Blacks keep movin' cuz I aint interested unless you can prove not all blacks are the exact same."

VICE reached out to Grindr for comment but did not hear back.

As a heterosexual female, this issue wasn't on my radar until gay friends—white ones included—brought it up in frustration. After doing a bit of digging, I found myself cringing internally at what I discovered. Grindr, it appears, is one of the last bastions of open racism (and fat-shaming and ageism) that exists in a relatively PC society, with profiles at times mimicking a crass wish list e.g. "no femmes" "no fatties" "gingers need not apply." It's not only white men perpetuating these ideas, either. Scanning through bios, I noticed users of different backgrounds indicating racial preferences—typically for caucasians.

"It's like another world," said Toronto server Jeff Lau, 26, who said he's been rejected and fetishized on the app.

"People may think these things in real life but you would never see it as explicitly until you went on a gay dating site...It's like an outlet for them to act out on it and live out this white supremacist idealism."

Vancouver social worker Victor Huynh, 28, told VICE he was once approached on a site called Manhunt by a "rank 50-year-old" who told him he would be down to hook up "if I were just a few shades lighter."

"I wrote back, 'Dude, that's fucked' and he said, 'Dude? Are you just learning English? People don't say 'dude' anymore.'" (They do, dude.)

The conversation carried on for a few minutes, said Huynh, with the aggressor saying things like, "You're beautiful but you're just not good enough for me."

When Huynh said the comments qualified as harassment, the man acknowledged he was being "rude" but added "that's just the way the world is and you don't fit into it."

Obviously, there's no excuse for that kind of in-your-face hatred. But the more common and subtle form of discrimination found on gay dating apps comes from people who romantically speaking, claim they aren't attracted to people from certain ethnic groups. Often, they defend themselves by saying it's simply a matter of preference.

In one Grindr exchange between two men, one white, the other Asian, obtained by VICE, the white guy said, "I'm not generally attracted to Asian guys. That's not racist."

An Asian man who spoke to VICE but wanted to remain anonymous, supported this theory.

He told me his definition of racism is when a person expresses a "malicious intent" and likened not being attracted to people of a certain race to his own disinterest in women.

"If someone actually cannot get turned on by someone from a minority group that's not really something they can change."

Research published last year, however, suggests that's in fact bullshit—it's still racism (sexual racism, to be precise). Sydney-based researcher Denton Callander, who led the study, compared men's attitudes toward sexual racism online and their racist attitudes in general. His conclusion? They come from the same shitty place.

"Sexual racism is a form of racism because, quite simply, it is the use of racial stereotypes to include or exclude groups of people," Callander told VICE. He said he's caught a lot of heat for this theory because people view it as an "attack" on their sexual freedom.

"The reality is that our desires—like all of our thoughts and behaviours—are as susceptible to broader social and political trends. At the end of the day, we live in a world rife with racial inequality, so it is not at all surprising that racism should permeate our desires as well."

For George Chijioke, a 25-year-old Torontonian who works in ad sales, there is no debate.

"I think preference is you like tall people, you like short people," he told VICE, admitting he's into tall, broad-shouldered men. "To discount a somebody just because of a race, I think that is inherently racist."

Chijioke has been called a "monkey" on Grindr, but he said those types of insults are rarer than run-of-the-mill "I'm not into black guys" rejections, backhanded compliments, or straight up fetishizing.

"I've had people messaging me saying, 'Oh my god, I've never been with a black guy before'...'I'm never really into black guys but you're really hot'," he explained. "I'm not here to be your guinea pig."

Rajiv, a 25-year-old Vancouverite who did not want his real name used, has had men seek him out for his "brown uncut dick."

"I had one guy essentially worship me because he read me as being Indian—calling me a sexy Mahatma Gandhi, and going on and on about how he loved Gandhi's politics and would love to worship me in the same way. Wanting me to be his Indian Prince."

Callander said racial fetishization is a form of racism that's framed positively; ultimately, it's still based on stereotypes, like the idea that "all black men have large penises."

"This myth may lead some to seek out black partners specifically, but doing this turns those men into objects and ignores that they are people also, with their own desires and needs."

Most of the men I spoke with seemed to think the anonymity of being behind a screen and the tendency to treat people on hook-up apps as commodities partially explains the blunt racism. Gay men are also more inclined to be direct because they've been using these apps for longer, added Callander.

"As more straight people continue to join these web services, particularly to organize sexual encounters, I suspect that expressions of racial discrimination will become more prominent," he said.

Sweet, something to look forward to, heteros.

In terms of dealing with the problem, the strategy seems to be to simply grow a thicker skin. Still, it seems sadly ironic that people within a traditionally oppressed community would hold these sentiments.

"It sort of baffles me because we're a group of people who have been marginalized for so long for something that we can't change," said Chijioke. "The fact that there are gay people that actually go out of their way to do that others, I think is ridiculous and strange."

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Last April, City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito announced that she wanted to go easier on several low-level offenses in New York. Her list of bullshit crimes we shouldn't be sweating too much included urinating in public, making unreasonable noise, and hanging out in a park after dark. It might seem trivial, but according to a Daily News analysis at the time, roughly 2.7 million New Yorkers had been hit up for these kinds of petty infractions between 2001 and 2013.

This is the pure, street-level incarnation of "broken windows" policing, a popular model of law enforcement where so-called "quality of life" offenses are aggressively enforced in order (theoretically) to prevent larger crimes. And the result—at least, in Manhattan—is a bizarro-world criminal court that is running full steam at 1 AM on a weeknight. And there are over 1 million open arrest warrants, mostly for minorities in low-income communities, for things like pissing in public a decade ago.

Now it looks like that might finally change.

On Monday, the City Council will introduce the Criminal Justice Reform Act of 2016, a package of eight pre-considered bills created in tandem with the New York City Police Department (NYPD) and City Hall. Together, the law would set a preference for police officers to hand out civil penalties, rather than criminal summonses, for those who are caught with an open container, littering, urinating in public, making unreasonable noise, or violating park rules. In addition, the act would eliminate permanent criminal records for public urination and park violations.

To pull this off, the move would be conducted administratively, as several public agencies, like the Parks and Health departments, agree to no longer treat certain offenses as misdemeanors. Should a civil offense be handed out, the act would transfer its adjudication to the Office of Administrative Trial and Hearings (OATH) courts, which would offer community service to low-income individuals, instead of requiring them to pay a civil penalty. In later proceedings, this court would also be significantly expanded, in order to accommodate the onslaught of new cases.

By doing so, the new rules would attempt to lift some of the 42 percent of all NYC criminal summonses that involve this sort of low-level BS, thereby allowing the clogged system to focus on more serious stuff, like gun violence or domestic abuse.

"The Criminal Justice Reform Act of 2016 is a bold step towards reforming a system which for too long has disproportionately punished low-level, nonviolent offenses," City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, who wrote an op-ed for VICE News on the issue last year, said in a statement. "By increasing the use of civil adjudication instead of relying on our broken criminal summons system, we can reduce the long-term consequences of over-criminalization while ensuring that the penalties fit the offense and that police have the tools they need to keep us safe."

However, the preference for the police to go civil, not criminal, is just that: a preference. In the end, it is up to internal NYPD policy—and the average cop on the street—to decide how and when to confront these types of offenses. The act would require the Department to set criteria for certain interactions, which would then be made public, and the Council would track the number of civil or criminal complaints.

But the cops will still effectively be the ones deciding who gets arrested, and for what—a serious problem when you consider the racial disparities in NYC policing.

