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 "A Prayer for Uganda." For the story, correspondent Isobel Yeung traveled to Uganda to meet some of the anti-gay leaders teaching intolerance to the country's youth. While there, she uncovered disturbing ties between their message and the lessons that American fundamentalists have been pushing for years.

Watch the video below:

When Winston Churchill referred to the landlocked East African nation of Uganda as the "pearl of Africa," he described it as "fairy tale"-like: lush, beautiful, complex, diverse, at times radiant. Decades after the moniker stuck, Uganda has established Makerere University, an extremely competitive institution where Africans from all over the continent have flocked for serious studies while being groomed to be parliamentarians and future leaders in their recently independent countries. However, in more recent years, the already deeply conservative country has become known for its increasingly hostile and violent attitudes toward its LGBTQ community.

Passed in October 2009, Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Act targeted the most marginalized and vulnerable members of the country's population with extreme penalties, including life imprisonment for gay sex, oral sex, and living in a same-sex marriage. In his attempt to legislate sexual desire, the bill's author, Member of Parliament David Bahati, characterized homosexuals as sexual deviants essentially driven by predatory sexual practices, specifically "converting" young boys under the age of 18 and the disabled. Noticeably absent from the bill's language was any reference to a homosexual lifestyle. The bill refuses to conceive of any scenario where two gay or lesbian Ugandans could together as adults for consensual, healthy same-sex relations. Although the act was struck down in 2014 for procedural reasons, Bahati has promised to bring back the "Kill the Gays" bill, as it's been nicknamed by Western media.

The witch hunt against Uganda's LGBTQ community isn't only political, but something more deeply embedded in the fabric of the nation, where homosexuality has been illegal since Uganda's first post-colonial Constitution was penned in 1962, laws the country inherited from Britain. More recently, the war on gay Ugandans has been fueled, in part, by American evangelicals, including Massachusetts pastor Scott Lively, who is currently being sued for inviting violence against the LGBTQ community and conspiring, with local anti-gay activists, to deprive gay Ugandans of their fundamental rights. At times the Ugandan media has also furthered this atmosphere of intolerance. In 2011, a now-defunct tabloid ran the infamous cover story "100 Pictures of Uganda's Top Homos Leak," which doxed suspected gay Ugandans and allies. The story led to the publication being sued—it lost—and contributed, some Ugandans believe, to the death of leading gay rights activist David Kato. In 2014, another Ugandan tabloid published a similar list of "top 200 homosexuals" under the headline "EXPOSED!"

As a native of Tanzania who was raised in Kenya and its neighboring countries, and someone who identifies as LGBTQ, I know firsthand the challenges and struggles—and dangers—the LGBTQ community faces in East and Central Africa. Silence is erasure, dismissal, and invisibility—in short, it equals nonexistence. These are all forms of death, socially speaking, and it's a threat that is quite literally experienced by the Ugandan activists who are forced to live in the shadows. For those suspected of being LGBTQ, death threats, violent attacks, and corrective rape are among the many methods of intimidation into silence.

In the 2015 VICE documentary "A Prayer for Uganda," correspondent Isobel Yeung traveled to Uganda to learn about these issues firsthand, particularly how anti-gay American evangelists have contributed to an atmosphere of hate, dehumanization, and violence. A year after the making of the documentary, I caught up with Yeung to talk about what it was like to do this reporting, the dangers LGBTQ Ugandans face, and what's been happening since.

VICE: What happened when you spoke to Ugandans about homosexuality? Did you notice that responses differed according to the person's gender, tribe, urban, rural, age, class, or education?
Isobel Yeung: I'd say in general the younger generation are more impassioned about homosexuality being a bad thing. They've grown up with politics and society pushing for a homophobic agenda, so it's not surprising. Having said that, everyone we met felt pretty strongly that being gay was deeply wrong.

Did you get the sense that Ugandans were really concerned/consumed with homosexuality? Or did you get the sense that the concern was being cultivated?
It's hard to separate the two. At what point does political influence stop and personal concern take over? But the fact that concern is so widespread and that didn't exist a couple decades ago definitely implies that strong influences are involved.

If the Ugandan government is scapegoating, what is being obscured when the focus falls on homosexuals?
It seems like a lot of politicians have jumped on the homosexual bandwagon. They use it for campaigning and winning power because it's a hot topic and a cheap way to gain support. I'm also sure there are politicians who would just love the whole issue to go away precisely because it is so divisive.

To what extent do ordinary Ugandans know or have personal contact with someone they know is homosexual?
There's not much of a homosexual community in Uganda, apart from advocates who are a whole other level of brave. But people who live with others of the same sex or who live a different lifestyle to what's considered normal are all under threat. I've met a lot of individuals who are in danger simply because they're not married and as a result constantly have to move homes and neighborhoods.

Can you describe an especially memorable person who was directly affected by the anti-homosexual bill?
In the film we met a lesbian whose name we withheld. I'm normally pretty good with keeping some distance from subjects, but her story was so horrific that it was hard to do that. She recalls the anti-gay bill coming up and this witch hunt ensuing. Her life is a reflection of the bill.

Did you have a chance to come into contact with local activists?
Yes, we met a few, several of whom are housebound because it's too dangerous and unpleasant to venture outside. They're fighting an uphill battle because general sentiment is so against them. But it's still amazing that there are small-scale LGBTQ groups in colleges and around Kinshasa, fighting to spread their word and to make the public aware of attacks that have been committed on LGBTQ people.

Have you heard anything about that promise or the new bill?
I'm afraid I haven't heard any follow-up. But I do know that the situation has not improved for the people we met—some of whom have had to flee the country for fear of their lives.

Nick Hadikwa Mwaluko is an FtM queer African whose book, Waafrika, is available on Amazon.

All photos courtesy of Channel 4

If watching a man fighting off adversaries and gleaning US intelligence while the Cure plays in the background sounds like something you'd enjoy, then Deutschland 83 is the TV show for you.

The show tells the story of 24-year-old soldier Martin, who is sent to infiltrate the West as an undercover spy for the Stasi, in order to pay for his mom's kidney transplant. It recently became the highest-rated foreign language show in UK TV history after it started on Channel 4 earlier this year.

Written by British-American novelist Anna Winger and her TV producer husband Jörg, D83 captures Germany on an historical precipice—caught between the US and Russia in the middle of the seemingly interminable Cold War, at the brink of the fall of the Wall. VICE spoke to Anna and Jörg to find out more about the show, what inspired them to write it, and what Germany in 1983 tells us about Germany today.

VICE: 
Firstly, why did you make a show about this particular period in German history? 

Jörg Winger: I used to work in the German military. I was a radio signaler during the 80s and we were under instruction to intercept messages from the Russians. We knew we had a mole though when the Russians started addressing us personally in their messages, wishing us a Merry Christmas and that sort of thing. So I decided to tell the story of that period in history from the perspective of a spy. That was the beginning.


Do you think young people in Germany today are aware of this period of history?

Jörg: No. It's not really something that is taught in school. History lessons here seem to end after World War II. Our lead actor (Jonas Nay, who plays Martin) was born in 1990 and really had no idea.


Anna Winger: You have to understand the Cold War to understand modern Germany. It's important to understand how we got to where we are now from 1945. You definitely feel the impact of Berlin being occupied by US and British troops still today. Germany was effectively a colony at that point.

What does watching Deutschland 83 tell us about Germany in 2016 then?
Anna: We chose a lead character who was young enough that he would have a future in the united Germany. Germany now is a utopia. It's really tolerant, it's diverse, and a special time. If you live in New York, you wish you lived there in the 1970s, but in Germany you feel lucky to live here now.

Jörg: Martin is the part of the first generation of Germans who are truly modern. As the series progresses we see him become less obedient to both regimes and I think obedience was a German character trait until this generation shook it off and began to think for themselves. To me, that's when Germany became more interesting. The blossoming of free will.

It felt radical to make a show that wasn't about the Holocaust.


What was it like growing up in divided Germany?
Jörg: I thought the Wall would be around for as long as I lived. It seemed like everything was written in stone and we had reached the eternal equilibrium of post-war Germany. Until the 70s, the differences weren't that pronounced but once I started going to East Germany in the 80s, the gap became more visible. I used to hitchhike to east Berlin with friends. We got caught smuggling Shakespeare across the border. We never imagined it would end so soon.

Is nostalgia good for drama?

Jörg: One thing we wanted to avoid was this kind of "Eastalgia"—looking back at the East longingly. When you went to the upper echelons of the East German government, it was a dark place. I know people who were tortured and lost relatives to the brutality of the system.
Anna: Our casting agent was put in jail because she was a punk. They were absolutely intolerant. 

Jörg: It felt radical to make a show that wasn't about the Holocaust. So much has been written about World War II, so it felt like a step in a new direction to be moving the time frame on a little.

Will that darkness be reflected in Martin's story?
Jörg: When the series started he was very innocent, a blank sheet. That changes as he spends more time in the system.

But the show is also hilarious in some places...

Anna: Even when the shit is hitting the fan, things remain funny. When we first pitched the show, someone at the TV network said that he had lived near a military base and was terrified of nuclear war. He would lie in bed at night and he would say, "I hope I get laid before the bomb hits." There are moments of natural absurdity in the situation.




Music plays a big part in the series. How did you decide on the songs that would feature on the show?


Anna: I picked a lot of them. It was one of the major reasons we set it in 1983 because it was such an incredible year for music. It was also the only year that German music really traveled too, so our opening song is Peter Schillings' "Major Tom".
Jörg: Growing up in West Germany, 1983 was one of the first years I started to go to parties and dance and all of a sudden people started to sing in German. It was a game-changer.

What's next? Will there be another series?
Jörg: We pitched this as a trilogy and are keen to make Deutschland 86 and 89 in the future. At the moment we're just trying to work things out.
Anna: I'm currently writing a new series set in contemporary Berlin. It's a family drama and a thriller for BBC in the UK and AMC in the US. I'm not supposed to talk about it really, but it's about a family that returns to Berlin and gets involved in serious drama.

Deutschland 83 airs on Sundays at 9 PM on Channel 4 in the UK. It aired on the Sundance channel in the US and episodes can be found on the usual streaming services.

The first government of the Belarusian Democratic Republic

Belarus's government in exile, the Rada of the Belarusian Democratic Republic (BDR), is part of a dying tradition. After WWII, governments in exile were often creatures of the Cold War and vanished alongside the Soviet Union. Today only a handful remain—the descendants of ousted monarchs and a few determined partisans from failed states. The oldest of them all is the Rada, which, despite governing for less than a year, has improbably survived two world wars, 70 years of Soviet occupation, and nearly a century in exile.

Formerly part of the Russian Empire, Belarus declared independence in 1917 and established the Rada as a provisional government. Before elections could be held, the government was pushed out of Minsk by the invading Red Army in 1918. Afterwards the Rada in exile began its slow trek across the globe: from Kaunas to Prague, Paris to New York, and finally to its current headquarters in Toronto.

Today the Rada, headed by Ivonka Survilla, has associated Belarusian cultural alliances in Lithuania, America, and Canada. The oldest is in London, where I'm greeted by a man in a dapper three-piece suit and round glasses. Mikalaj Packajeu is the Rada's Secretary for Information and the Deputy Secretary for Foreign Affairs. He ushers me into a dark front room, decorated with grainy photographs of long-dead revolutionaries and a badly dated map of Belarus. It could be a scene from The Spy Who Loved Me.

Mikalaj Packajeu

"We have never been receiving any support from Western governments," explains Packajeu. "Probably not much since the loan from Lithuania in the 1920s." Instead the Rada is financed almost entirely by the Belarusian diaspora. The consequence of limited funding has been equally limited outreach, their online presence restricted to a wonky website and assorted social media. The Associations of Belarusians, whose members support the Rada, rent out the upstairs rooms to help pay the bills. To an outsider, the organization, with its scattered membership and low bank balance, looks like it's on the verge of collapse.

