We went looking for a real-life Saul Goodman and found Howard Greenberg—a fast-talking, boundary-pushing, notoriously eccentric criminal defense attorney in Brooklyn. We followed Howard as he worked through his latest case and saw just how far he was willing to go to get his clients off.

Eyes of people on all sorts of drugs (top: cocaine; middle: pills, ketamine and speed; bottom: ketamine). Photos by Lisa Ludwig

People don't often take their drugs in isolation. In fact, polysubstance use—a grand term for "getting fucked up with more than one drug"—tends to be the norm rather than the exception for most drug users.

You'll have a beer on its own, sure, or smoke a bit of weed without feeling compelled to email your accounts department at 4 AM, asking for a salary advance to blow on six more grams. But put anything up your nose and it's likely you'll end up supplementing that with something else—another upper on top of your existing upper, a downer to even you out when you want to go to sleep.

Despite its prevalence, polysubstance use is poorly researched, with most drug studies concentrating on the effects of single substances. One certainty, though, is this: With every additional drug you take, you increase the risk to your health exponentially. Case in point: the many celebrities who successfully take heroin or cocaine for years before injecting a speedball—a cocaine-heroin combo—and very publicly dying.

"There are different boxes of substances, stimulants, sedatives, hallucinogens, dissociatives. Combining more than one from each of those boxes can increase your risk," says Dr. Owen Bowden-Jones, founder of the CNWL Drug Club Clinic.

Bowden-Jones has conducted extensive research on club drugs and knows the effects on his patients. The combination of two uppers isn't a good idea, he says, since they "increase the heart rate and the blood pressure. Taking more than one stimulant can multiply this effect, increasing the risk of catastrophic harm, such as cardiac arrest or stroke." Same goes for two or more sedatives, he points out, as "the risks of extreme sedation or coma are heightened."

Combining drugs from different categories can be an equally bad idea. "Many users combine a sedative with a stimulant," says Bowden-Jones. "They try to balance the effect of one with the other, the sedative taking the edge off the stimulant high." The problem, though, is that it's easy to get the balance wrong: "People act as amateur psychopharmacologists, mixing drugs to get a certain effect—but what they judge poorly are the risks."

Aware that most people are going to continue taking two or more substances at a time, regardless of what that might do to them, we decided to ask a couple of experts—Bowden-Jones and Dr. Adam Winstock, founder of the Global Drug Survey—to talk us through the potential risks of some of the most common drug combinations.

Photo by Chris Bethell

COCAINE AND ALCOHOL

This is a pretty common combination, with many casual cocaine users only really taking the drug if they've already been drinking. Unsurprisingly—given that one's an upper and one's a downer—it's not a mix that's very good for your heart, or your general wellbeing. However, it does create a whole new different kind of high in itself, which is possibly why so many people end up reaching for their phones once they've got a few beers inside them.

According to Bowden-Jones, " a sedative. Co-ingestion leads to the formation of cocaethylene, which itself has a psychoactive property."

Studies suggest that while this cocaethylene substance might stick around longer in the blood than cocaine, therefore lengthening the euphoria, it also may be more cardio-toxic than cocaine, i.e. not good for you in any conceivable way.

MDMA AND KETAMINE

Combining ketamine and MDMA is as common a drug combo as you'll get. Often people take MD to start their evening off, topping themselves up with bumps or bombs throughout the night, before getting the K in to either push them that bit further or help to bring them down once they're back in someone's living room and the sun's coming up and, inexplicably, Ultrabeat is on the stereo and they really don't want to be there any more.

Bowden-Jones says that, despite its popularity, he has seen "very little research" into the effects of combining the two drugs. "We know that ketamine can be a sedative and MDMA a stimulant, but judging the right balance of the two is incredibly difficult," he says.

Tom, a 24-year-old student, has experienced this while taking MDMA and, shortly afterwards, ketamine in the "momentum of a party situation." He had never taken ketamine before, but found the combination of drugs to cause a violent, rapid onset of his high.