A report issued in May by the Police Reform Organizing Project (PROP) demonstrated the inequities baked into "broken windows": Essentially, that it applies to minority communities and doesn't exist in white neighborhoods. According to that analysis from before, a startling 81 percent of those low-level offenses were handed out to black and Latino individuals.

Another issue is that a lot of time these individuals are poor, which this reform doesn't necessarily address—one worry is that it will result in more fines being levied against people who can't afford to pay. (This criticism was also leveled after the city softened its stance on public possession of weed last year.)

Still, the bills are the end result of lengthy negotiations between the City Council, the NYPD, and the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio, who was elected in 2013 on a police reform agenda. He's heralded initiatives of his own to fix the insane summons system, and, according to the New York Times, his office appears to be behind the bill.

From what it looks like, the boys in blue are receptive to change, too.

"Our direct input has been considered instrumental and well-received by all involved in this important process," Stephen Davis, the NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Public Information, said in a statement. "We look forward to the establishment of reforms that positively affect the goals of fairness and public safety. The NYPD appreciates having the opportunity to continue to play a key role in this process."

But according to Council Member Rory Lancman, a sponsor of one of the bills, that process wasn't always easy—particularly when it came to dealing with NYPD Commissioner William J. Bratton. In the end, he "adheres to 'broken windows' almost like a religious belief," Lancman told me. After all, the top cop has built his career on the theory's debatable success, both in NYC and in Los Angeles, where he was also police commissioner.

"A year ago under Bratton, you couldn't imagine this happening," Lancman told me. "He was very dismissive. But I think we were determined to do something on this issue, and he realized it was better to work with us than against us, if begrudgingly." (He reminded me that Bratton is still opposed to a handful of police conduct bills floating around in the Council.)

Since then, the police commissioner has evolved a bit, opening himself, albeit slowly, to some changes. Just this week, in an op-ed for the Daily News, Bratton wrote that the reforms in place must prevent RoboCops. "We want to develop well-rounded, highly skilled police officers, not arrest machines," he said.

"This really isn't about taking the 'broken windows' out of 'broken windows,'" Lancman argued. "It's about that part of the criminal justice system that Bratton never focused on. After you make sure the windows aren't broken, what happens to these people?"

Although he believes it is "very highly likely" the bill will pass, the councilman acknowledged that his colleagues and the public will raise questions. To that end, Lancman referred to a Daily News cover from last April in response to the Speaker's announcement, where a man was seen pissing on a building in broad daylight.

The headline? "Drink, Pee, & Be Merry!"

"We want to address the core concerns," Lancman told me. "We don't want cops to stop identifying and targeting true bad guys in this city. We just don't want them to run people through the criminal justice system who don't have to be run through it."

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

In anticipation of the upcoming fourth season of our HBO show, which will premiere February 5 at 11 PM, we are releasing all of season three for free online along with updates to the stories. Today's installment follows up on a dispatch called Rent a White Guy, exploring the Chinese trend of hiring white males for menial jobs as a status symbol, and what it takes to actually apply. Watch the episode below:

Is there something more trustworthy or authoritative about a person who is white? In the early 90s, when my parents ran an after-school program in a highly competitive suburb of Southern California, they often debated hiring exclusively white teachers as a way to appeal to their predominately Asian-American customer base. I remember feeling baffled and indignant that they believed Asian faces didn't broadcast prestige the way a white face did.

Although casting white faces has become less prevalent among the Asian diaspora community, in remote parts of China, "face jobs" or "monkey jobs" are still common. Businesses can rent laowais—foreigners—to show up at parties, to masquerade as CEOs and doctors, even to act as emissaries of Obama.

Filmmaker David Borenstein, who made the New York Times Op-Doc "Rent-a-Foreigner in China," first went to the country as an anthropologist to research the massive housing developments that were being built in provincial western China. While he was there, he was often approached by agents in the rent-a-foreigner industry to participate in real-estate openings organized to lure potential buyers.

A still from 'Dream Empire,' by David Borenstein. Photo courtesy of David Borenstein

Borenstein's new film, Dream Empire, from which the NYT Op-Doc is excerpted, examines not only the rent-a-foreigner industry but also the political and cultural climate in China that allows these "international" spectacles to seem like valid demonstrations of prosperity and progress. While it is easy to focus on the surface-level absurdity of the phenomenon, the economic realities underneath the spectacle remain enormously complicated.

Earlier this week, I spoke to Borenstein over email about his film, and the precarious economic situation in China that has created the need for "white monkey gigs."

VICE: What is your new film about?
David Borenstein: Dream Empire, supported by Danish Film Institute and Sundance Institute, is a character-driven documentary about the rise and fall of a Chinese rural migrant named Yana. This story takes place within the Kafkaesque environment that was the Chinese building boom.

The story follows her from humble beginnings as an aspiring foreigner-agent. Later she becomes the owner of Chongqing's largest foreigner agency, turning ghost towns into boomtowns on the day that outsiders visit. The last third of the film takes place in the last year, where China's current economic troubles have pushed her to the brink of financial ruin.

The film pays close attention to the larger environment she inhabits, and takes periodic breaks from her story to investigate developers, homebuyers, security guards, and other players in China's real-estate system. The rent-a-foreigner phenomenon plays a role in the system, but it's only one small part. In this surreal world, brutality is always one step away from the absurd.

"People in the industry call these jobs 'white monkey gigs.' Probably sums it all up."

How did you get recruited for the jobs that you got? What were some of your jobs?
My first encounter with the rent-a-foreigner industry is something that's quite common for foreigners in China. A "foreigner agent" flagged me down while I was walking down the street. He later offered me gigs that mainly involved pretending to play instruments over backing tracks with other random foreigners. MCs at the events would often introduce us as "famous American bands."

I did a lot of gigs in my time in China. Probably the most absurd offer was when I was asked to be present at the opening of a new development complex as some sort of fake emissary of Obama. It was some half-baked plan where they wanted to suggest that the new development was so magnificent that it had even managed to catch Obama's attention. They were even planning on forging fake US State Department credentials.

How did it make you feel to be a foreigner for hire?
People in the industry call these jobs "white monkey gigs." Probably sums it all up.

"Ten years ago, when I first came to China, it was absurd. Talented, dedicated Chinese bands were getting no gigs, while foreigners were getting rich making a fool of themselves on stage playing air guitar."

Did you get the sense that the buyers were successfully duped into believing that the foreigners were who they claimed they were? Did they recognize on a certain level that it was all for show?
I found it interesting that the foreign acts were often brought on stage after authority made its presence felt. My New York Times Op-Doc, for example, shows foreign students strutting down a stage in their underwear, while an announcer introduces them as top-ten models. But what was perhaps the most interesting thing about this gig was what happened immediately before the performance. The party officials of the small town were introduced on stage one after another, and led the entire room in a powerful performance of the national anthem. I don't think it wise to discount the feeling of legitimacy that a ritual like that might transmit to the whole gig.

Luckily things are changing, at least in the big cities. Over the past few years, these kinds of gigs have become more and more of third- and fourth-tier city kind of thing. Nowadays many event companies in bigger Chinese cities are putting on events that involve local Chinese acts. Ten years ago, when I first came to China, it was absurd. Talented, dedicated Chinese bands were getting no gigs, while foreigners were getting rich making a fool of themselves on stage playing air guitar.

"It's Guy Debord's nightmare. Finance capitalism is boiled down to its raw essence—pure and unadulterated spectacle."