But skating close to extinction has always been part of the history of the Rada. The party survived by the skin of its teeth as it was forced across Europe throughout two world wars. Tenacity in the face of disaster has kept the party afloat through its long and convoluted history. But the Rada's unlikely existence in 2016 owes as much to the chaos of Belarusian politics as the determination of its members. For a short period after the fall of the USSR, it seemed as though Belarus might democratize. Instead, Alexander Lukashenko, who came to power after the 1994 elections, returned the country to a neo-Soviet style of government, complete with state ownership, rigged elections, and hired goons.

President Lukashenko and his son "Kolya." Photo via Cancillería del Ecuador Flickr account

"If you are not Lukashenko's person you will not even be elected to the local council," says Packajeu. "There is no politics, it's a dictatorship." It's a charge echoed by groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, who point to the restrictions on civil liberties in the country. In 1996, Lukashenko held a referendum to amend the constitution, successfully ending the limitation of the number of possible presidential terms. As with all elections in Belarus, the results of the vote were widely contested.

Lukashenko remains unlikely to leave office, recently promising, "I have only you, the people of Belarus, and I will serve to the last of my days." He is often accompanied to political events by his young son Nikolai, nicknamed "Kolya," leading to speculation that the boy is being groomed for succession.

It takes some time to clarify how exactly the Rada, outside of Belarus since 1919, is working to oust Lukashenko. The Rada's current mission, Packajeu says, is to support opposition parties in Belarus. "The Rada in exile at some point recognized that it could not come back to power in Belarus. So its overall purpose... is to lay down its mandate on behalf of a freely elected parliament," he explains. "Now what follows from that purpose is that there should be an appropriate government in Belarus. So our practical tasks are to support and promote any activity that would lead to Belarus having such a government."

The BDR coat of arms

But the pro-democracy parties created before Lukashenko came to power have been excluded from public life for 20 years. Other parties remain unofficial, unable to register in Belarus's restrictive political environment. "The problem is of course that while we are fully prepared to help and while we do what we can, the opposition in Belarus is currently not in very good shape," Packajeu concedes. He is clear about the challenges the Rada faces, animatedly detailing the disastrous state of Belarusian politics.

"Everyone understands in Belarus that Lukashenko has eliminated all the legal and, let's say, peaceful ways of putting him out of office and what it leaves is that people would probably risk their lives to try and change the political system," says Packajeu. But the problem is greater than simply the high personal cost of revolution. "There is no insurgency," he continues, his voice rising. "There is no one to support. So the result is that people are simply losing interest."

Watch: VICE Talks Film with Mike Leigh

After two decades of no political change, it is not just voters that have become disillusioned. "At some point the western governments and NGOs... seem to have become disappointed in the opposition in Belarus" says Packajeu. "Previously there was an arrangement where they would support some activities which would indirectly allow to dedicate their time to further political activism but that has been stopped... the support to the opposition has been really dramatically reduced because apparently there is little prospect of any result."

Recent Russian nationalism, however, has put Lukashenko in a difficult position. "The bear in the room," says Packajeu, laughing. Belarus is economically reliant on Russia, its primary trading partner. As the Kremlin pushes to expand its territory, Lukashenko has come under pressure to allow new air bases for the Russian military. In order to counterbalance Russian influence, Lukashenko has reached out to the EU. The EU has, in turn, suspended sanctions after Belarus's relatively uneventful recent elections.

A newspaper clipping with the BDR's parliament building 1918

Packajeu is skeptical about Lukashenko's willingness to change as well as the overall stability of the regime. "The problem with dictatorships is that they appear stable but they are actually unpredictable. When they blow up they actually blow up." The better strategy, he argues, would be to encourage opposition within Belarus, ensuring power goes to the right people if the government falls. Looking around the small room with its dated decoration, it's difficult to imagine that this organization, housed in a lonely suburb of London, will prove instrumental in unseating one of Europe's longest serving leaders. Decorated with pictures of dead leaders and old territory, history is certainly present in the Rada's London outpost. What is less clear is it's place in the future.

At the moment, there is little political will within the EU to foster opposition in Belarus. On the edges of Europe, economically marginal, and dwarfed by Russia, the country is all too easy to dismiss. The Rada's continued existence in 2016 is part of the tragedy of Belarusian politics, an anachronist byproduct of Europe's last dictatorship. Nevertheless, Packajeu remains optimistic. "The Rada has lived through Stalin and all the Soviet Union. For those 70 or so years there was not even hope of Soviet Union ever falling apart. I mean we've been there for almost 100 years. We've seen it all."

Follow Dylan Brethour on Twitter.

For a game so quiet, The Witness never stops talking. There is no music. The trees creak and birds chatter. Stand still for long enough and you might hear the distance chime of something unknown. Occasionally you might see a Dictaphone discarded on the ground—a message left perhaps by a previous occupant of the island, or maybe something else entirely. But the real communication is conducted within the 660-plus puzzles dotted around the island. It's a language spread across hundreds of mazes, and with each one you get closer to understanding the whole.

I've been asked to not say too much about the game, which is totally correct. The Witness is about learning and discovery, of closing the distance between creator and player. For me to tell you anything other than how it made me feel would be robbing you of that experience. It made me feel quite good.

In The Witness, players will find themselves walking around an island, isolated, solving puzzles in order to discover more about... Well, that would be spoiling it.

Within the many, many hours I spent exploring this stunning world, I realized its closest parallels are to literature and epistemological philosophy, rather than other games. Across human experience, we've always been obsessed with puzzles and solutions. In Teju Cole's novel Open City, for example, Julius—a young Nigerian immigrant—wanders around New York City ruminating about the maze of life and the variety of monsters hiding around every corner. Alone and always moving, Julius's New York is not just a city, but a shifting sandbox of discovery, where everything from getting out of bed to social interactions becomes a puzzle to be solve. The city morphs before Julius's eyes, and he often doesn't know if it's him or the buildings that have changed: "The site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased, rewritten." I found myself constantly thinking about Open City as I played The Witness, and many other books and films, too.

In Ben Lerner's novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, the narrator similarly finds himself wandering and musing through life, in search of "a profound experience of art." He goes to gallery after gallery—always wondering whether he'll be found out for inauthenticity—hoping to be moved. He never is. In The Witness I found myself solving puzzle after puzzle hoping to be moved. I was.

Just as with Cole and Lerner, The Witness is less about solutions to the incomprehensible and more about our journey to the end. That may sound ridiculously pretentious, but I genuinely believe it's true: Its designer Jonathan Blow has, clearly, chosen the puzzle genre as a way to talk about life. This is handled best through the puzzles, and less well in the occasionally hammy Dictaphones dotted around containing quotes from famous theologians and scientists. Very seldom have I played a computer game that has made me think—via its mechanics alone—about the philosophical issues underpinning it.

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch VICE's film about the animator behind the Star Wars and Jurassic Park films, 'My Life in Monsters'

One of The Witness's greatest strengths as a game is its consciously stripped-down approach to the puzzle and open-world genres. The puzzles are always obvious in their location and what function they serve, and it is very rare to not know where to go next. (Note the black wires winding around the entire island that link each section—don't know what you just achieved? Follow the wire.) This is an improvement from Blow's previous game Braid, an experience that was both very fun and deeply annoying, to the extent that I'm fairly sure Blow is at his happiest when he's pissing off the player. The Witness is more of an even fight. Not to say it's easy—it isn't—but that the answers are, often, right in front of your face.

What was particularly wonderful about my time with The Witness was that, despite being alone on the island for countless hours, I felt constantly locked in conversation—with the world around me, with the puzzles that threatened to melt my brain, with its creators. At no point did I feel genuinely lonely—I knew I was a rat in a maze, but the fact I was learning to speak back to the game was an incredible experience I have never felt before in this medium. Braid, by contrast, often had me feeling like I'd revised for my maths GSCE and accidentally stepped into an A-level physics exam after slamming two pencils in my eyes.

One weakness of having so many bloody puzzles is that the strength of each individual one is almost impossible to maintain. Not all of them are satisfying; some alter mid-series and frustrate for hours, while others simply aren't that tough. I felt I spent far too long, for instance, in an area with a very tedious and not at all challenging puzzle involving light and perspective. This was followed by an even more irritating section set within what can only be accurately described as a gigantic toilet. To counter that gripe, my favorite area is a wonderful cohesion of theory and execution where you spend your time literally building pathways in the air with your mind. It's wonderful.

The mazes aren't so much hard as they are alien: In order to get them, you have to figure out what they're trying to say to and about you. I like to imagine the whole game is that one wonderful scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind when the humans first discover how to communicate with the mothership, but stretched across anything from 20 to 100 hours. The Witness is all about your perspective: The higher above the maze you get, the clearer the picture becomes. Just as Oedipa Maas discovered in Pynchon's The Crying Lot of 49, you have to rise above the maze to finally see the "hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate."

'The Witness,' release date trailer

While not perfect, Blow's second release is the closest I have come to being moved by a computer game, by its function and message alone. Like staring at a piece of art in a gallery, my hours spent with The Witness caused changes within me. I found myself letting out many a "fucking yes!" when I worked out the solutions. I don't do that when I down a boss in Bloodborne.

For a game about isolation and being alone, there is a real warmth about the experience. The game's artists—Eric Anderson, Luis Antonio, and Orsolya Spanyol—have created a world that looks sort of like a child's drawing after they've gotten high on ice cream. Which is to say: It's one of the very greatest worlds I have ever explored. Not only does it look good enough to eat, it is also thematically consistent with the game—it begins with childish wonder (like the player) and slowly, steadily darkens as the player learns more and more of the information the game wants to provide (this is, essentially, a metaphor about growing up). Ah. Everything in The Witness coheres with the central idea, and that is an astounding achievement.

Whenever I would activate a maze panel and attempt a solution, I would be surprised by the wonderfully tactile nature of it. A bright line would appear, accompanied by a subtle buzz, moving sturdily along the path I drew. It is often cruel: Solving one puzzle often only lights up the next, which can be quite frustrating when you've spent an hour on a single maze, which was eventually solved after a stiff drink had loosened up my brain. However, feeling frustration with The Witness is precisely what it's designed to do. Learning how to speak is not easy. The more you know, the more you know you don't know. But suffer the lessons and there are great awards.

You will never feel so close to the architects of a game than you will with The Witness. And that's a pleasure open to everyone who wants to play it, and who doesn't cheat. Looking up a solution online is like learning 25 letters of the alphabet. Any word containing the one letter you don't know will make no sense to you. It's robbing yourself of understanding, nobody else.

What I'm ultimately saying is: Somehow, in a game with no characters and no scripted narrative, I have been moved. I have walked through the island like Cole's Julius and experienced Lerner's profound experience of art. All that in a game about drawing a bloody line through a grid, over and over and over again. Blow has shortened the distance between game and player in a way other games can only dream. It's a magical achievement.

The Witness is out now for PC and PlayStation 4, with a iOS version planned for later in 2016.

Follow David Whelan on Twitter.

Last year VICE reported on the trend of "Sologamy,"Sologamy," the practice of marrying yourself as a way of boosting or affirming your self-esteem. Reports were coming in of women from California to the UK, mostly in their thirties, taking the next step with themselves, saying, "Alright, I'll take your outmoded tradition, your patriarchal road to ruin, and I'll make it about myself in every single way."

Sologamy isn't recognized in the US or Europe. However, while it might not be a legally binding union, it is part of a growing self-empowerment movement. The benefits are plentiful—no pressure to change your perfectly decent surname, no doing sex with the same body again and again, no resentment over a lopsided chore schedule. It's all about real self-love. So you can see why people are into it.

Sasha Cagen is a life coach who offers lessons on how to embrace what she calls the "quirkyalone" lifestyle: a way of being for those who find themselves terminally single and just want to appreciate being alone until something perfect comes along romantically, if ever. Cagen is an advocate of the self-wedding, which she views as a much-needed coming-of-age ritual that functions like a bat mitzvah or a quinceañera. She wrote a book about it when it first started happening in northern California ten years ago, and now runs a business off of it. Plenty of women have got self-married directly as a result of her ideas and direction.