"I could still feel the emotional connection you feel on ecstasy, but it was quite overwhelmed by the ketamine," he says. "Maybe I didn't feel quite as distressed about being in the K-hole because of the MDMA, though I generally didn't really like it overall."

MDMA AND ACID

According to Bowden-Jones, MDMA and acid is a far more unusual combination than MDMA and ketamine. He's right: It's not a mix that comes up too often on your average night out, which is probably a good thing, as combining the two stimulants leaves the user at "risk of getting both heart and blood pressure problems, as well as horribly intense hallucinations."

MDMA AND ALCOHOL

"Most people would drink some alcohol while they're on MDMA, which is not a great idea," says Dr. Adam Winstock, founder of the Global Drug Survey and, like Bowden-Jones, an expert in the field of polysubstance use. "The alcohol further dehydrates you and brings you down from the MDMA effect."

He says a glass of wine is OK, but not "two or three bottles, so it really depends on how much you drink. You're much better off drinking water, juice, or milk."

WEED AND ALCOHOL

Combining weed and booze has traditionally been a great way to make yourself feel really dizzy and sick. If you enjoy purposefully making yourself feel like that, says Winstock, make sure to stay away from the wheel—or, if your designated driver has been smoking weed and drinking, make them sit on their hands until they're sober, then allow them to drive you home.

"The alcohol rapidly increases THC levels in your blood, so it makes you more stoned," explains Winstock. "Alcohol impairs driving, cannabis impairs driving, together they impair driving a huge amount."

Photo by Andoni Lubaki

MDMA AND WEED

"Weed is the most common comedown," says Bowden-Jones. "They smoke weed or take sleeping pills at the end of the night."

The main risk this poses, if you're susceptible to that kind of thing, is the weed making you anxious and paranoid, compounding the anxiety and paranoia you're already experiencing thanks to your comedown. Mind you, of all the drug users we speak to, no one has anything particularly bad to say about mixing pot and pills.

"I've had plenty of nights when I'm buzzing my absolute twat off on MDMA and everyone just wants to smoke," says Matt, 24. "It doesn't do as much as normal, but still chills us out."

KETAMINE AND ALCOHOL

"When we asked people is, most of them said ketamine and alcohol," says Winstock. "That is a smart answer, since alcohol hugely increases the bladder problems triggered by ketamine because of the dehydration. Also, it gets you sedated and you lose your balance, which increases the risk of getting into a K-hole."

So there you go: If you're drinking, stay away from the K.

HEROIN AND CRACK COCAINE

"It's a really common combination," says Winstock. "The comedown from crack cocaine is very unpleasant; heroin is used to mellow that out."

With that in mind, the more crack you use, the more heroin you're going to use to balance yourself out, raising the risk of overdose.

Related: Watch the trailer for our documentary 'Chemsex'

GBL/GHB AND CRYSTAL METH/MEPHEDRONE

GBL and GHB are big libido-drivers, and crystal meth or mephedrone helps to physically sustain that libido over a long period of time. However, they're all substances that can cause psychotic symptoms or paranoia, so combining them clearly isn't the best way to reduce the risk of experiencing those side effects.

"It's obviously a really common combination, particularly with people involved in chemsex," says Winstock. "GBL and GHB can reduce people's ambition when it comes to safe-sex practices, so apart from the unwanted physical effects there are also behavioral effects, such as an increase in high-risk sex and sexual assault."

This can lead to the transmission of STIs, facilitated by mephedrone drying out your skin, which can cause bleeding if you don't use enough lube.

INJECTING HEROIN AND COCAINE (SPEEDBALLS)

While cocaine stimulates the heart, heroin depresses the lungs, which can cause simultaneous cardiac and respiratory arrest.

"It's dangerous, because you combine two very potent drugs and it's very hard to control since it's usually taken by injection—once you've injected it, there's nothing you can do," says Winstock. "People play a risky game seeing how they can get the best experience by balancing them."