Can you describe some of these housing developments? After these fake boomtown days are staged, what happens?
Evan Osnos from the New Yorker wrote the book Age of Ambition to talk about this era of Chinese history. I think that name really does capture the feeling of this period. We went to new developments all over Sichuan Province, including some that were quite remote. The unifying theme of new development projects was grand ambition mixed with a dollop of utopianism. In our forthcoming film, Dream Empire , developments with names like "paradise," "utopia," and "heavenly" are everywhere.

To me, this era of Chinese history is about dreaming as wildly as one can and believing in the power of the human will to make dreams a reality—regardless of the difficulty. But of course when things don't go well, developers need a way to save face and find a way to sell properties. That's where these foreign shows come in. The shows will sweep into a pretty empty development, turning it into an absolute spectacle for the afternoon when speculators come in. Then when they leave it's remarkable how fast it reverts back. It's Guy Debord's nightmare. Finance capitalism is boiled down to its raw essence—pure and unadulterated spectacle.

Still from VICE on HBO's 'Rent a White Guy'

How did the buyers respond after they bought the property? Did they live there?
There is a scene in the film that follows homebuyers who believe they purchased property in an "international boomtown." I don't want to spoil the scene, but it might be easy to guess that they weren't happy when they moved in.

But that group was mainly people who actually wanted to live in the area where they purchased their homes. In China, 70 percent of household wealth is in real estate. When this fact is combined with high levels of economic inequality, it means that the rich end up controlling most of the real estate in the country. This of course means many empty apartments.

As far as I can tell, many rich Chinese homeowners don't really care if their investment properties exist in unlivable, empty communities. They only care about the price, which still has not dropped much. Price drops might actually not be so bad in the long run—it would help so many young Chinese and rural Chinese obtain homes. They face the most expensive housing market relative to average salary in the world. Economists keep complaining that Chinese aren't consuming enough, but that's because they are spending their whole lives saving up to buy ludicrously expensive housing.

But a lot of what the Chinese government does makes sense if you consider what seems to me to be their main source of legitimacy: allowing rich Chinese to continue getting rich. People who own lots of real estate in China constantly tell me: "Yes, there is a bubble, but the government will never let it pop." It's a basic contract with the state. Last year when prices saw relatively minor drops, furious homeowners were smashing the windows of their own properties.

So governments both local and national work to protect wealth generated in financial bubbles at all costs. Legitimacy is on the line. Hence the various heavy-handed attempts to guide the market: suppressing discourse that negatively affects financial confidence, embellishing official statistics to report "healthy GDP growth of seven percent," and, for all of our enjoyment, having foreigners sing and dance in their underwear.

Essentially these companies are using white faces as masks of power and authority.
I know it sounds insane, but any discussion of rent-a-foreigners is necessarily a discussion of the nature of the spectacle, China's national identity, and the utter absurdity of modern finance capitalism. What good does it do to just point out the surface-level absurdity of rent-a-foreigners? The more rewarding discovery is to dive deep into the absurd, to take the absurd seriously, to see what the absurd means to the people perpetuating it. If you take this route you will come to a far more gratifying conclusion: Absurdity resides in the heart of many of the things that we perceive to be deadly serious.

Follow Anelise on Twitter.

Dream Empire by David Borenstein premieres later this year.

Promotional art for 'No One Lives Forever'

My favorite James Bond film is On Her Majesty's Secret Service, and it's because of one particular scene. Bond escapes from Piz Gloria, Blofeld's base in the Swiss Alps, and flees to the village of Lauterbrunnen. Unarmed and tired, he runs onto an ice rink, trying to lose his pursuers in the crowd of winter sports enthusiasts. But he can't go on. There's this brief moment, where Bond sits on a bench, panting for breath, and you can see he's absolutely terrified—he knows that he's going to die. And then Tracy, played by Diana Rigg, appears and saves his life.

People rave about the Daniel Craig movies, and how they show not only a more vulnerable and fragile Bond but also more capable, and less objectified women. It's not consistent—there are still some damnable sexual hijinks involving Blofeld's harem, the Angels of Death—but a full 37 years before Casino Royale, OHMSS gave a woman in a Bond movie something to do above looking pretty and swooning over James. In that scene, Tracy is the hero. And when she's later killed, after marrying James in Portugal, her death isn't throwaway and tacky, like Jill's in Goldfinger. It's the climax of the film, and we close on Bond crying over the body of his wife.

Then George Lazenby's agent convinced him the Bond films were going nowhere and that he should drop the part, and we got first Diamonds Are Forever, a total disaster, and then Roger Moore, whose tanned wrinkles and spiked punch drawl have become synonymous with the very worst in sexual politics. Despite its faults, OHMSS stands out from the other Bond movies. In an ocean of sleaze, innuendo, and cheap shags, it's an island of at least vaguely more palatable treatment of women. So too is the 2000 first-person shooter No One Lives Forever, by Monolith Productions (or, to give the game its full name, The Operative: No One Lives Forever). Amidst myriad boisterous FPS games, both before and after its release, NOLF has the guts to not only put a woman front and center, but to openly challenge male authority.

Cate Archer, as she appeared in marketing for the 'No One Lives Forever' sequel of 2002, 'A Spy In H.A.R.M.'s Way'

The game's protagonist, Cate Archer, isn't trying to fit in. She isn't along for the ride, doing what the boys do and trying to disguise her identity. Besieged by chauvinistic 1960s attitudes Archer nevertheless stands firm and makes her point. She's doubted from the off. "Emotional inconsistency and assassination hardly make good bedfellows," remarks her handler, less than convinced that women belong in the field at all. "Drop the Joan of Arc routine," says Tom Goodman, Archer's male counterpart. The UNITY agency's gadgets department even develops for her a special corpse-dissolving spray, since it's assumed, as a woman, she won't be able to physically carry and hide bodies.

But Archer continues to assert herself. In so many video games, her confidence would be illustrated through action—the badass heroine is one of gaming's most popular archetypes, because she's so cheap and easy. You simply re-skin a male protagonist. But those characters—Bayonetta, Lara Croft—still feel to me largely created to satisfy, or at least not threaten men. The former is not so much a strong character as fulfilling of a male dominatrix fantasy. Before she is acceptable and can become "Tomb Raider," Lara Croft has to prove she can survive in a man's world. The majority of female characters in big games are, in some surreptitious, very well disguised manner, made with men in mind. There's a knowing behind Evie Frye, Samus Aran, the heroines of the Final Fantasy franchise. They feel like they've been sanded down and made palatable by a committee of men, afraid that overt strength of character will spook their audience of teenage boys.

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Related: Watch VICE's film on the struggles of one black trans man

Archer, by contrast, is unapologetically herself. How often in video games do you get a character that carries a gun and blows things up, and then sits and talks about feminism? "The point is letting young women be whatever they please," Archer tells Goodman.

There's something to be said for the fact Cate's gadgets are all disguised as female fashion accessories—her cigarette lighter is a blowtorch, her perfume bottle sprays sleeping gas, her lipsticks are grenades. It's a smart touch, taking these artifacts of stereotypical femininity and turning them into weapons. The standards of beauty and emblems of womanhood pushed onto Archer by a visually stimulated male society are turned back around and used, quite literally, against men. More subtly than Bayonetta using her legs and leather to manipulate her pursuer-cum-admirer Luka, it's Archer embracing, owning, and using her sexuality—at no point does it feel like, maybe instead of empowering women, this game is about titillating men.