There are also plenty of critics of the concept, who largely think it's a narcissistic mess and the true embodiment of everything wrong with a society centered around self-importance and personal fulfillment. However, with the amount of young people staying single on the up, it's likely a move that will continue to appeal to some.

But is it a solid idea? Does it actually make you feel any better, or does your face now just come up in Google Images every time someone searches "woman marries herself"? I spoke to Cagen and other women who married themselves in the past year or so to see how they feel about their commitment retrospectively, and how—or if—it's really changed anything.

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

This article first appeared in the Colombian edition of VICE Magazine

I wrote to The Administrator—the only name I have for him as I don't know his real identity—to check if he'd have the time to read the few questions I'd sent to his encrypted email server. I didn't expect much from his answers: In the past, he'd start most of his replies with "for security reasons..." before responding in the negative to my requests. On other occasions, he'd answer dryly, bluntly. Seldom would he offer the type of answers that journalists look for in order to craft a good story.

The story I was chasing was one about him, the page admin of Valor Por Tamaulipas (VxT, translated as Bravery for Tamaulipas). An anonymous figure with a price on his head—600,000 Mexican pesos, about $32,000—he may have done more damage to criminal groups like Los Zetas and the Gulf Cartel with a Facebook fan page than has been inflicted by the Mexican military. While the cartels have enough weaponry—RPG-7s, .30-caliber machine guns, and even monster "narco-tanks" armored with metal plates—to withstand any assault, the reports about their activities broadcast to the page's 615,000 followers are a direct attack on their reputation and their attempts at control through fear and intimidation.

Every Tweet and every post draws blood from the narcos, a little at a time.

On this occasion, however, his reply was neither in the negative or positive...

VxT: Something happened and there is a lot on my plate. I'll see what I can do.

I asked him what happened. Could it be an RS*? A kidnapping? A high-level assassination somewhere in the region? Maybe in Ciudad Victoria or Nuevo Laredo? All these potential scenarios are alarmingly frequent for activists like him. But instead he replied:

VxT: They murdered Miut3.

The details around this are murky—one series of events claims that two white vans arrived at the Tierra Santa clinic in the city of Reynosa, around 11 AM on October 15 ^, 2014. Doctor María del Rosario Fuentes had just finished her shift when the vehicles arrived. She barely had time to protest when armed men jumped out of the vehicles and dragged her, along with another doctor and a nurse, into the vans. They then sped off. Another version of events reported by the media, and one The Admin seems to stand by, is that Fuentes was actually going to her job in the medical department of a maquiladora (textile factory) when she was kidnapped. Still, the result was the same: the assailants—presumably members of the Gulf Cartel—checked the victims' mobile phones and noticed that Dr. Fuentes' Twitter handle was Felina (@Miut3). Felina was dangerous to the cartels: a relentless activist, a Twitter user who denounced kidnappings, shootings, killings, and all the activities that occurred in the Reynosa region. She had worked with Bravery for Tamaulipas, but lately had been reporting independently. Very few people knew her identity, and presumably no one in the criminal gangs did... until that moment.

That same night the doctor who was kidnapped alongside Fuentes was released. He would later tell the authorities that she probably "wouldn't come back."

At 5:06 AM the next day the first tweet arrived:

@Miut3: FRIENDS AND FAMILY, MI REAL NAME IS MARÍA DEL ROSARIO FUENTES RUBIO. I AM A DOCTOR, TODAY MY LIFE HAS ENDED.

It was published from Fuentes' Twitter account, hacked into by the kidnappers. Two minutes later...

@Miut3: IT RESTS FOR ME TO TELL YOU NOT TO MAKE THE SAME MISTAKE I DID, YOU WON'T ACHIEVE ANYTHING, QUITE THE OPPOSITE, TODAY I REALIZE THAT

@Miut3: I FOUND DEATH IN EXCHANGE FOR NOTHING @Bandolera7 @civilarmado_mx @ValorTamaulipas THEY'RE CLOSER TO US THAN YOU THINK.

Her final tweet said: "#REYNOSAFOLLOW CLOSE YOUR ACCOUNTS DON'T ENDANGER YOUR FAMILIES LIKE I DID, I BEG YOUR FORGIVENESS." Two photos were attached to the post: on the left, a resigned Dr. Fuentes was set against a dark background, nearly impossible to identify; on the right, her body was on the ground—her face bloodied, her hands on her head, and her eyes wide open and lifeless.

But that wasn't sufficient proof for the authorities. She is not officially dead, just "disappeared." The authorities have yet to find her body and verify the homicide.

October 17, 2014

VxT: She was a comrade, a person who for 2 years collaborated with me in Responsabilidad por Tamaulipas (Responsibility for Tamaulipas). She was a person who had my affection and my respect.

RR: And you stayed in contact?

VxT: Why do you think her loss pains me so much? She didn't know me, or at least I never shared my identity with her. But I did know who she was, I chose her to help me with VxT, and then I pushed her out to protect her. But it turned out to be a poor decision, it made her get close to people who were not trustworthy.

RR: I'm very sorry. The risks in what you do are big, but no one deserves this for doing the right thing.

VxT: She had a kid, a daughter. She was a very special person for her family. I know they'll miss her. I'll miss her, terribly.

RR: Will you be able to go to the ceremonies, to the wake? Keeping your safety in mind.

VxT: No, I can't go. In any case they haven't found the body yet. The criminals have it.

RR: Sorry to ask, do you think there is any chance they'll find her?

VxT: In that area it's common to cook** the victims. I don't know what will happen.

Even for a middle-aged Colombian, someone who has lived through the days of the political genocide of the Patriotic Union and of the violence caused by Pablo Escobar, it would be difficult to understand what it was like, and still is, to live in the state of Tamaulipas, Mexico. In the northeast of the country, and neighboring the United States, it's a place that reminds one of Wild West movies: the dusty Sierra Madre, the arid planes full of cacti, and the lands the Rio Bravo flows through on its way to the Gulf. It's also a land of outlaws.

The recent history of Mexican drug-trafficking and its wars is so long and complex that it takes on the feel of an epic. It contains, necessarily, a fair bit of speculation, since there aren't historians documenting what happens within the criminal organizations. But it goes, more or less, like this: Since the 90s, the Gulf Cartel operated in Tamaulipas, focusing on the traffic of cocaine backed by Los Zetas, a group of mercenaries with military training that served as its armed wing. When the cartel's leader, Osiel Cárdenas, was arrested in 2003, the hierarchy of the organization split, presenting an opportunity for the Sinaloa Cartel—the largest in Mexico, led by Joaquín 'El Chapo' Guzmán—to advance from the West Coast toward the Gulf region.

The war between the Gulf and Sinaloa cartels caused the undue increase in strength and influence of Los Zetas. Osiel Cárdenas was extradited to the United States in 2007, which prevented him from running the organization's affairs from prison, and Los Zetas began to carry out activities usually reserved to those of a cartel proper. The violent break-up between Los Zetas and the Gulf Cartel reached its climax in 2010. "This was the period of the grenade attacks, the clashes between each groups' armed men," one of the region's other activists, @MrCruzStar, told me during a Skype interview, as if consulting a history book. Since then, with the state divided among several factions, the violence has become a permanent fixture.

Locals tell of checkpoints on country roads and even within city limits, gunmen checking drivers' IDs—and their mobile phones, denying entry to anyone from their opponents' territories. Whole families became fragmented, some having to escape their neighborhoods because one of their relatives—sometimes merely in-laws or distant family memebers—came from an area controlled by a rival cartel.

"Those who didn't leave paid the consequences: disappeared relatives, kidnappings, torture, and executions," recalls The Administrator. The media also remembers the shootings, the disappearances, and the attacks with machine guns and grenades.

Closer to the activists' hearts was the assassination of La Nena de Laredo, María Elizabeth Macías, author of the blog Nuevo Laredo en Vivo (Nuevo Laredo Live), whose headless body was found one early morning in 2011, in the city she took her online pseudonym from. Next to her was a sign that read "I am La Nena de Laredo and here I am because of my and your reports..." A year later, in the same city, two activists were hung from a bridge after being tortured and executed. A cardboard sign stuck to one of the bodies said, "This will happen to all the internet agitators. Check yourselves... I'm on to you, sincerely Z." The signature, "Z," is a commonly used abbreviation for Los Zetas—which means "The Zs."

Despite these killings, on January 1, 2012, someone created the Facebook fan page "Bravery for Tamaulipas." At that moment, The Administrator emerged. He was one more activist among all those who denounced the criminal gangs. On the page, The Administrator recorded the disappearances, noted the daily RS that occur in the city, and listed the various businesses that deal with the criminals. The Administrator forms part of a loose band of Twitter users like @Agente_Rey, @Bandolera7, and @MrCruzStar, who have been denouncing crimes in Reynosa since 2010.

The Administrator doesn't want to be a hero, and even less a martyr. That's why, like all the other activists, he's kept his identity a secret. All he wants to do is to leave the hopelessness, the fear, and the silence behind. He wants to help the people, and he feels the need to spread word of the realities of life in Tamaulipas, a state that proves how far the savagery of the cartels can go. According to The Administrator, there have been numerous shootouts in the middle of the street since 2010, disappearances (4,875 between 2011 and 2014), the deaths of innocent people completely unrelated to organized crime, and checkpoints set up by criminal gangs. The military, he notes, has also taken over parts of the city at points, though seemingly with little effect on the situation. Tamaulipas is a place where seeing certain types of vans drive past instils fear in all passers-by. In the words of The Administrator, it is "the perfect narco-government that you (Colombians) managed to resist for 20 years."

He wasn't the first to make such a page, or to publicly attack the narcos, but he became, without a doubt, the most popular. The page took off. It had over 200,000 followers a year after it began reporting, with daily postings listing the latest disappeared, where shootings were taking place, or which areas to avoid because of increased criminal activities. According to some of the activists I spoke to, his reports had become for the locals more important than the TV news. Reading one of his reports before leaving the house could save their lives.

When he started out, the cartels seemed almost pleased by the idea of the page. They wanted someone to inform them of the movements of their rivals, according to The Administrator. He tells me that he received several messages from people associated with the cartels asking him for his cooperation. He refused to help them, blocked everyone connected to the drug-trafficking, and didn't respond to any of their messages.

"And that's when the problems started," he says.

At the start the threats were mild, but they escalated quickly. Within a short space of time there were ghost accounts writing to him that they wanted "his eyes as key rings." The biggest threat of all occurred in mid-2013: a flyer distributed throughout the Ciudad Victoria criminal underground. It offered 600,000 pesos to anyone who provided exact details on the identity of the admin of Bravery for Tamaulipas, or information about his parents, siblings, offspring, or partner. "This is just freedom of expression," said the flyer, "but in exchange for that a good amount of cash to shut the mouths of these fucking clowns who think they're heroes." A phone number, and a guarantee that the tip would be kept completely anonymous, were included together with the reassurance that the money would be handed over to whoever passed on the information.

According to a note he published around that time, The Administrator sent his wife and children to the States for their own safety. Then he continued with his reports.

Innocent lives were lost during this harassment campaign. In May 2013 a couple was kidnapped because the criminals—apparently Los Zetas—alleged the two were relatives of The Administrator. They weren't, claimed The Administrator in another message. He then blamed the abductors for the death of a relative of the kidnapped couple.

That same year, The Administrator temporarily retired for the first time, closing down his Facebook and Twitter accounts. He had received another threat: "They sent me a video of a woman being beaten and you could hear the voice of a man saying this would happen to anyone who continued helping me. They cut her head off in that video. What sense does it make to maintain a page to help others avoid risks when you yourself become a risk?" And then, with what happened to Fuentes...

He confesses that this sort of harassment in the past had caused him panic attacks. He couldn't walk calmly down the street. He was always looking over his shoulder, fearing whoever was behind him. He needed to take medication to calm his nerves, and his own mortality weighed constantly on his mind. Sometimes he found it impossible to live that double life. Now, though, he claims he's more "thick-skinned." With such a heavy burden, he frequently speaks to God, but there are few people to blow off steam with in his daily life.