ALCOHOL/BENZOS/OPIATES

The highest risk from this combination comes from people not recognizing their drug problem.

"You drink half a bottle of wine and take four codeine tablets, and you think, 'I don't have a problem, the doctor gave me these tablets,'" says Winstock. "But actually, the combination of those has a huge risk of overdose, and you can mix the three of those. Lots of people would be on prescription opiates and benzos, but they can quickly make you stop breathing."

To take part in the Global Drug Survey 2016, click here.

Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, and Ted Cruz at the Presidential Family Forum on November 20, 2015 in Des Moines, Iowa. Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images

If the official kickoff of election season is the Iowa Caucuses, then Thursday's GOP debate is arguably the last preseason game for the Republicans competing for the presidentball championship. There have been six such debates already, enough for a lot of viewers to grow tired of this serialized remake of Twelve Angry Men, and this time there's one less reason to watch: Donald Trump won't be there.

As part of his feud with Fox News, the network broadcasting the debate, the GOP poll frontrunner is skipping the event in Des Moines, Iowa, in favor of an "Event to Benefit Veterans' Organizations." Since Trump has been as ubiquitous as oxygen during the campaign, and other candidates have been defined by their opposition to him as much as their own policies, it's fair to wonder, what the hell are they going to debate about?

Well, they'll probably talk about Trump in absentia, for starters. Though he has a healthy lead in the nationwide polls, the Iowa polls are closer, and many think Texas Senator Ted Cruz has a good chance at knocking off the business mogul, who has never been a candidate for office before, at the caucuses on Monday. Cruz will likely continue to attack Trump on stage; so far he's called his opponent a "fragile soul" and challenged him to a "mano-a-mano" debate any time before the Iowa Caucus. And, not to be high-roaded by the whole "benefit veterans" thing, Cruz's Super PAC has offered to give $1.5 million to veterans' charities if Trump says yes to Cruz's face-off. (At least one veterans' group said it wasn't interested in donations from any candidate.)

Others have used the chance to beat up on Trump, with Kentucky Senator Rand Paul telling CNN, "He thinks he's already elected himself king. I say, good riddance. We're going to have a much better debate."

You might think that without the famously angry reality TV show host in the mix things would get a bit more civil, but chances are it's just going to be a more evenly distributed bloodbath. Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who was polling alongside Ted Cruz back in November, is now showing signs of sliding into the also-ran bin, and Chris Christie seems to smell failure. The New Jersey governor has started taking aim at Rubio in interviews, saying the Cuban-American has "never accomplished anything." Adding to the pileup, Jeb Bush-affiliated anti-Rubio TV commercials are attacking him as a flip-flopper and an immigrant-lover. None of these candidates has much of a shot at winning Iowa, but they can still shoot for some good headlines that might appeal to voters outside the state.

Also hoping for good headlines is soft-spoken neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who at times seems barely to be running anymore. Earlier this month, Carson's campaign manager and 20 other staff members quit their jobs, then another staffer died in a van accident. Carson, who once led in Iowa, seems now to be an also-ran—and while you might ascribe his fall to the incoherence of his policies, that same thing doesn't seem to be hurting Trump.

There are other candidates too, and I guess I have to write about them and you have to read about them, so here we go: John Kasich continues to do well enough in the polls to earn a spot on the main stage, though he's mostly focused on New Hampshire. Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee recently unleashed an Adele song parody on the world Wednesday that critics have called "long." The song unfortunately didn't prevent Huck from being relegated to the dreaded undercard stage on Thursday night. That second-tier debate will also feature Carly Fiorina, Rick Santorum, and former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore, who has been drifting out in the ether like this election's mysterious ninth planet.