There's also something telling about No One Lives Forever's mission structure and how, in the first half of the game especially, the story wrong-foots the player. Repeatedly, and beyond your control, missions go wrong—you fail objectives, comrades get killed, and targets get away. That leaves Archer to face admonishment from her superiors, who use every botched assignment as proof that women belong back at home.

New on Noisey: Stories About Prince Are Like Fan Fiction, Except They're All True

But it's not your fault, and by extension, it's not Archer's. Missions go wrong not because of your shortcomings or hers, but because of absurd, unforeseeable factors. It transpires that one of your handlers, Mr. Smith, the most vocal opponent to female field agents, is in fact a traitor, who's engineered most of the mission failures himself. What both you, as a player, and Archer, as a character, face is frustration towards a stratified system, one that simply won't give women, no matter how deserving they are, any credit. Wage disparity, the presumption of advancement law, being prohibited from front line jobs in the military—this kind of legislative sexism is reflected in Archer's struggle to be taken seriously at work.

In that light, the attitudes of Archer's bosses seem daft and unfair—the more you play NOLF, the more their remarks sound bigoted and behind the times. The game's 1960s setting highlights archaic, outmoded beliefs still prevalent in the modern gaming industry. That line about emotional inconsistency and assassination is reflected perfectly in the 2013 Tomb Raider's executive producer Ron Rosenberg's remark about players wanting to "protect" Lara Croft. The spy agency's reticence to accept a female operative is representative of gaming's enormous gender bias—video games are made by men, for men. We boast about graphics and VR and "new experiences," but politically speaking, the majority of video games are stuck several decades in the past. And of that, Cate Archer remains proof, even this many years after her debut.

Follow Ed on Twitter.

'Degrassi: Next Class.' Photo courtesy of Netflix

Violence. Addiction. Ego. Intimacy issues. Growing up. These are the motifs that inform TV shows for teens, and they have sprung directly from the rib of Degrassi, the great Canadian juggernaut of edutainment that will never die.

It is a truly blessed time to be a grown adult fan of television shows about and marketed towards high-schoolers. Consider Hulu's telenovela-inflected show East Los High, or Pretty Little Liars, which daringly just jumped five years into the future and has, over the years, inspired a freakish number of intelligent and charming podcasts. And though it's not currently on air, we shouldn't forget the Shakespearian saga that is Gossip Girl, whose first two seasons ought to be required binge-watching for any adult with a Netflix password, access to marijuana, and a free weekend or two.

The brilliance of Degrassi—especially Degrassi: The Next Generation, otherwise known as The One Drake Was On—is that it depicts every horrible thing that could have possibly happened in high school, all pretty much at the same time. Since 1979, the show has depicted teens going through trials and tribulations ranging from murder, suicide, teen pregnancies, AIDS, and a pre-rap-superstardom Drake making the following face while getting a boner:

Screengrab via YouTube

Still, the new season of Degrassi—whose first ten episodes were released to Netflix last Friday—feels like an outlier in the bold landscape of teen TV. Showcasing a new cohort of students at Degrassi High, Degrassi: Next Class is the show's newest rebrand, this time as a more realistic alternative to the competition. Whereas East Los High verges on magical realism—that show combines plot lines about AIDS, pregnancy, domestic abuse, and high-level drug-dealing with EDM and dance battles—and Gossip Girl centers around the lifestyles of the impossibly attractive and rich, the newest iteration of Degrassi is a kinder, gentler teen drama.

Degrassi: Next Class is for the most part sweetly earnest, treating the things teens go through—sex, drugs, rapid-fire changes in personal perspective—as monumental events. It aims for a kind of realism with refreshingly lowered stakes: Degrassi's pansexual drug addict essentially just stumbles around a lot and kisses both his ex-boyfriend and his female Ativan pusher; the boy branded as a lothario earns his rep through a series of make-outs, not by Chuck Bass-edly bedding every young lady in sight. One girl jumps to conclusions about a boy's preferences after stalking his Instagram likes, and the kid who refuses to wear sleeves gets schooled on how consent is an ongoing conversation. The plotlines are clearly ripped from the headlines, but they never verge on absurdity as teen-centered shows often do, even when the intensity is amped up. (One genuinely nail-biting affair starts with the "gamer club" arguing with the "feminist club" about what is and is not a trigger.)

In real life, high school can be serious stuff. Your friend might get pregnant, a teammate may get wrapped up in drugs, you could wind up in a destructive relationship, someone might call in a bomb threat. But, in all likelihood, not all of that stuff will happen to the same group of teens—and that fact could make previous Degrassi incarnations feel over-the-top. What Degrassi: Next Class understands is that high-school drama is usually more about the emotions stirred up by events than the events themselves. Kids always feel like their world is crashing down, when in reality the foundations are just being rattled a bit.

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Illustration by Dan Evans

Thirty-six, if you believe the results of a recent survey, is the age you give up on your career. You spend your 20s trying to vaguely sort your shit out enough to get a job, and before you know it you're in your 30s and it's too late to even think about whether it's what you wanted to do. Life's pendulum swings on. Spreadsheets by day and box sets by night. Grey's Anatomy. Circling things in the Lakeland catalogue. That kind of thing.

Research conducted by accounting firm AAT found that people begin to feel "trapped" in their career by the time they reach their mid-30s. Thirty-one percent of the people they asked said they considered changing career at least twice a month, but their main barrier to doing something better was because re-training was way too expensive.

We spoke to six people in their mid-30s about how work fits into their lives now.


Habib, 34, bouncerMy job isn't what I ever really dreamed of. I thought I'd end up doing something more interesting or glamorous than this. I used to work as a manger at a bookies and I preferred it, but working on the door is better for me and my wife. We're separated now, but we have two little girls and if I work nights and she works days, then there's always someone around to look after the kids.

I didn't study very hard at school and never thought I'd have the kind of job where I need to wear a starched shirt. Working the door at night can be quite tough—you never really get used to sleeping during the day. But I don't complain about it to my friends. The guys I work with are safe, and we often have a laugh. I see lots of bad behavior in the clubs I work in so I always have good stories, which is good enough for me for now.

Abigail, 34, freelance journalist with a young baby
I was at my most ambitious in my late 20s and then around 30 I decided it was all bollocks, which is when I went freelance. For me and a lot of my friends, our 30s are about family and putting down roots. At the moment I just want work to be easy and well-paid, which, when you've been doing pretty much the same thing for nearly 15 years, it should be, or you're probably not very good at it.

I think once you earn over a certain amount, it's very hard to change career. I guess the exception is for people who go out on their own and do something entrepreneurial. It's the age where you go, "Ooh, I want to launch an amazing website/music label/ cupcake shop," but very few people can really do that. I suppose if you had a very well-paid partner who could support you, then you could. Like a banker funding his wife's interior designer whims... but think that's rare and old-fashioned.

James, 36, works in marketing
My dad worked for the same company for 40 years. His key message to both me and my brother as we were growing up was, "Don't do what I did, be creative." So I did drama at university, and then thought I should work in TV, so did that for a year or two, and then left that to start a comedy sketch troupe. We tried relatively hard to make it into a career. Some of my friends are now winning BAFTAs and writing for Radio 4. Most aren't. I did temp office jobs to support it, but then felt like I might like to actually earn some money for a bit and not struggle for rent, so took a permanent marketing job, and thought I'd write stuff in my spare time.