RR: And do your relatives know you're the page admin? What do they think?

VxT: The only relative who knows, from the start has told me that I am responsible for anything that happens to my family. That's all he has said, although at least he still talks to me. This hasn't been easy for me, but I'm not here to complain or to reproach anything. I am alive, for the time being, and every day I stay here is another day we have outdone evil.

The Administrator doesn't say much about himself. Even less since Felina's disappearance. "It's not advisable to expand on this," he says when asked about his tastes, about whether he watches TV, about what he eats, about his day-to-day. "I know this interests you, but these facts give away too much information about me. I used to watch TV, I used to do a lot of things. I don't get the chance to any more. I work a lot, that's true, and that makes it hard for me to manage the page as I should."

There is no way of telling what The Administrator has for breakfast, what he does for a living, what route he takes to return home from work every night. Nothing. Aside from his dissatisfaction with the government and its current politicians, one of the few things he talks about openly is his routine of reading, without fail, the approximately 100 messages he receives on social media accounts and on his e-mail daily. Other activists, like @Agente_Rey and @MrCruzStar, report that they don't receive more than a dozen tip-offs a week, which indicates how much more popular and influential his page is.

The Administrator closely examines all of the information he is passed. He verifies that those who report disappearances are close family members of the missing, and that the details of the stories are consistent. Sometimes he asks for more information to make sure everything "fits" because, he claims, criminals sometimes try to pass on false information. According to him, on some occasions, the government or its agents, either hoping he missteps and reveals his identity, have passed on false leads.

On the subject of his personality, all that can be said is that his answers betray a certain paranoia, fueled by the threats and the attacks that have gotten close to revealing his identity. One such attempt happened in March: An email, "which looked like a genuine Facebook notification," stole his password and gained temporary control of two of his other pages (Hope for Tamaulipas and Bravery for Huasteca). He assures me the attackers didn't gain access to his personal information or that of his informers.

The paranoia is inherent, and it forms part of his nature. He is all too aware of the idea that Fuentes had been identified and threatened before her abduction: he bases his knowledge on the fact that, a few days prior to her disappearance, Fuentes received threats from user @Garzalaura142, who sent messages similar in tone to the last ones published on her account.

He also has a near fanatic certainty that the government is as evil as the cartels, if not in terms of active criminality, at least for ignoring the realities in Tamaulipas. Even though he has little evidence to support the theory, he claims the government has started a social network control strategy in which the Army and Navy Ministry (Semar) and the National Defense Ministry (Sedena) take an active part monitoring activists. He makes it sound like a full-blown conspiracy. It's a view shared by others trying to tackle the cartels online.

The Administrator has misgivings these days even about some of his fellow online activists, and he suspects many have ties to the government. "They act in favor of the government," he says. "I published the details of a disappeared person and these activists called the family and offered them help from the Victim Support Institute, but only in exchange for my taking down the original post." He adds, "It makes me mad to think that Muit3 died in the middle of this governmental social media control strategy."

Rafael Luque, of the Secretaría de Gobierno (the Government Secretariat), had this to say on the matter of governmental involvement with online activism:

"The government does not have a stance regarding the social networks' activists. We don't condemn them, nor applaud them. We don't know if they've been threatened, as they claim, because they haven't reported it to the proper authorities.

"As for whether they help or not, I think it's a very inconclusive matter. For many, they are useful. For many others, they don't help at all, because they can distort the truth, exaggerate the facts, and issue alerts that on many occasions are unjustified... In fact, when they say something, next day the reporters from the Tamaulipas' Coordination Group (Grupo de Coordinación de Tamaulipas) expose them as wrong.

"In other words, it seems that the social networks have been infiltrated already by the criminal groups, and that's why have lost so much credibility... We don't have any contact with them, nor do they try to contact us. It seems they have a mentality focused on attacking the three levels of the federal government, as well as the federal and state forces of the Tamaulipas' Coordination Group that fight crime and insecurity."

Those who visit the page Bravery for Tamaulipas on Facebook might feel that the reports posted are somewhat impersonal. Crimes which would normally provoke outrage are posted on the page with detached professionalism. The Administrator has fears about this: "I worry that I am becoming dehumanized, that I start to see certain crimes as a norm, and that worries me above any stress the page may provoke in me."

On occasions, he worries that he may cause more harm than good with what he posts.

@MrCruzStar: The gas station La Cucaracha in #SanFernando attacked. Teacher killed, her son injured, he's scorched alongside customers. #Reynosafollow unrelated to organized crime.

@MrCruzStar: 2 deaths, gunmen lock in teacher and a worker, set them on fire. Her son and a customer torched. #SanFernando #ReynosaFollow #Tamaulipas

These two tweets were posted in June 2013, two days after Bravery for Tamaulipas stated that the gas station Las Cucarachas was owned by a man who laundered money for Los Zetas. The following Saturday the gas station was attacked. Gradually the rest of the activists on the web revealed that the gas station in question actually no longer belonged to that person, but to a woman completely unrelated to the drug trade or Los Zetas. This was the woman who died in the attack.

@LaTecolotita: What will @ValorTamaulipas do now? How will you justify yourself? A death provoked by your stupidity.

Over the following days Twitter was used to protest against the irresponsibility of The Administrator in publishing false information. He tried to defend himself, but with the loss of innocent lives hanging over him, his comments only made him seem insensitive and unable to confront what had happened.

The Administrator would not back down. He published a long post in which he stated he would not be intimidated, that he'd continue doing the right thing despite the consequences, and that his information was always verified to the best of his abilities. The negative reactions, he says, are proof of how deeply his reports—and those of other citizens—can cut the criminals. "So the question is, should we keep silent or should we continue?" he wrote.

He has considered going silent on several occasions. Toward the end of 2014, The Administrator announced that he would pass on his page to someone else. Another anonymous admin would take his place, maybe someone with contacts within the government and SEDENA, who could pass on the reports to the authorities and encourage them to act. The page's followers were divided over whether this was a good or bad thing, but it didn't matter: the transition never took place.

The Administrator is still there, in the line of fire, despite knowing of very few cases in which his actions have directly saved someone's life; despite the growing risk that he could join the ranks of bloggers and activists executed across Tamaulipas; and despite not believing there is a workable solution to the conflict in his country.

VxT: What made me come back? I realized the page isn't mine, it belongs to the informers. I couldn't take something that doesn't belong to me away from them. The government is already copying the VxT model to inform and to receive tip-offs. They publish and receive information at a faster rate than I am able to. So it's not that I want to one day leave this, it's more that I will slowly become obsolete. And I prefer that to happen naturally. That's why I won't stop the page.

RR: Do you think then that what you do makes a difference?

I can't avoid imagining a deep sigh, two sunken eyes, the tired face of an unknown man grimacing as he read the question...

VxT: I'm not so sure about that.

*SDR stands for "Situación de Riesgo" (Risk Situation). It's the hashtag activists use to report activities such as kidnapping, murders, and shootouts. They usually use it alongside the name of the city (#SDRReynosa, #SDRVictoria).

**To burn or disintegrate a body with acid.

Screencap via YouTube

When I was a lad, slurping soda through a straw in the local social club of a Sunday lunchtime, only one thing had my absolute attention: said smoky den's sole arcade cabinet, leant against a wall, almost in the way of the pool table. And for a short period, between RoboCop and whatever came afterwards, it was playing Konami's inimitable multiplayer beat' em up Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles (called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the US).

I remember it like it was yesterday, rather than, shit, 25 years and change. Stage one, fighting the Foot Clan through a burning building, massive bowling balls rolling down stairwells for no good reason, and throwing down with a horny Rocksteady at the level's end. Stage two, out on the streets of New York, dodging manhole covers on the way to a boss battle with the porcine Bebop. Stage three, down in the sewers. I don't think I ever made it past stage three, at least not on the chump change available to a ten-year-old without a paper round.

The game was ported to the NES, which was already home to one outstanding Turtles title, but I was a Sega kid growing up, so my memories are exclusively centered on the arcade original. (And if we had a cracked copy for the family Amiga, it clearly didn't leave an impression.) And those memories are golden. The game was fast and exciting, it resembled the show I knew from the TV, and its visuals were dazzlingly bright.

A couple of great 16bit Turtles games followed, Back from the Sewers and The Manhattan Project, but since the era of the SNES there's been little in the way of recommended interactive adventures for Turtle fans to chew on. Did you play 2013's Out of the Shadows? The game barely worked, for one thing, and even if you could forgive its bugs, it was as much a solid brawler as turtle soup is a sensible sandwich filling. "The Turtles deserve better," was Polygon's says-it-all line on Red Fly Studio's piss-poor attempt at recapturing a little Turtle Power.

But gamers with a soft spot for half-shell-sporting heroes might just have cause to get excited again. The announcement trailer for the new, Activision-published Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants in Manhattan came out a few hours ago—watch it above—and provides us with three main reasons to believe that this will be a revival of the arcade game's all-action excellence.

One, Mutants in Manhattan is being made by Osaka's PlatinumGames, the studio behind contemporary action genre classics Vanquish and Bayonetta. Yes, they put together The Legend of Korra and it was garbage, and the forthcoming Star Fox Zero's looking more than a little shitty; but Platinum delivered the best Transformers video game for over a decade with 2015's Transformers: Devastation, proving that they can match slick gameplay with franchise-respecting fan service. No reason to believe that they can't do the same for the Turtles.

On MUNCHIES: I Ate Illegal Turtle Eggs, and They Were Disgusting

Two, the game would appear to have nothing whatsoever to do with the Turtles movie that's coming out this summer, Out of the Shadows. Which, assuming it's every second as enjoyable as the Michael Bay-produced Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles flick that came out in 2014, will be a Razzies frontrunner come awards season.

Three, look at it. It looks ace, with the same cartoon-style visuals that made Devastation such an aesthetic triumph. I don't know for sure, but I'm going to assume that it's set up for multiplayer, given the scenes where individual Turtles come together for special moves—online play is certainly assured, and you'd hope that's cooperative rather than not. (Also, wouldn't an open-world Manhattan be amazing? I'm not holding my breath, but some of the game's achievements relate to miles traversed.) The frenetic pace of the combat has Platinum written all over it, and the familiar line-up of foes, and more pertinently how they're drawn, suggests that it'll reconnect with the old comic and cartoon rather than more recent live-action characters. That is the Shredder I remember, not this awful mess.

I can't wait, is what I'm saying. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants in Manhattan is released this summer, coinciding with Out of the Shadows. I know where my money's heading, and it's not the multiplex.

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Jakob Wassermann. Photo by Emil Otto Hoppe/ullstein bild via Getty Images

Jakob Wassermann (1873–1934) was the son of a shopkeeper. His mother died when he was young. He published his debut novel, Melusine, in 1896. Then he spent some time writing for newspapers. And eventually he became an acquaintance of Rainer Maria Rilke and Thomas Mann. He wrote and published many novels during his life. His previously untranslated autobiographical novel My Marriage was published after he died. I am not sure whether he intended for it to be published. It is honest in a way that writing-for-others often is not. I mean that it is careless and quick, written in little bursts of what might be anger, or maybe just note-taking, or memory. Most striking, Wassermann's narrator doesn't conceal his pique. His anger reflects badly on him—when it clearly betrays selfishness—but it's not edited for the ring of objectivity. He writes, "I hear her dull 'Hallo-o' which drives me wild with nervousness, ten times an evening, 20—a real huntsman's sound, it sounds like the jungle with its grim long-drawn-out 'o-o.'" It's an angry voice, the voice of a friend confiding over a beer, a bit oppressive, yes, but remarkable for its candor. The book comes out today from New York Review Books Classics.

—Amie Barrodale

An Excerpt from 'My Marriage'

The tragedy of the male

Before I relate how the ever uglier and more distressing business of the school went on and finally ended, I want to talk about my own experiences in the years before the war, and in the first years of the war—two in particular that, each in their own way, had a profound effect on the future. The one was the birth of my daughter Doris, the other the gift of a house—a whole fully furnished house, with grounds—the kind gift of a young couple I had been close friends with for some time. I had told them about my domestic trouble, the difficulty of finding peace and concentration in a rented apartment, and the resulting tendency to fritter away the day and do my work at night. Then, on a generous impulse, they offered me the money to buy a house in the country. I was so stunned I could hardly breathe. I didn't dare turn it down, but felt I couldn't accept it either. It was extraordinary; I asked myself if I had any right to avail myself of this favorable smile of fortune, it almost seemed to me it would be betraying my friends to do so. How can you deserve such a sacrifice—albeit those making it don't see it as such—how thank them, when thanks you can't give will end up burdening you? I had none of the greedy self-certainty of those geniuses (I didn't think I was one in any case) who accept support and help from their admirers as a perfectly natural form of tribute. I was too steeped in the bourgeois ethos of deals and contracts. The formulas 'nowt for nowt' and 'you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours' were in my blood. It wasn't easy for me to see myself in any way as (in some higher sense) 'deserving' the generosity of these friends.

Ganna, however, had no such scruples. She thought it was absolutely to be expected that people would seek to spoil me a little. They were only giving me back what they had already had from me in plenty, she said, with eyes wide. 'Come off it,' I said, petulantly, 'there must be a couple of thousand like me. Ninety per cent of us will probably die in a ditch. You're doing pretty well if you have enough to eat and a bed to sleep in at night. What's so special about me? What have I done to deserve a luxury villa? We have no right to such security, it seems to me.' Ganna vehemently disagreed. She was too obviously the child of a well-provided and self-righteous era where mind and work had their value just as stocks and shares did. It raised my worth immeasurably in her eyes, although she seemed not to be aware of the fact that it was her husband who had been given the house. Nothing like this had happened since the days of the Medicis. She trumpeted her and my good fortune to all and sundry, and when I asked her to be a little discreet, she looked at me uncomprehendingly. But it gave us a neutral territory where our shared interests could get to work on a common project. Ganna needed to be kept busy, she was like a stove needing fuel. She could do 20 things at once, and each of them with verve and enthusiasm. And when we discussed the house together, looked for a piece of land, spoke to the architect, studied the plans, bought furniture and lamps and other things, the besetting passivity I fell into whenever I was with her left me, and I could at least be dragged along. And, so that she didn't see I was only allowing myself to be dragged along, I would stroke her tiny hand which was feeding me sugar lumps, so that I for my part wouldn't notice how she was dragging me along. Marriage offers the weaker party plenty of opportunity to show no character.

It took no particular cleverness or endeavor on Ganna's part to induce me to have my new possession—this house, the workplace and refuge intended for me personally—registered in her name as well. One day we went along to the land-registry office and Ganna was legally made co-owner of the villa. I gave the matter no thought whatsoever. I didn't think that I was thereby relinquishing the one and only thing that was entirely mine. I didn't reflect that I was establishing Ganna in a feeling of ownership and entitlement that—beyond the actual name on the deeds—signified in some magical sense a transfer of body and soul.

But I was only superficially engaged with all this. In hindsight, these years came to seem like a trek along a dark, overhung path, with rare moments of rest or looking up. I could sense that tremendous things were imminent. The black cloud, still invisible below the horizon, was already projecting electric waves, and I was continually nervous, like a bird before a storm. There was an awful magic being wrought over the land and over the people, I felt ill at ease when I walked at night, as I often had occasion to, through the streets of German cities; I suffered from my second sight like a sleeper dreaming his house is on fire. It seemed to me another world was claiming me than the one in which I had thus far been content to be. What I had achieved seemed negligible, inadequate; it spoke to too few people, it existed in outmoded forms. I had a sense of others, waiting, but I didn't know anything about them. I was still far from my limits, and far from myself; if I failed to break through my crust, then I would find myself crushed by it.

My senses too were aflame. Ravenous appetite alternated with satiety. No woman was enough for me; none gave me what I was dimly seeking: a sense of who I was, some final easement of the blood. I went from one to another, and it was often as though I had to break them open like a husk or shell with unknown contents, peeling them like a fruit which I then discarded. It wasn't Don Juan-ishness, nor was it sheer lechery either. There might have been something in it of the misunderstanding that takes the living being and half-angrily, half-playfully exchanges it for an imaginary one, and contents itself with that because it can't perfect the other. Perhaps it was something to do with the tragedy of the male who sets off towards the glacial region of symbols and en route forgets himself with warm-blooded nymphs.

By the time the baby was born, we were already living in our new house.

The truth begins to dawn

Only then did events with the school board take on the shape of the catastrophe that deeply affected both Ganna's life and mine. The main cause of the trouble was that Ganna stubbornly refused to make over the meadow to the company. The stockholders described it as intolerable that the extensive land for the project, on which the newly built school was standing, should remain in separate ownership, and that the owner, herself a member of the board, should charge a substantial rent for it. In the course of stormy meetings, Ganna was upbraided for the immoral and unbusinesslike nature of the situation. It made her look bad, it was said, that she laid claim both to the idealism of the project and the lion's share of the profits. That is very much the way of it: People who have disappointed expectations of money are extremely hard on those who, while on the side of the angels, also want to turn a profit. That's wrong, they say, there are businessmen and there are priests, you can't be both at once. The other side's lawyers even contested Ganna's title. Their claim was that Ganna had managed to acquire the title by some underhand method, and they sought to expose it.

Ganna is left reeling. The world is darkening on her. She swears sacred oaths that she would rather die than give up her meadow; she won't give up a square foot of it, no, not so much as a blade of grass. Inevitably, the children, for whose sake this venture was started, become aware of their mother's unpopularity. The advantage that Ganna sought to gain for them is lost. But neither can I find that they are disadvantaged and emotionally damaged by all this, as Ganna weepingly claims. They needed to learn to take the rough with the smooth, I opine with a calmness that drives Ganna into a fury. 'How can you stick up for those criminals?' she hisses at me. 'That just shows what a weakling you are. The whole world knows that you abandon your wife at the earliest opportunity. Well, God will punish you for it.' Those speeches! I really haven't abandoned her, and why is she coming with her divine punishment? What does she know of God, she who only ever uses His name in vain. Her god is Ganna Herzog's special constable, who will launch his thunderbolts the moment his dear Ganna is hurt by a bad person.

She goes up to the teachers and gives them all a piece of her mind. It fails to improve matters. Ferry goes on strike; we've reached the stage where the children are paying for Ganna's misdeeds. The quality of the teaching, which Ganna once praised to the skies, is suddenly wretched. The same teachers who only recently were paragons, so many Fröbels and Pestalozzis, are now held in contempt. She sticks at nothing in her campaign against the headmaster Borngräber, with whom she was certainly once half in love. She conspires with handymen and charwomen. Day after day she hangs around with people in whom the name Herzog inspires no respect. She tussles with them. Like anyone with a political mission, she is surrounded by provocateurs and flatterers. I worry that she won't come out of this smelling of roses.

The establishment is crumbling. She comes home in the evening shattered from her campaigns. She gulps down the warmed-up leftovers of lunch, not tasting anything, not knowing what she's eating. She runs into the nursery, where she opens the floodgates of her dammed-up tenderness, because, with her maternal care limited to this brief interval, she tries to make up for constancy by intensity of feeling, and remains sternly unaware of anything that might show her idols in any other light than in her immediate passion. But then all it needs is for one of the children to test her patience, or not play along with her latest whim, and she starts to yell crazily at the shocked—a moment ago babied—creature, and if I try and intervene (it's one of Ganna's abiding characteristics that she can't stand any contradiction, not from anyone, in any matter), then she will foam with rage. If the telephone shrills she shuffles out into the corridor in her down-at-heel slippers, and I hear her dull 'Hallo-o' which drives me wild with nervousness, ten times an evening, 20—a real huntsman's sound, it sounds like the jungle with its grim long-drawn-out 'o-o.' It's very evident if the person at the other end is someone who wants something from her, or if it's someone she wants something from; if it's the former her voice is cutting, mordant, bossy, and if it's the latter it's sweet, beseeching, submissive. After her supper she comes into my room and combs her hair, an activity that seems to take her forever, during which she dreams and builds castles in the air, and chews over old wrongs she's suffered. The comb drives crackling through her chestnut hair, her wide-open blue eyes stare fixedly into space. What they're so fixed on is anyone's guess, not even she herself knows; but the bottomless pain etched into her features moves me. And when I think she's on her way to bed, so that her tortured soul will finally have some peace, she will remember something and hurry across to the desk, to compose some long screed or epistle which the next day will turn out to be perfectly meaningless and superfluous.

'What are you playing at, Alexander,' she cried, 'a father of young children, a family to support, you're not serious?'

It's in the nature of hell that it affords ever deeper degrees of torment and dread; you think it can't get any worse, but you're only in some antechamber of limbo, some zone of moderate awfulness; and that was my position when Ferry and Elisabeth were removed from the school and put in an ordinary state school instead. Whether it was punishment or a voluntary withdrawal wasn't vouchsafed to me. Ganna claimed it was an act of revenge and I had to believe her; I had no desire to go looking for the truth, I didn't want to create yet more conflict. The heads of the state schools had little good to say about the private school, and Ganna's bewilderment was great when the various gymnasiums refused mid-semester to admit Ferry; and her shock was even greater when it was put down to the insufficient preparedness of the boy. Anxiety darkened my mood. I felt accountable for my son, but how could I stand up for him at the court of destiny, when his mother robbed me of all responsibility and remonstrated passionately with the judge against whose verdict there was no appeal? The thing she had tried to save him from now came to pass, with a vengeance: intellectual insecurity, academic caprice. I didn't have the time to win back from her what she claimed from me and the world as hers of right. No, I didn't have either the time or the energy to fight with her and persuade her to change course. I thought—maybe foolishly, maybe vaingloriously—that God had given me my days for some other purpose than that anyway. Ganna's world was a world of limitless freedom, and for her to help herself from it equally limitlessly was the only way to happiness that she knew, even though whatever happiness resulted wasn't what she wanted. I can remember hours when I argued with her as though my soul's salvation depended on it, tried to break her rigid purpose, tried to make her milder, gentler, more insightful. But it was like trying to draw a face on a sheet of water. Once, in a strange fit of contrition, she said to me: 'For you I would have to be a saint, but I can't become holy without a mortal sin.' I have never been able to forget those painful and terrible words. An abyss opened, at the bottom of which I glimpsed a Ganna fighting with ghostly shadows.

And what about me? What was I? A man being crushed in the fist of destiny. The war was tearing at me, tearing me in two the way a storm breaks a sheet of ice on a frozen lake; it broke me and I flooded and flooded, and the quiet dreamer and worker, the hibernal dreamer, the frozen dreamer, became a waker with the experiences of many, the sufferings of many in his bosom. Sleep and peace fled from me, and I stepped out of my rocky fastness; I tried to help, I tried to serve, I was looking for a soul, and if I hadn't happened to find it finally in Bettina Merck, then despair would have choked me.

Ganna remained oblivious to all this. There was never a conversation about these things, no chance of a serious debate, as she was completely taken up with her business. There was something eerie about the way the global catastrophe seemed not to touch her. Her involvement in the events that shook all five continents was that of a little girl who was surprised to see the sky reddened by distant fires. She didn't quite believe that the news that reached her ears was based on actual events. Her shock had something feigned, it was as though there was some conspirative agreement between people who didn't concern her; all the while the true, the palpable, the Ganna world, the Ganna nursery world had nothing to do with these bruited, alleged doings.

I had volunteered in the first few weeks of the war. No man of heart and upstanding character at that time gave any thought to the rights and wrongs of the war, nor did anyone know what war actually was, or what it meant. We were parts of a whole and the whole was, or appeared to be, a living organism, a people, a fatherland, a place of being and becoming. I made up an excuse to Ganna, travelled into Vienna overnight and went to the consulate. The Consul, who knew me, initially wanted to pack me off home because they were so overrun with volunteers, but I insisted on being examined. The doctor found a cardiac neurosis. I went home desperately disappointed to Ebenweiler and told Ganna what I'd done. She was aghast with shock.