Then I got married, and took another marketing job, better paid, harder to step away from. So I'm still writing, but the pretense of "writing is my career" is dissipating. The ambition, I think, is still there, at 36. But there's more things fighting for brain space. A marriage to keep alive, kids, a mortgage... And then the reality of creative work doesn't match up with the ambition I had when I was in my 20s. The most creative stand-ups at best get to be on tacky panel shows like 8 Out of 10 Cats. I think ambition can be tempered as you see the limits of what your peers achieve. The ambition to change jobs doesn't necessarily leave you, but maybe the ability to do so does.

Jay, 31, upholsterer
I've been earning fuck all money my whole life. I'm relatively happy in my career choice but I would like something that's better paid. Starting something new takes ages and is usually expensive as hell, though. it took me like 25 years to decide what I wanted to do with my life so I should probably just stick with it and force people to pay me more. I did film studies at university because that was when everyone was told to go to university.

I worked in a cinema for a while afterwards because I wasn't qualified to do anything. To get the job I have now, I moved back home with my parents for a year to afford to re-train, which gets more painful the older you get. Also doing what you love isn't fun when you spend months stressing about how you're going to pay for your car insurance and your friends' birthday presents months in advance. I'd like to be an electrician in the future—you earn proper money and get to look inside other peoples' houses!

Daisy, 38, graphic designer
I don't feel stuck at all—that would be so depressing. One of the main reasons is that I'm not driven by consumption. My monthly expenses are low, and it's more important for me to save money than to spend on quick fixes to cheer me up. Those savings open up more options than any new clothes or gadgets ever could.

However, I'm also just not frightened to make big decisions. I went traveling at 33 for a year, went back to London with nothing, and I can see what I have built up with hard work. I could do it again. Not having children makes this easier as my actions only affect me and my husband. A lot of emphasis is put on "living your life when you're young," but with age comes wisdom and experience—they are valuable tools in making successful changes in your life and shouldn't be overlooked.

Tom, 33, author
I don't think I'll stop having ambition. I've never really had access to the sort of linear career progression of in-job promotions and incremental pay-raises that many others I know have, and to get on I've needed to take a few risks. Things usually either work out for the best, or you learn something. As for external factors, inevitably I'd worry if I had someone else to look after, but thankfully I've always benefited from taking risks, so I think I'll be taking that lesson forward into my 40s.

I don't think it's surprising that people take their career risks before having children. By the time you get to your 50s, and can finally send them off to university or they move out because they have a job, you can start being selfish again.

Margarita, 34, works for a human rights organization
I used to work in the UK, but now I live in Argentina. There's more pressure to accumulate material things in Britain. Being a bit of a lefty, I'd say late-stage capitalism does encourage that. I don't have a "traditional" life in that sense. I've had open relationships since I was a teenager with people from different genders and I was never tempted by marriage. I've had relationships where I've been responsible adult for another person's kids, but to be honest, I've never really wanted kids myself. I also don't like the idea of being tied down by a mortgage. I guess this changes the decisions I've made in my career. My job is from 8 AM till 2 PM, which gives me lots of time to pursue my other hobbies. My job is in human rights in government, which is very satisfying, but I also am an artist and am interested in electronics. I am doing pretty much what I wanted to do when I was a teenager. It's taken me a long time to get the balance right.

Some names have been changed.

Photo by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete

These days, most couples share pictures online, but Garrett and Evelyn (not their real names) have a special, private folder of photos with the two of them. In one, they're facing each other, saying their "I dos" at city hall. In another, they're sitting on a bench in front of their home; his arm is around her, her head is on his shoulder, and they're both smiling: the perfect image of a young, happy couple.

But Garrett and Evelyn are not, in fact, a couple at all. The photos, along with other "evidence," like a joint bank account and a lease signed in both their names, have been carefully crafted to make their sham marriage look real. If they're caught, they could both be charged with felonies.

Garrett is a United States citizen, born and raised in New York. He has a real girlfriend of two years, with whom he lives in New York City. Evelyn, whose native country is in East Asia, came to the US for college and married Garrett after her student visa expired and she couldn't get a work visa. The "green card marriage" allowed Evelyn to become a lawful permanent resident in New York.

Marriage to a US citizen is one of the easiest ways for immigrants to obtain green cards (a quarter of all green cards issued in the United States are for spouses of American citizens), and according to those who have done it, marriage fraud is shockingly easy to pull off. Just this month, a Los Angeles couple was arrested for setting up more than 100 sham marriages for pay. While the scam is simple, the penalties are stiff: People who marry for the purpose of circumventing immigration laws can be charged with visa fraud, harboring an alien, and conspiracy.

Evelyn understood the law, but decided to take the risk. She and Garrett met six years ago while working in the hotel industry; Garrett was employed legally but Evelyn was being paid under the table. One day, she asked Garrett if he knew anybody who might go in on a fake green card marriage with her.

"I was just like, 'I'll do it,'" Garrett said. "And she was like, 'Really, are you serious?' And I was like, 'Yeah, sure.'"

Garrett had heard of others in similar scenarios, and he decided to do it because Evelyn was his friend and he wanted to help her out. Plus, the money was a nice bonus.

"I gave it to her for half of the street cost," Garrett explained. "$20,000 is the normal price tag but she paid me $10,000." (Anecdotal sources suggest the average fee can range from $5,000 to $20,000.)

She paid in cash, giving Garrett the first half of the payment after the pair was officially married. She took care of all of the paperwork after that: opening the joint bank account, changing Garrett's mailing address to match hers, adding a new phone line together. He got the second half of the money after the most nerve-wrecking part—the immigration interview.

When applications or petitions are filed with US Citizenship and Immigration Services, background and security checks can be used to confirm the accuracy of applicants' information. In some cases, applications can be approved without an interview, if the relationship seems genuine enough, according to Jim McKinney, a public affairs officer for USCIS.

This was the case with Joe and Libby (not their real names), who married when Joe was 21 and Libby was 18. They were young, but they had to act fast: Joe's one-year temporary visa was already several years expired, and he was still in the US. Joe, who's originally from Bulgaria, couldn't imagine going back.

The two were already dating, and while they likely wouldn't have tied the knot so young had it not been for Joe's immigration dilemma, the relationship was real. They were never asked to interview with an immigration officer.

"There were no red flags in our relationship," said Libby. "I think the things looks for are same age group, can communicate in the same language, live at the same address, and have stories and quirks that healthy relationships exhibit."

Fake couples like Garrett and Evelyn, whose applications may seem more suspicious, are expected to appear at a USCIS office to meet with an immigration officer. To prep for the interview, Garrett and Evelyn wrote detailed notes about one another—the specifics that only real couples would know, like which side of the bed they each sleep on or information about their in-laws.

"I went to her place and took a whole bunch of pictures, like where little things were," Garrett recounted. "I took a picture of the bathroom in case they ask me what color her toothbrush is—shit like that. I just wrote it down and basically studied it for a day and went to the interview."

The USCIS doesn't keep data on how many of these applications are denied, but according to statistics collected by the New York Times, only 506 of the 241,154 petitions filed in 2009 were denied for fraud. There's no way to know how many fraud marriages succeed in receiving green cards. While the number of applications denied is small, the consequences are huge: There's potential for both civil-administration and criminal consequences for green card marriages; the non-citizen gets automatically deported. Criminal prosecution in such matters is controlled by the Department of Justice and its United States Attorney's Offices and can result in five years imprisonment and a $250,000 fine.

In addition to information obtained at the time of interview, Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate also receives marriage fraud tips. If the couple fails an interview or suspicions arise, the USCIS may conduct an administrative investigation which "may include, but is not limited to, visits to the couple's home as well as interviews with neighbors and associates of either the beneficiary or petitioner," according to McKinney.

In Garrett and Evelyn's case, everything went smoothly, and Evelyn's ten-year visa was approved. Garrett also hasn't dealt with pushback from his actual girlfriend, Anna, who he lives with and has dated for about two years.

"She knew about it because I was 'married' before we started dating," Garrett explained. "It wasn't like in the middle of a two-year relationship, like, 'Oh, I'm going to do this.' There's an understanding. It's not like I'm going out and hanging out with my wife all the time. I hardly ever see her. I don't think it's an issue."

Garrett and Evelyn have now been married for almost three years, and Evelyn will soon file for naturalization. Afterwards, they plan to eventually get divorced.

Libby and Joe, who have been married for five years, said the process required lots of money and time in fees, lawyers, interviews, and collecting paperwork for Joe's naturalization case, but today they have a happy—even relatively normal—relationship.

"This was something I could not prepare myself for," Libby told me. "This topic is usually hushed up, so there were no books or magazines to read from to get helpful advice, such as how to explain to your relatives why you got married so fast." But in the end, she says it was well worth it to be with him, and for him to be in America.

Follow Belinda Cai on Twitter.

Not the sushi dinner he was expecting. Screenshot via Skinwalker.

An Alberta man who got fancy by making sushi at home was later diagnosed with the first known Canadian case of a parasitic worm.

The 50-year-old showed up at Calgary's South Health Campus hospital in August of 2014, vomiting violently and suffering from crippling stomach pain, according to the National Post. Earlier in the evening, he'd made himself a sushi dinner using raw salmon purchased from a local Superstore.

The patient's CT scan and X-ray indicated something weird was happening in his stomach but doctors couldn't figure out exactly WTF was wrong, so they stuck a camera down his throat.

That's when shit got next-level gross.

The footage revealed centimetre-long worms were feeding on dude's stomach lining. After testing some of the "larva" in the man's body (ewwwww), a microbiologist confirmed the worms were anisakis, a parasite that infects marine mammals, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Humans can become "hosts" by eating infected raw or undercooked seafood.

The case study was recently published in the Canadian Journal of Infectious Diseases and Medical Microbiology.

The CDC said the worms need to be removed from the patient's body via surgery or an endoscopy. Speaking to the National Post, Stephen Vaughan, an infectious diseases expert, explained that, untreated, they could poke a hole in a person's stomach.

Vaughan said raw farm-fed salmon and saltwater fish are generally OK for consumption, while the CDC website's advice for avoiding anisakis is simply: "do not eat raw or undercooked fish or squid."

But sushi restaurants follow strict freezing regulations to ensure their fish is safe to eat.

As much as we all love a good home-cooked meal, it's probably best to leave it to the pros in this case.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

A file image of the abortion drug RU-486, which will be sold in Canada as Mifegymiso. THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP, Charlie Neibergall

After a two-year-long approval process, the abortion pill will finally be available in Canada this spring. But with restrictions and cost issues, it won't be an immediate solution to Canada's access to abortion problems.

Sold under the name Mifegymiso (known better for its US name RU-486), the abortion pill is actually two pills—Mifepristone and Misoprostol. When taken sequentially the drug mimics a miscarriage and expels a pregnancy in someone up to nine weeks pregnant. The drug is already available in over 50 countries and it's included in the World Health Organization's list of essential medicines. "We're not breaking any new ground here, we're catching up," says Sandeep Prasad, executive director of Action Canada for Sexual Health and Rights.

The drug has been celebrated as an alternative method of abortion for those living in remote areas where accessing a surgical abortion would mean travelling great distances. Even in urban settings, where abortions are more readily available, it gives anyone wishing to terminate a pregnancy the option to do so in the privacy of their own home.

But access to abortion in Canada is complex, and the newly approved method comes with many caveats. For one, Prasad says, physicians will have to take a six-hour training course, while pharmacists will be required to do a three-hour course in order to prescribe the drug. "It is a barrier that will impact how many physicians we will see taking up and prescribing and offering medical abortions that aren't currently offering either medical or surgical abortions," says Prasad.

Another puzzling restriction is the gestational age approved in the Health Canada decision. The World Health Organization states that Mifegymiso can be used up to 63 days into pregnancy, whereas Health Canada has shortened that time period to only 49 days. That two week difference is significant, says Prasad. VICE did not receive an answer about the gestational age limit from Health Canada by the time of this writing.

Prasad also expressed disappointment that only doctors and pharmacists, not nurse practitioners, will be permitted to provide Mifegymiso, again limiting the drug's scope of access. But that may change in time, says Dr. Sheila Dunn, an associate professor and clinician investigator with the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto, who has studied medical abortions. Dunn hopes that as the abortion pill mainstreams, we will see nurse practitioners starting to perform what she calls a "fundamental service."

"You start somewhere and then you expand when you can say, 'Look, it's safe,'" she says.

With some training, Dunn believes any nurse practitioner or doctor who has the ability to monitor a miscarriage can also monitor a person's use of the abortion pill. "That would really improve access if that were adopted throughout all reasonably-sized communities."

Still, cost remains yet another barrier. At around $270, Mifegymiso will be cheaper than a surgical abortion. However, if you're insured under a provincial healthcare plan, surgical abortions are covered. But because Mifegymiso is technically a medication, it won't be.

That too may change. If the Liberal government moves forward with its plan to develop a national pharmacare strategy, Prasad hopes that Mifegymiso would be covered under that. Both he and Dunn hope that the provinces and territories will come around to covering the cost of Mifegymiso over time as well.

It's undeniable that Mifegymiso will represent a new option for terminating pregnancies via facilities that already offer abortions. But throughout Canada, where surgical abortion is only available in one in six hospitals, and not available at all in PEI, the onus to improve access to this service will fall on the shoulders of individual doctors, for now.

Follow Grace Lisa Scott on Twitter

A protest at Shawnigan Lake on January 6. Photos courtesy Louise Gilfoy

A community up in arms over what they fear is the potential contamination of their drinking water supply continue their fight in BC's Supreme Court this week.

At the centre of the dispute is a permit, issued in the summer of 2013 by the Ministry of Environment, which allows for five million tons of contaminated soil to be dumped into a landfill site uphill from headwaters of Shawnigan Lake at a rate of 100,000 tons a year for 50 years.

A variety of toxins are allowed to be dumped at the Stebbings Road site by company South Island Aggregates (SIA) including hydrocarbons, dioxins, furans, benzene (carcinogenic, specifically causes leukaemia and anemia), toluene (a solvent and neurotoxin particularly dangerous to children and developing brains), and xylene.

The stream that the company releases its waste discharge water into eventually joins Shawnigan Creek, which in turn empties into Shawnigan Lake, the drinking water source anywhere from 7,000 to 12,000 people in the local community, depending on the season.

BC NDP Leader John Horgan attended the rally.

The current case before the courts, which began last week, is the latest in a series of legal actions mounted by a community—primarily in the form of the Shawnigan Residents Association (SRA)—who have voiced loud and focused dissent against the project from its beginnings. As these various appeals and hearings have played out over the last few years, the story has developed a few intriguing twists.

At the centre of this week's judicial review is a file of documents anonymously delivered on July 7 to Calvin Cook, president of the SRA, which allegedly revealed a profit-sharing contract between SIA—the company dumping the soil, and Active Earth—the engineering firm that submitted the technical assessment report and subsequent scientific advice to the ministry for the permit.