'What are you playing at, Alexander,' she cried, 'a father of young children, a family to support, you're not serious?'

Then it was my turn to be shocked; I think it was on that day that it occurred to me that the female Don Quixote was only a decoy.

'And what's the matter with your heart?' she moaned, when I told her what the doctor had said. 'You see, it's because you don't look after yourself. You smoke too much, you don't sleep enough, you should listen to me.'

'Oh no, Ganna,' I said, 'it's not that. Living means using up your heart. That's the point. I will have got too upset about too many things. Has it never occurred to you that getting upset is worse for me than smoking and not sleeping?'

That hurt her. She wanted to know what had upset me, as though it could be anything I might put my finger on. I was unable to give her a detailed instance; what difference would it have made if I had, she would have tried to talk it away and another argument would have started. Still, she kept boring in on me, and finally she asked me if I thought she was a good wife to me.

'Have you got any grounds for complaint? Tell me, aren't I a good wife to you?'

'Yes, Ganna, you are,' I said, 'you're a good wife to me.'

Then she wanted me to swear that I really meant it.

'What's the point of that, Ganna, don't be childish,' I replied, and more than ever I had the sense of her hopeless trusting in forms of words, believing in hollowed-out notions and being in love with an image of herself that bore no relation to the living being.

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Ganna makes her will

By now, things have got to the point where the consortium or board or whatever the group of directors called themselves have started to demand the meadow back from Ganna. She can name a price for it, she is told, but within reason. It's not easy for Ganna to think of a number, seeing as the exploitation of the meadow is the subject of all her dreams, and she wants to make me happy by it (though I don't seem very happy about it). With a strange unaccountable tenderness she clings onto the piece of property in her mind; 'my little meadow' she says, and smiles just as blissfully as when giving our little Doris her breast. How can such a thing be, what makes someone like that tick? I can't explain it to myself.

The pressure on her from all sides is too much; she loses her nerve. Tossed back and forth between opposition and weakness, tenacity and fear, bitterness and speculative greed, she is unable to make her mind up. She asks everyone who crosses her path for an opinion—her sisters, her brothers-in-law, the servants, the suppliers, the gardener. But if one doesn't coincide with her own secret wishes she becomes unpleasant, and launches into lengthy discussions of her view and praise of the meadow.

She calls a general meeting. People talk, quarrel, shout, and at the end Ganna promises to make her decision public the next day. The next day she communicates the price to the board in writing. No sooner has she posted the registered letter than she takes fright and asks for it back. 'They'd be laughing all the way to the bank,' she says to me, 'I should ask for three times as much, they're all well-off people and I mustn't allow them to bully me.' I warn her. I don't know what's going on, but this seems to me to be playing a dangerous game. More negotiations, more ranting and screaming, followed by an abrupt walk-out. The brothers-in-law are with me in exhorting her to moderation. Dr Pauli describes the offer made to her as decent and acceptable; she resists it with all her might, claims she is being cheated. The inappropriateness of her demand is proved to her; she seems to accept it, only an hour later to be back with her old standpoint. She runs from pillar to post, scolds those who disagree with her, wastes people's time, describes the intrigues being used to intimidate her, comes up with vast sums she is being cheated of by the pressure of the antagonists, asks every Tom, Dick, and Harry: 'Should I do it, should I not, at this price, at that price, on this condition, on that condition? Will I regret it, won't I regret it? Is it not a crime against my husband and my children if I let that gang walk away with my lovely meadow?' She thinks about nothing else. She lives like a fugitive. She neglects herself, her domestic duties, me, the children. She no longer appears at mealtimes. Sometimes she can be found sitting on a bench in the public park, eating an apple. Sometimes having a nap in an Automat, listening to a scratchy gramophone record all dewy-eyed as if it were the Philharmonic.

The story of the meadow is already making waves. To know that my name is being used in connection with it pains me.

Her indecisiveness, her anger, her restlessness, her wheeling and dealing, her tangled arguments, all the trash of a commercial dispute fought out with repulsive methods—she brings them all to me and dumps them on my lap. I am to 'have the last word.' I decline; the last word would only be the penultimate one anyway. Every evening till far into the night the same song with the same exhausting refrain that it was all for my sake, that this whole struggle was all for me and only for me. 'If you accept that, then I'll stop,' she says. 'Do you accept that, do you accept that?' Echolalia and nothing but. What am I to say? She won't stop anyway, never mind how much I accept.

I can't stand the endless rhetoric of it any more; the canny lawyerly presentations; the suspicions of people who are either acting in good faith, or who have nothing more dastardly in mind than Ganna herself, namely to make some money. I am nauseated by the disagreeable mixing of profit motive and highmindedness. The story of the meadow is already making waves. To know that my name is being used in connection with it pains me. Old Councillor Schönpflug approaches me once in the club and begs me to keep Ganna from further folly, which might end up in a court case and not just a civil one at that. It's horrible, it's humiliating, I must try and bring it to an end.

One morning, dressed and ready to go out, I walk into Ganna's bedroom to say goodbye to her. She is just coming out of the bathroom, swathed in a red and white chequered dressing gown. No sooner does she catch sight of me than she launches into the usual daily litany. There is to be a meeting at Dr Pauli's at twelve o'clock, could I not perhaps attend. It would help her a lot. She would be forever grateful to me (or rather, I think to myself, she would never forgive me if I refused).

Of late, I haven't shown her much in the way of friendliness. It cost me too much. I can't be friendly if I don't have it in me to be so. I have become increasingly cold and laconic and irritable. I am angry with myself for my lovelessness. But my heart is blocked. I can't find a kind word. Not now either. I shrug. The thought of more talks at the lawyer's office gives me the willies. I couldn't, I'm afraid, I say. Straight away Ganna turns aggressive. If only I could leave her to rage and walk off. But her tirades are like glue, and I'm stuck fast. When she calls it pathetic, my refusal to support her, the man for whom she is sacrificing herself, I remind her I hadn't demanded or wished for any such sacrifice, and she was more use to me as a housewife and mother of our children. That earns me a salvo of derision from Ganna's mouth.

'That's the thanks I get! I bleed myself dry for such a man, such a monster, more like! What thanks!'

'There's nothing to thank you for,' I remark with a degree of calm that should have given Ganna pause, but it washes off her, 'just as I never counted on a life like the one you're making me.'

Ganna laughs hollowly. 'What do you mean by that? What life? How do you propose to live? Do you want to starve till you get white hair? Where would you be without me anyway? Ask yourself that.'

'I don't know where I'd be without you, all I know is that I can no longer go on with you. Either you put an end to the business with the meadow and just sell it, or I'm going to leave you and get a divorce.'

No sooner has the word fallen than Ganna's features are contorted. The word is not one that has been spoken before between us. She never thought she would hear it. She feels as sure of me as if I were a part of her, an arm or a leg. She is fundamentally secure, rootedly secure. Perhaps the dread word lies in some buried depths of her unconscious, like an explosive charge in a cellar. She gives a scream. The scream, which is awful, shrill and guttural, lasts fully 15 or 20 seconds, and while she is screaming she is running around the room like a madwoman. She is certainly oblivious. She is certainly not in possession of her senses. Even so, I have the feeling that the utter loss of self-control is giving her pleasure, the pleasure of abdication, of psychic degeneration, that epileptics are said to have during a fit. While she rips the dressing-gown off with furious movements, she hurls a torrent of abuse at me. In every register of which her voice is capable she shouts the dread word at me: divorce. Inquiring, shouting, squawking, howling, gasping, with fingers hooked like claws and blue flashing eyes. And as I suffer the ghastly outburst showing me a wholly new, unsuspected Ganna in silence, she runs over to the window, stark naked as she is, and leans over the metal rail with her upper body, as though to plummet down the next moment. I am instantly reminded of the scene 16 years ago, on the balcony by the Mondsee. Basically, she always does the same thing, I think to myself sadly, reaches for the same trick to get the other person in her power, the same words, the same gestures; only I always forget, and I always fall for it. In spite of my tormenting fury I remain relatively cool. I know she won't do it; anyway there's not much danger, the window's about ten or 12 feet over the garden, which at that point is lawn—at the most she could break one or two ribs. But my certainty that she won't throw herself over gives the situation something darkly ridiculous. At the same time, the rage that has been gathering inside me suddenly bursts out like a jet of boiling steam; it's years and years since I last felt anything like it; with a single bound I am behind her, I grab her by the bare shoulders, fling her onto the bed and start blindly punching her. I still can't imagine how it came over me. I'm laying into her like a drunk in a bar fight. Like a drayman. I, Alexander Herzog, am punching a woman. And Ganna is completely quiet. Curious, because she's so quiet I stop hitting her and rush up to my room, lock the door behind me, drop into my chair, and sit perfectly still and brood about my misfortune.

And what did Ganna do in the meantime? I found out later, by chance. I found a sealed envelope on her desk, inscribed with her big accusing capital letters: My Will and Testament. When I asked her in amazement when and why she composed her will, she tells me with tear-stained face that it was just after I had hit her. I begged her not to bring it up again. But she told me about her despair and how she had sworn to herself to sell the meadow that very day. One day I would surely understand what I had done to her, what I had done to myself... From that moment on, we each had our own private stab-in-the-back story. Ganna never let go of the version that I had gone for her at the very moment she was in the process of making me millions. This figment was Ganna's prop through all the later blows of fortune she suffered. In that way, she was like all conquered peoples and power-hungry parties; without a scapegoat she had no chance of confronting reality. And scapegoats are everywhere to be found, since without divided responsibility there is no practical action.

Burdened with this moral debt, whose interest payments I with my usual willingness took upon myself, I emerged into a new phase of my life—the one for the sake of which I have set down these confessions.

Excerpted from My Marriage, by Jakob Wassermann, by arrangement with New York Review Books Classics.

I probably discovered the movie adaptation of Elizabeth Wurtzel's autobiography, Prozac Nation, in a lethargic haze. I was depressed at the time, and likely just googled "good movies about depression." There are too many movies about depression that aren't really about depression. Instead, it's put down as a quirky side effect, a "trait" designed to make the character more pitiful or abject. Prozac Nation is not one of those movies.

The film is a hell ride. It's a lethal combination of beauty, brains, and narcissism masquerading as a human grenade. Based on Wurtzel's Generation X best seller, it describes depression with unparalleled accuracy and prose sharper than a razor blade. While this is unfortunately one of those annoying cases in which the book is better than its adaptation, don't let that stop you from watching. Five minutes in, you'll realize you can't look away. It's like witnessing the most bewitching car crash you can fathom.

Jessica Lange is in it, as the official mascot for bad, chain-smoking moms everywhere. Christina Ricci is in it, in the role of reckless Harvard-journalism student Lizzie. She gets into the college on a full-ride scholarship, after writing a tell-all account of her parent's divorce for Seventeen magazine. She fabricates an imagined relationship with her deadbeat dad to please its readership. Then she becomes a self-described "beautiful literary freak." What follows is sex, drugs, and Lou Reed concert reviews for her school paper, the Harvard Crimson. However, Lizzie is one of those death-or-glory people, one whose efforts end up Pyrrhic at best. Predictably, all her relationships implode because she's an angry person suffering from a very real mental illness. She yanks her hair, screams at friends. Her face is streaked with tears when her peers aren't accommodating enough or try to offer unwanted help or simply exist near her. When they don't succumb to her outbursts, her eruptions only intensify. She's asking for help but rebuffs its advances.

Ricci narrates the film in her seductive vocal fry, and while most voiceovers can be grating, this is her character's salvation. It's like Wednesday Addams 2.0. Paired with Wurtzel's potent words, the effect is intoxicating: "Hemingway has his classic moment in The Sun Also Rises when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is, 'Gradually, then suddenly.' That's how depression hits. You wake up one morning, afraid that you're gonna live." Everything she says could be a tattoo, but it's her sarcastic aphorisms that make her so relatable.

The only likely reason Ricci lost out on an Oscar nomination that year for her lung-stabbing performance is because the film was never released in the States. Due to some executive-level bullshit, the distributor (Miramax) pawned it off on the premium cable channel Starz four years later. It was released in the director's home country of Norway to an audience of tens. That brought about the ironic New York Times headline, "For Author of 'Prozac Nation,' Delayed Film Is a Downer."

In comparison to the multitude of depressing films out there, Prozac Nation is wildly entertaining, but only if you get off on watching people self-destruct. (See also: Sarah Silverman's I Smile Back). When she claims her best friend Ruby (young Michelle Williams) doesn't know what it's like to truly love someone, Lizzie finally gets what's coming to her. A verbal bitch slap. Ruby, choking back tears, retorts with one of the best on-screen truth servings of all time, saying, "I'm not crying because you're mean. I'm crying because I can't imagine how incredibly painful it must be to be you."

At this point in the movie, it's impossible not to hate Lizzie. She's the devil incarnate, catering only to her own whims and edging her friends and lovers out. It forces you to consider the worst: that people might eventually give up on you. Maybe not now, but getting out of bed in the morning is something only you can do for yourself. It's sobering. The other thing I noticed was how high-functioning her character was. If the process of watching and re-watching this movie was some fucked-up journey of self-diagnosis, if I really were depressed, then I had found what I was looking for. It was time to get help before I became a human sinkhole.

One day after I'd inhaled the movie and it left me gasping for air, I found myself standing in my university library, thumbing through titles like How to Think Straight About Psychology. I chuckled at the idea of the school relegating a popular work of fiction like Prozac Nation to a library pregnant with ancient, academic textbooks. I checked it out, huffed and sobbed through the chapters. I re-watched the film, drinking in the dialogue. I made a decision to call my parents and told them that I wasn't happy.

I quit college a semester before graduation and moved back home. One year and a shitty telemarketing job later, I landed a different job, and a very small part included arranging a Reddit AMA with the Dame of Depression herself, Elizabeth Wurtzel. So I emailed her. She responded. We exchanged pleasantries, and I tried to tell her how much she meant to me in so many words. She told me about her newfound work as a lawyer and the weird legal cases she'd been working on. I can't remember all the stuff we spoke about because, like an idiot, I never saved the emails. Now they're long gone, like all my feelings of depression—a faint memory of a random interaction with someone who I may have unknowingly appointed to save me.

Follow Trey Taylor on Twitter.

A version of this article originally appeared on VICE UK.

When I started high school, I began studying Mandarin Chinese from a Taiwanese woman who ensured that I could speak by the time I graduated. I practiced reading, speaking, and writing with her for an hour every day. Up until this past year, I'd never put any of those lessons to use aside from overhearing conversations over fruit sales in New York's Chinatown. In November, I got my chance when I traveled to Chongqing and Chengdu, China, to learn and explore a place that seemed to be so profoundly different from anywhere I'd ever known. What I found was a place suspended between ancient and hyper-modern, so vast and populated that it seemed to charge ahead and dig its heels at the same time. Below is a selection of images from my time there.

Cait Oppermann is a Brooklyn-based photographer. You can follow her work here.

Tim "Gonzo" Ryan, Nick Maher, and Pawel "Parv" Jarecki

Four years ago, the three us—Nick, Parv, and me (Gonzo)—loaded into a barely roadworthy Toyota Corolla and set off across the US. We wanted to make a documentary series that took us deep into the country's bizarre subcultures. Just like Louis Theroux without the British charm. For six months, we slept in tents on the side of highways and survived off some of the country's finest $1 fast food menus.

This isn't how television is supposed to be made, let alone a show that gets picked up first by a national broadcaster and then the world's premiere streaming service, Netflix. But back when production began on the first series of Unplanned America, we were naïve enough to think everything would just fall into place. There's a "right" way to make a TV show, and then there's our way—where with the budget of literally five minutes of House of Cards you can travel across an entire country and shoot three whole seasons.

Unplanned America was born over happy hour beers when we decided, on a whim, to fund a six-month shoot in the States with our own money. We'd worked together in TV for years and were tired of making "content" to satisfy a brand's mission statement or fit a fickle trend. As good fortune would have it, I was made redundant a matter of days after our beer-fueled production meeting, giving me the money and the kick up the ass I needed to head overseas and start filming.

Filming what exactly, we didn't know. We were just confident we could make something better than what we'd been churning out. The boys raised their share of the budget by camping in friends' backyards to save on rent and maxing out our credit cards. We didn't own a camera, had no interviews lined up, or any on-air experience. We didn't have a plan A, let alone a plan B.

With 200,000 miles on it, the only thing the Corolla could be relied on to do was breakdown.

On the road in the US, we were the entire crew. Usually, the people on camera aren't the same as the people behind it. You'd stay in nice hotels, and have at least $100 each for food everyday to keep healthy working 16-hour shoots. Not for us. Forget about the comfort of separate rooms, we slept in shared tents, on couches, and floors. Splurging meant a night in a joint called something like "Banana Bungalow"—an exotic description for a hostel filled with drunk Aussie travelers. To be fair we were pretty trashed most of the time too.

After the shoot wrapped, the three of us headed back to Australia to cut it all together. Instead of a post-production team we had a dilapidated desk in the corner of a friend's office and a dying old MacBook. Voiceovers for the pilot episode were recorded in the cleaner's storeroom. All we could pay our sound mixer was a bottle of stolen scotch (from one of our parents, so it's not illegal).

Instead of a studio, we recorded voice overs in the cleaner's storeroom

If Australia's SBS2 had ever seen our "editing facilities" I doubt they would've picked up the pilot. In fact, they actually rejected us when we first approached them—apparently the show wasn't the "right fit." It was last minute desperation, after six months of shopping to show around with no luck, that pushed us to ask SBS again. Luckily, they'd since found their audience wanted more "road-trip adventure shows and cultural documentaries." Fucking bingo. Right time, right place.

The money wasn't huge, just enough to buy a few decent computers and edit the rest of the first series. In March 2014, two and a half years since the show was conceived over beers, Unplanned America first hit the airwaves. It felt pretty satisfying when the credits rolled for that first episode. Much to our surprise it was a little bit of a hit. SBS2 quickly green-lit not one, but two more seasons. We filmed the next season with the luxury of being able to afford a camera guy but a daily food allowance still nowhere near $100.

Working hard in the editing suite

Back home and deep in the edit for season two we got the news that the show had been picked up internationally by Netflix. They'd seen the first series and bought the rights for that series along with series two and three, sight unseen. Even though SBS International absorbed most of the money as part of their distribution deal, we were still over the moon. We'd just spent months on a road trip filled with strange moments and encounters but this moment was particularly surreal. Our little DIY show was suddenly going to be streamed by people all around the world.

So here's where selling three seasons of a TV show gets you: I've upgraded from living with my folks to a room above a sketchy bar. Parv went from camping in people's backyards to living in a van, and Nick moved from the couch at his mate's house to a couch in our very own office. Although our stupid heads are being beamed into lounge rooms across the globe, we still have to share footlong subs for lunch. Hopefully, the money that's supposed to come with success isn't too far away (give us that sweet House of Cards cash, Netflix!). Money was never why we made the show though, we needed a change from the status quo. We got that and so much more.

We still can't afford chairs that don't break

Our show is still very much DIY. The voiceover booth is still in the storeroom, our office is still made up of furniture we found by the side of the road. Unplanned America wouldn't exist without mates rates and the three of us doing the job of about eight people at every stage. Reflecting now, I'm actually shocked that we didn't give up. The only thing that kept us going was the hope other people would be as sick of watching all-singing, all-dancing cooking construction shows as we were of making them. Unplanned America was all we had. It was the fail safe strategy of putting all your eggs in one basket.

Unplanned America is available to stream on Netflix.

Image via B.o.B. on Instagram

Over the past week or so, Atlanta rapper B.o.B.—the guy responsible for such pop-rap hits as "Nothin' on You," "Airplanes," and more recently, guest verses on T-Pain's "Up Down" and Ty Dolla $ign's "Paranoid"—made a splash on Twitter after presenting a bunch of evidence arguing that the world was flat. The comments went viral, culminating with a back-and-forth between the rapper and renowned astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who tried to convince the rapper that the world was, in fact, round. Yesterday, B.o.B. dropped a diss track against Tyson.

His obsession with the flat-earth theory aside, B.o.B.'s career has taken something of a left turn in the past couple of months. He's released two free EPs titled WATER and FIRE (False Idols Ruin Egos), both of which showcase a bizarre intersection of the rapper's ear for pop hooks and his newfound skepticism for the entire canon of human reason.

On WATER's "Uncomfortable," he completes the triple Salchow of paranoia: claiming to have woken up from the Matrix, shit-talking Charles Darwin for being a Mason, and topping it off by claiming NASA is just showing us CGI pictures of stars. On "The Crazies!!!," he utters the double entendre, "That jet fuel gon' melt them steel beams, girl."

As for FIRE, well, there's a track called "False Flag," and that should tell you all you need to know about that. It's strange and utterly fascinating music, some ungodly combination of the B.o.B. of old and extremist rhetoric straight from a Pharoahe Monch record, custom-made for the nonexistent Woke Wednesdays night at Atlanta's Magic City strip club.

Still, this is part of a long and rich tradition of rappers espousing off-kilter views about the world around us. Before B.o.B., there was Chris Brown tweeting that the government was using Ebola as a way to control the population; Chingy's Instagram; and Lil Wayne's "Georgia Bush," which accused the government of exploding the levees around New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. Before that, Prodigy of Mobb Deep chopped it up with Alex Jones to drop science about the Illuminati. And while we're on that subject, let's not forget the ever-frequent suggestions that Jay Z is himself a member of the Illuminati.

That's not even to mention the various rumors swirling around the premature deaths of icons such as Tupac, Biggie, Pimp C, Eazy-E, and Aaliyah, which seem to reach higher and higher levels of unreality each year. Or the belief that US President Ronald Reagan introduced crack and AIDS to the black community, a theory has been repeated throughout hip-hop at such a steady clip that it has ceased to be conspiracy, and has entered into the realm of reasonable opinion.

For some, kooky ideas like these are something of a charming quirk of the genre. "They're a part of hip-hop," said the rapper, producer, and writer J-Zone, who documented his decades of experience as an outsider in hip-hop's inside lane in his book Root for the Villain. "It's always been an art form where people are trying to test and second-guess you. I think anything that sparks debate is hip-hop, no matter how far-fetched."

"Still," J-Zone said, "it gets to the point where it gets ridiculous."

"People I knew personally," said Houston rap legend Bun B, were convinced that "the year 1995 was supposed to symbolize a major revolution in the world. That kind of talk came around again with Y2K." And due to false death rumors, Bun joked, "hip-hop's killed Too $hort probably eight times."

Bun B, meanwhile, has been at the center of a few hip-hop bizarre theories himself. "There was a notion that J. Prince and I killed Pimp C to get rich," he told me. "I'm not rich," he added. "And what the fuck was I supposed to gain from killing Pimp C?"

Others have accused Bun B of being a member of the Illuminati. "I'm not in the Illuminati," he laughed. "I had to have that conversation with Professor Griff." (A onetime member of Public Enemy, Professor Griff is responsible for one of the most notorious hip-hop conspiracy theories, that "the Jews finance... experiments on AIDS with black people in South Africa.")

To both J-Zone and Bun, hip-hop's tendency towards distrusting mainstream narratives come as a side effect of years of institutional racism faced by the black community. "Hip-hop was born out of neglect and despair, so it has no respect for authority," J-Zone said. Part of any rapper's job, he added, is to "question, attack, and distrust everything."

J-Zone said that as an African-American, "you go to school and they skim over your history. It's just that you were enslaved, then Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks happened, now it's gangs and drugs and poverty. They slide over everything you accomplished, and you're forced to think, 'Everything the establishment told us is a lie.'"

Bun B echoed this sentiment. "If you think of ten things that seem strange and then find evidence for four of 'em, you start to question the other six. When people say, 'This is a result of systematic oppression of entire races of people' and then you look at the Tuskegee experiments, you look at Guantanamo Bay, it does give you pause about blindly assuming certain things."