The Shawnigan Residents Association allege that this 50/50 partnership, which was never disclosed either to the Ministry or to the Environmental Appeal Board, amounts to nothing less than fraud.

"Throughout the entire permit application process the so called 'qualified professionals' were actually secret co-applicants in the project," the SRA wrote in their November 5 application for the judicial review. "As a result, the objectivity of their scientific advice to the Ministry as to the suitability of the site for a landfill was fundamentally compromised; they were motivated in every respect to reach conclusions about the site that enhanced their investment in it."

Not true, says Aurora Faulkner-Killam, lawyer for Cobble Hill Holdings, SIA's parent company, who acknowledged via email that "there is a document, but no agreement. It was abandoned and not implemented, and it has absolutely no bearing on the MOE permit, or the environmental protections that have been confirmed over and over since the permit was issued."

Protesters using snowmen to 'block' dump trucks.

However financial spreadsheets and internal emails obtained and submitted by the SRA for the current judicial review paint a vastly different picture and suggest a partnership between the companies that is referred to well into 2015.

On this point in particular, the ministry said they are aware of the allegations by the SRA of fraudulent behaviour during the permitting and subsequent appeal board process, but "at this time the permit, amended in accordance with the Environmental Appeal Board's decision, remains valid. We cannot comment further as the matter is before the courts," said the ministry, in an emailed statement.

Other controversies have plagued the project from its inception. In August, Malahat Chief Michael Harry resigned over allegations he received a per-ton consulting fee from the dump operators, which is also referenced within documents submitted by the SRA in the current judicial review. As yet, no charges have been laid and the allegations have not been proven in court.

On November 13, due to a "suspected non-containment of surface water" from the dump site, the Vancouver Island Health Authority issued a do-not-use water advisory to the community and warned against drawing water from the south end of Shawnigan Lake for bathing, personal hygiene, drinking, or food preparation.

Is Canada at a risk to be hit by a major pandemic?

We all know what the flu feels like. But what if you contracted a mutated flu virus so severe there's a 40 percent chance you won't survive? VICE speaks with medical experts convinced we may be overdue for a repeat of a virus similar to the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic that infected a third of the world's population and wiped out 50 million people. On our journey we talk to an expert in mathematical modelling of disease and zombies, and pay a visit to the National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg, the only lab of its kind in Canada, housing the most dangerous viruses in the world.

This video has been made possible by Ubisoft and Tom Clancy's The Division.

All of the rat lights. Photo via YouTube.

A rat casino assembled by scientists from the University of British Columbia (UBC) have proven two things: that bright lights and sounds may cause us to engage in more addictive behaviour, and that the release of dopamine is directly associated with risky gambling.

According to a paper published in the Journal of Neuroscience this week, the researchers set up a pseudo-gambling scenario for the 32 rats involved, with the rewards being sugary snacks instead of money. They then gave the rats an option of four choices to bet on, each with an increasing level of both risk and reward.

At the beginning the experiment, rats stuck with the low risk option, knowing that they could take home small rewards consistently without having to face the prospect of losing—a result that would net them a timeout period in which they received no treats.

Look at Anna Haifisch's art and comics on her website and Twitter.

In anticipation of the upcoming fourth season of our HBO show, which will premiere this February, we are releasing all of season three for free online. Watch all the episodes here, and don't miss the premiere of season four on Friday, February 5, at 11 PM on HBO.

In the spring of 2011, as Alabama lawmakers debated some of the harshest anti-immigration bills in the country, a monstrous twister ripped through the town of Tuscaloosa, flattening neighborhoods and killing 64 people. Everyone needed help—but many of the city's Latino residents stayed cowered in their homes, afraid of being thrown in jail if they emerged to seek food or shelter. Disaster workers were stunned by the reaction, suggesting that it might be a sign of what was in store if Republicans passed the pending legislation.

But within weeks, immigrants weren't just hiding—they were fleeing. The law, Alabama's HB 56, had passed in a landslide vote, and the state had quickly become hostile territory for anyone even suspected of being a foreigner. Officially titled the Beason-Hammon Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act, the law targeted immigrants—primarily Latinos—everywhere: in school, at work, in church, and on the street. Cops were not only allowed but required to demand immigration papers from anyone they suspected might be undocumented, and to hold him or her in jail until the individuals proved they had papers. Teachers could ask students about their legal status. HB 56 made it a crime to employ, house, or even give rides to undocumented individuals, effectively criminalizing any contact with illegal immigrants in the state.

Within a year, between 40,000 and 80,000 Latinos had bolted the state, according to a study by the University of Alabama's Center for Business and Economic Research, costing the state up to $10.8 billion in lost income and tax revenues. In the fourth season of VICE on HBO, correspondent Thomas Morton traveled to Alabama to see the effects of the state's so-called "self-deportation" policy firsthand, visiting towns and farms that have dried up in the absence of cheap undocumented labor.

Faced with a backlash from the state's business community—and a federal court ruling that declared many of the law's provisions unconstitutional—Alabama lawmakers had more or less given up on HB 56. That is, until Donald Trump came roaring into the state, telling a crowd of 30,000 ecstatic supporters in Mobile this August that he'd use HB 56-style tactics to drive undocumented immigrants out of the country entirely. The Republican frontrunner has devoted much of his campaign to this type of heated anti-immigration rhetoric, promising to end birthright citizenshipand create a "deportation force" to round up all 11 million illegal immigrants living in the US.

The message seems to be working: A poll conducted by Alabama's News 5 last week showed Trump with 40 percent support among Republican voters. To find out why people would continue to support policies that had demonstrably failed in their own state, we talked to Muzaffar Chishti, director of the Migration Policy Institute's office at NYU School of Law.

VICE: Alabama isn't the only state that has passed anti-immigration legislation. Why did the state face such a strong backlash?
Muzaffar Chishti: Alabama was one of five states that passed broad omnibus immigration legislation that covered a swath of territory, that had police stop people on the street and penalized people for hiring undocumented individuals or renting them accommodations. Alabama got more attention for a variety of reasons. It was the most far reaching and for a brief period the court did allow many of the provisions to go forward, whereas many other states' provisions were blocked.

The provision that was particularly problematic was having teachers ask kids their immigration status. Some people stopped sending their kids to school, and kids started getting more teased in school. Then there was a section cannot apply for electricity, a water meter, or for a mobile home. Anything that included a transaction was banned for an unauthorized worker, so that obviously had a lot of effect in people's daily life.

You were a plaintiff in the lawsuit to block HB 56. What was your argument?
We based it on constitutional law violations. A cop cannot ask a citizen for papers—that's an invasion of their constitutional right. The cops were asking people for papers on the grounds of their looks, based on racial profiling. It's a huge social problem, and it violates the 14th amendment.

How has Alabama been impacted economically?
A significant amount of people left the state, and the industries affected the most adversely were agriculture, hospitality, and some construction. Either people went to a neighboring state, or some became independent contractors because the immigration law only applies to employees. When people left the state it reduced the tax base—sales tax, income tax, and overall revenue. Investment went down. People do not want to invest in a state that is perceived to be hostile to immigrants in general.

Given that experience, can you explain why Donald Trump's anti-immigration rhetoric is resonating with Alabamans? It seems like there's a disconnect there.
The reason these anti-immigrant laws are so popular, and that he is so popular, is that people have anxiety about their economic wellbeing. and they are feeling anxiety about their cultural identity. They see that their state and cultural communities are changing and that is unnerving for people. In the past 20 years, the patterns of immigration settlement have changed in a big way, so parts of the country like Alabama suddenly had a large number of immigrants.