As for B.o.B. and his theories about the earth actually being flat, Bun B told me the public shouldn't read too much into that stuff. "B.o.B.'s a good friend of mine," he said. "He's one of those guys who because of the music he's made, has seen a lot of the world, and probably had some preconceived notions that were dispelled as he went around and saw things. And once you start question some things, you start questioning everything."

In a way, the issue is not that B.o.B. is necessarily saying odd things within the context of hip-hop, but the cognitive dissonance of hearing B.o.B.—a guy best known for his work in the pop sphere—warn of impending, government-aided-and-abetted doom and gloom. "Once someone deviates from their ," Bun said, "it throws people off."

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Two years ago, the United States Congress appointed a bipartisan panel, the Charles Colson Task Force on Federal Corrections, to develop practical, data-driven ideas for enhancing public safety and creating a more just and efficient prison system. That it was named after Colson was no mistake: An evangelical who worked tirelessly on behalf of inmates after his own time behind bars stemming from the Watergate scandal, Colson created an organization called Prison Fellowship based on his "vision of a criminal justice system centered on accountability and redemption," as Craig DeRoche, the group's president, said in 2014.

On Tuesday, Colson's namesake took a step toward that goal, releasing a report recommending a reduction in the number of US federal prison inmates by 60,000 over the next decade. Criminal justice reformers won't exactly be shocked that the report found mandatory-minimum sentences for drug crimes to be "the primary driver" of prison overcrowding, and suggested such sentences be only dished out only to the most violent criminals. The authors also found a whopping 80 percent of inmates convicted of drug crimes had no prior records or criminal history, and encouraged Congress to offer a path for prisoners who've served more than 15 years to have their cases looked at again.

"The task force's recommendations go further than any sentencing reform bill in Congress does and line up with the opinion of almost 80 percent of voters—mandatory minimum drug sentences should become a thing of the past," Molly Gill, government affairs counsel at the advocacy group Families Against Mandatory Minimums, told me in an email. "The punishment should fit the crime and the individual. The task force remembers that important American value, which has been utterly lost in the federal criminal justice system. I hope the bipartisan recommendations add wind to the sails of the reform efforts pending in Congress."

Reforms have been percolating in Congress—specifically in the form of a Senate bill called the Smarter Sentencing Act—since October. The law would take aim squarely at sentencing laws, corrections reform, solitary confinement, mandatory minimums, and juvenile justice. In that sense, this new report just amps up the volume of the pre-existing chorus demanding fundamental change to America's criminal justice system.

"Harsh mandatory sentences continue to strain our prisons and jails with too many individuals who have committed nonviolent, low-level drug crimes, making it difficult to allocate scarce resources effectively," Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch said in a wide-ranging speech at the American Correctional Association's Winter Conference in New Orleans, shortly after the report was released. In her remarks she, like Gill, urged Congress to enact sweeping reforms.

Just last week, 70 leading law enforcement officials—current and former police chiefs and commissioners, attorneys general and US attorneys—wrote a letter in support of the bill. "This is a unique moment of rare bipartisan consensus on the urgent need for criminal justice reform," the letter read. "As law enforcement leaders, we want to make clear where we stand: Not only is passing federal mandatory minimum reform necessary to reduce incarceration, it is also necessary to help law enforcement continue to keep crime at its historic lows across the country."

And on Monday, President Obama—who's pardoned or commuted the sentences of more inmates than any of his predecessors—got in on the action, banning solitary confinement for juveniles in federal prisons.

What this all reflects is that the myriad problems of the American criminal justice system—its explosive growth, high rates of recidivism, and violence—are no longer just talking points for advocates or experts, but the topic of discussion at the highest levels of the US government.

Follow Brian McManus on Twitter.

On February 29, VICE will launch our new TV channel, VICELAND—a 24-hour cable channel featuring hundreds of hours of new programming. It's been a lot of work, but we've had help from some insanely talented people and we can't wait to share our first lineup of shows with you.

One new series we've been working on is called GAYCATION with Ellen Page and Ian Daniel. In it, Ellen and her best friend Ian set off to explore LGBTQ cultures around the world. From Japan to Brazil to Jamaica to the USA, the two meet some amazing people along the way and hear their stories.

Today, we are excited to share the first trailer for GAYCATION. Give it a watch above right now, and be sure to check out the full episodes on VICELAND when the channel launches next month. The premiere episode airs March 2 at 10PM.

Like, where do you even start? Photo via Yukon Health and Social Services

The Yukon government got caught with its pants down (not sorry) after it launched a health campaign boldly proclaiming that its residents "need the D" last Friday.

But the fact that needing "the D" means something different to anyone under the age of 40 was apparently lost on whoever vetted the ads, which were meant to raise awareness for vitamin D deficiency in the territory.

The campaign in question saw several posters posted online and on buses around Whitehorse, the territory's capital. One shows a smiling woman in the foreground, with two others in the background tending to a baby (come on!), topped off with the slogan "We all need the D, even me."

Another poster shows a bearded man crouching beside his dog, accompanied by the question: "I'm in my 30s, who knew I needed to do the D" (Bonus points to the government for not limiting itself to a heteronormative sense of humour, though it loses points for the hints of bestiality.)

WHO KNEW????

The ads kicked off an inevitable flurry of jeering on social media as Yukoners seized on the government's obliviousness, with local comedian Jenny Hamilton confessing that she had overdosed on D in junior high, and was now a lesbian.

"I just could not let it go unmade fun of, too easy really," Hamilton told VICE.

"As a lifelong Yukoner, I am sure most of us just thought: Really? No one ran this past a group of young people? Say a group of 13-year-old boys or a 40-something lesbian."

Unfortunately, just a few days after the campaign started to get online attention, the government decided people were having too much fun, and they pulled it down from its website.

Patricia Living, director of communications for the department of health and social services, said the ad's wording was intended to catch people's attention, but it hadn't anticipated that it would be blown out of proportion on social media, leading the government to reconsider its approach.

"When trying to reach a young adult audience, in any way. The lack of sunlight can make us all a bit nutty. We probably are lacking some vitamin I am sure," joked Hamilton.

Now the serious stuff about the D.

Canada's long dark winters mean approximately 40 percent of Canadians are vitamin D deficient during the season, compared with 25 percent in the summer.

The reason the numbers fluctuate is because we depend on the sun as our biggest natural source of vitamin D. Supplements such as vitamin D pills and cod liver oil can help boost levels, which, aside from its foray into comedy, is exactly what the Yukon government is promoting.

The vitamin is essential for everything from healthy teeth and bones to reducing the chances of certain forms of cancer, Alzheimer's, and dementia. Studies have also found that vitamin D is important for combatting depression, something which is particularly prevalent in Canada's territories where some communities go weeks on end without seeing the sun in the depths of winter.

And finally, some studies have shown that increasing vitamin D intake can actually boost a man's sperm count.

Definitely something worth pondering the next time you've got the D on your mind.

Follow Cody Punter on Twitter

A Manitoba residential school. Photo via Public Archives of Canada

Kenneth Deer's traditional name, Atsenhaienton, means "The fire still burns." He grew up in Kahnawake, his older siblings speaking fluent Mohawk, while he hardly knew anything about his roots. At the local day school, the nuns exerted Canada's tradition of taking "the Indian out of the child." And they'd done a good job on him. Right up until high school, when he embarked in a lifelong search for his Iroquois identity.

"You know, they always talk about residential schools," the Indigenous political activist tells VICE, his long white ponytail shaking. "About how bad they were. Well, I went to a day school. We had the same curriculum as the residential ones. But they never mention those."

Last June, Federal Court in Vancouver validated a class-action lawsuit presented by former Indigenous students known as "day scholars," who attended the schools but went back home at night. Until then, day scholars had been left out of residential school compensation.

Survivors say the abuse, neglect, and culture shock at day schools rivaled that of residential schools. Their new life was in stark contrast to the one they left behind. Corporal punishment was the cost for falling out of line.

"It was very regimented, very strict. We'd sit in rows. They aimed to take the Indian out of the man," Deer says. "We didn't learn anything about us except for the Lachine Massacre, where we burned Jesuits at the stake. We Iroquois were the bad guys and the black robes were the good guys."

Kenneth Deer speaking in 2015.

Residential schools in Canada first opened in 1876 as part of the Indian Act; they were designed to strip Indigenous children of their culture and assimilate them into Euro-Canadian society.

Over the course of a century, the government plucked 150,000 kids away from their communities, forcing them into residency under the care of 125 Christian churches and seven government-sponsored institutions. The children suffered abuse and extreme neglect at the hands of their caretakers and the government, often dying far away from home.

The last residential school was still operational as recently as 1996.

In May 2015, Toronto Police Service began a year-long body-worn camera pilot program. A hundred officers were chosen to wear the cameras throughout their shifts. The program came in the wake of recommendations after the 2013 police shooting of 18-year-old Sammy Yatim on a streetcar. The footage from that shooting was uploaded to YouTube and James Forcillo, the police constable who shot him, was found guilty of attempted murder in a landmark ruling. But civil liberties groups have cautioned that the cameras could become a tool for mass surveillance if not used under strict guidelines.

VICE sits down with the executive director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, Sukanya Pillay, to talk about the implications of police wearing body cameras and follows two Toronto constables participating in the bodycam project on their regular patrol route. Toronto Police Sergeant Michael Barsky explains how cameras could change police and the public's behaviour.

A beluga whale at Marineland. Screenshot via YouTube

A video produced by a US-based animal rights group alleges animals abuse at the beleaguered Marineland theme park in Ontario, this time with a focus on the park's beluga whale population.

Last Chance for Animals (LCA), a Los Angeles-based non-profit organization that investigates allegations of instances of animal abuse at zoos and theme parks across the world, released the five-minute video and an information package today on their website.

The LCA video follows investigations in the past few years which have typically focused on the killer whale population at places like Seaworld and Marineland—controversies that have sparked projects like the celebrated Blackfish documentary film that looked at the abuse of killer whales in captivity.

According to Adam Wilson, director of investigations for LCA, the evidence was gathered between the summer and fall of 2015 by Marineland employees working at the park. Since the publication of the report, LCA has filed a complaint with the OSPCA regarding the mistreatment of the animals. The OSPCA told VICE that there will be an investigation, but could not give any further details.

Last year, new legislation to protect marine mammals in Ontario was passed, which is set to go into effect this spring. Wilson argues that minor steps are probably not going to make a large difference in the treatment of animals at the park. Rather, he says that the parks need to end altogether.

"I can't speak as to why lives," said Wilson. "That has to change."

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter.

Abe Vigoda (right) on Barney Miller. Photo via Wikipedia

Abraham "Abe" Vigoda, the American character actor best known for his roles in Barney Miller and The Godfather, has died at the age of 94. His daughter told the Associated Press he died in his sleep.

According to his New York Times obituary, Vigoda was a relatively unknown stage actor until he landed the role of Salvatore Tessio inThe Godfather when he was 50. From there he landed one of his most notable roles as Sergeant Philip K. Fish opposite Hal Linden on Barney Miller, a gig that turned into his own spinoff show.

Those under 30, however, most likely knew him as being the centerpiece of a running joke: In 1982, People magazine reported that he had died, but he hadn't, and ran a full-page Variety ad making light of the error. That led to gags like "Abe Vigoda's Dead," a spoof of the Bauhaus song "Bela Lugosi's Dead," and appearances on late-night shows to prove that he was still alive. At least two websites kept watch over him, isabevigodadead.com and abevigoda.com—you could visit either and see if Vigoda had given up the ghost, though they were a few minutes late to update upon his death on Tuesday.

Shon Taylor, the proprietor of isabevigoda.com, is also the manager of Bottle Rocket Manufacturing, a software developer who built the site about ten years ago. Part of running the site included setting up a google alert for Abe Vigoda's name, along with coding an "internal monitor" for the site that would alert him to Abe Vigoda news.

"I of course feel bad for his family," Taylor told VICE from Bottle Rocket in Salt Lake City. "He deserved to be more than just an internet joke. I will watch The Godfather tonight with a cocktail."