Trump says he can fix that. Would it be possible implement something like HB 56 on a national level?
There's no specificity in Donald Trump's statements. He makes broad statements that we should throw out all these undocumented workers, but that's a slogan—not a provision or law. Meanwhile, Trump has no idea how many unauthorized people work for him. If all undocumented people stopped working for Trump, his casinos would probably stop operating--that's the nature of our labor market. He knows immigrants are hugely important to our economy.

So why does he want to deport them?
These are feel good provisions, playing to people's anxieties and fears, but they are very difficult to implement in reality. They're unconstitutional. If you went into any neighborhood, how would you know who was unauthorized? Also, we already have a law that says employers should not hire unauthorized workers. We don't have the ability to enforce the laws we already have. His immigration rhetoric does not work in the real world. The laws come in conflict with the Constitution, with the economic needs of the state, and against our values.

Follow Meredith Hoffman on Twitter.

Matthew Leifheit

What images come to mind when you think of love?

It's almost too much to even think about that question. Do you imagine some distillation of a feeling focused in a gesture like this Elliot Erwitt picture? Or something simpler, a screenshot of a Stevie Nicks lyric or a schmaltzy Instagram poem? The above photo of a series of roses?

Artist and curator Rachel Stern is used to posing that question and is hoping to scratch the surface of it in LOVE 2016, opening tonight at Columbia University's LeRoy Neiman Gallery. The group exhibition includes nearly 50 artists all engaging in the ideas of love and eros; it's intended as a survey of what love looks like now and hopes to come closer to a sense of how it might be defined, or accept that maybe the idea is impossible to pigeonhole. I recently got to walk through a preview of the show in its installation and talk to Stern about the process of peeling through different peoples associations of the word.

VICE: Why did you choose to curate a show on the crazy, expansive topic of love? It sounds exhausting to me so I'm really curious.
Rachel Stern: It has been exhausting. When I was an undergraduate, I ran a photo blog that was surrounded around the idea of grouping photographs based on topics rather than historical moments or cultural context. They would be pictures of dogs, food, or pictures from Russia—really weird, broad categories. I think from that, I realized the category I was most interested in was romantic photographs so I had an idea to start a journal about that; they ended up taking a few different forms, all of which never really made it past their InDesign files.

Yeah, I have a lot of those lying around.
Yeah, mostly because I'm not really a publication person, I'm not a designer, I'm not good at getting type and information right.

The printed format doesn't really work that well for me. My work questions what love is or looks like, or how people get it or why people want it, how it function or what it can be called. It is impossible to define and since it's undefinable, I wanted to see how everybody thinks it looks like and maybe through there, we can find points of consensus or diversion of points that explain each other. I like the idea of saying that, "Let's have a show about love," is like saying, "Let's have a show about air." It is almost impossible with the name, so it really becomes more about who are these people, why is their image of love important, and why are some of the images are particularly resonant to me.

Did you find it really difficult to represent a broad range of artists?
Yes, I wake up every night with an anxiety attack about somebody that I didn't ask to be in the show that should be here. I was also interesting to me to see what the list looked like because I put them together naturally and the first iteration was almost all gay white men. It was alarming to me to count and realize that I had twenty-something artists and only six of them were women. That was a year ago when I first wrote the list down, then it became a question of breaking it down: Why did that happen and what was the thought process that lead to that? It became a way to think of people to ask that might surprise me, that wouldn't be something I knew in the beginning. So for some of the works, I didn't know what they would like like until they came out of the box here in the gallery.

Bryan Jabs

What was the most surprising work that came out of this?
I think Peter Clough's. He was one of the last people who I asked to be in the show, it was like a last-minute thing because I saw a piece of his which was a rock with eyes on it, and I asked for that piece. He said we couldn't put that piece in because of specific reasons but he would make something special. Then he had us to leave him a space on the wall of a certain dimension. I was nervous because his work takes a lot of different forms but it's usually video. It could look like anything and his space was this huge gap on the wall where everything was hung and we has no idea what to expect. He sauntered in on Friday morning and popped it on the wall and it was amazing.

Do you have any go-to image about love for you?
So many. More than an image, the curatorial statement has that Stevie Nick's line from "Designs of Love," which is a line that I think of a lot. The first time I heard it was when I was alone in Brussels—I like to travel alone because it lets you be melancholy, write down notes, and be really romantic—I, no joke, must have listened to it 3,000 times. I was just looking at the beauty of the place and thinking about how you define love.

I think about all the specific artists in the show and whenever I think of love, in Jason Lazurus's project Too Hard to Keep, especially, I think of images of loss first, it seems to be something that had meant something first.
He is somebody I invited less for the specific work and more because it is a practice that is about love on a large scale. He could put any work into the show and it would more than satisfy the topic of conversation. When I did a studio visit with him before he moved to Chicago, he had a whole wall of Too Hard to Keep and he had carved these dashes on the floor. He found some people that were important to him for different reasons in the public record: a rural doctor, a jazz musician... he works in a historical ramble. He used the typographical setting either on their tombstone or on their document for the dashes between the birth and death date and carved them into granite monuments that sat on the floor. It became a graveyard of their lives because the dashes represented the span of their lives.

Leigh Ledare

Some of this, including the poetry, will be published in MATTE. How did you select the poetry and writing for it?
You couldn't do a show about love without love poems, or without flowers—they are a given. We have those covered right off the bat with MATTE's wallpaper. Paul Legault is a poet who I collaborate with all the time, usually when there's writing to be accompanied with my photographs, we do something together. He wrote the poetry that is written on the LeRoy Neiman Gallery wall and the other poems are from my cousin, Natasha Ochshorn, who writes young adult fiction. She writes these poems on Instagram and they functioned as a diary over the past several years. So we curated out a dated collection of those poems that work throughout as little ties along with Yoshie Sakai's heart works.

I feel like this is an endless sort of project which is what's so exciting. It's a theme that could evolve into a HUGE catalogue.
I would love to keep it going, I want to make a LOVE 2017 and on and on.

Look at a selection from LOVE 2016 below:

Michael Stablein Jr.

Allana Clarke

Genesis Breyer P-orridge

Martin Gutierrez

Michelle Handelman

Thomas Roma

TM Davy

Brooke Holloway

Bobby Gonzales

Matthew Morrocco

LOVE 2016 will have its opening reception tonight from 5 to 7 PM. The show will be on view at LeRoy Neiman Gallery until February 17, 2016.

Rachel Stern is an artist and curator based in NYC. You can follow her work here.

In anticipation of the upcoming fourth season of our HBO show which will premiere this February, we are releasing all of season three for free online. Watch all the episodes here, and don't miss the premiere of season four on Friday, February 5 at 11 PM on HBO.

In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, countries in the Middle East have seen a surge in the looting of antiquities. In Egypt alone, an estimated $3 billion dollars worth of artifacts have been plundered. Looters have broken into museums and left thousands of empty pits, all to feed the demand for antiquities around the world—especially demand from the United States.

In this episode from season three of VICE's HBO show, which originally aired on May 1, 2015, Gianna Toboni went to Egypt to meet some of the people behind the black market trade as well as those trying to preserve what's left of the country's archeological heritage.

Then Thomas Morton headed to China to check out the trend among that country's elite of hiring white males for menial jobs as a status symbol, and what it takes to actually apply.