While all this is going on, the Donald J. Trump Special Event to Benefit Veterans Organizations will be held just down the road from the debate venue at Drake University, meaning viewers will be forced to make a tough choice between Trump, the rest of the GOP, and I don't know, watching Netflix or something.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

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

David Bowie as Jareth, the Goblin King, from 1986's 'Labyrinth: The Computer Game.' Screencap via YouTube

When David Bowie died on January 10, the grief that ran through you, without ever personally knowing the man, was just as real as any you'd experience when a close relative passed. Nobody had the right to tell you otherwise. If you grew up in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, or 90s, Bowie was all around you, whatever form he took. It was completely natural to feel a sense of loss when he succumbed to the most-dreaded of c-words. I know I felt it, immediately rendered numb at my kitchen table. Of course, his music was at the forefront of his output, influence, and impact, but he was an actor before he ever sang a note. He continued to express his passion for the stage and screen across his career. Some will always picture him as the Goblin King; others as the Man Who Fell to Earth, Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke, or Halloween Jack. More still, as an enigma that mortality could never reach. And though it did, you suspect time will never truly take him.

But this is no eulogy—there have been enough of those, and another from me isn't going to say anything you've not already read, touching tributes from the hearts of those who'd been more significantly touched by Bowie than I ever was. I don't own all his records. I only saw him play live once, and I can't remember all that much about it. Rather, these words are tinged with a different kind of sadness, regret, for what Bowie didn't achieve in his lifetime.

Bowie in 'Omikron: The Nomad Soul'

When news of Bowie's passing broke, game sites were quick to publish a couple of paragraphs on his contribution to the medium, almost exclusively focused on 1999's action-adventure affair for PC and Dreamcast, Omikron: The Nomad Soul. Bowie both appears in the game twice: He lent his voice and likeness to the renegade Boz and a nameless singer in a band called the Dreamers, and he contributed music for its soundtrack, alongside regular collaborator and Tin Machine colleague Reeves Gabrels.

The debut game from Paris-based studio Quantic Dream, headed up by founder David Cage, one of the most divisive directors in the gaming industry, Omikron laid down gameplay foundations for what followed after it, the likes of Heavy Rain, Fahrenheit, and Beyond: Two Souls. Which is to say: ponderous dialogue, a confusing plot, sci-fi interjections that derail any attachment the player might think he or she has with leading characters, and the general impression that this all might work better as a movie, rather than a game. OK, we can probably give Heavy Rain a pass from that kind of criticism—its flashes of future-tech funny business don't entirely spoil what's otherwise a gritty noir thriller about a serial killer, containing a pretty well-masked twist. But to cut a long story short, Omikron was not a particularly good game, especially if you played the port for Sega's near-death Dreamcast. Much of its publicity came not from Cage's ambition to create "interactive dramas" in the gaming world, but for the previously unreleased Bowie material on the soundtrack.

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch VICE's interview with Pusha T for the new series 'Autobiographies'

Omikron's current publishers, Square Enix, offered it as a free download after Bowie's death, as a tribute. But a better game to play, to remember the man by, might well be 1986's Commodore 64 adventure based on the dark children's fantasy movie Labyrinth, in which Bowie played the primary antagonist, the aforementioned Goblin King, Jareth. I'm not about to get into the plot of the film—you can watch it for yourself and revel in the terrific Jim Henson puppetry, which as fine as it was couldn't turn his final movie as director into a box-office hit. But its video game tie-in didn't completely adhere to its story.

For one thing, you weren't cast as a young Jennifer Connelly—the player could choose his or her name, sex, and favorite color at the game's start (in the mid-1980s, amazing, eh?), which would then generate an on-screen avatar. The player is then sucked into a labyrinth, the labyrinth, through a cinema screen, and has 13 real-time hours to find and defeat Jareth. As well as being interesting for deviating from its parent picture, Labyrinth: The Computer Game is also noteworthy as the first title developed by Lucasfilm Games, later LucasArts, which would go on to make The Secret of Monkey Island, Maniac Mansion, and more. Plus, it was co-designed by The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams.

Bowie was more actively involved in the making of Omikron than he ever was with the Labyrinth game, but for someone so enthralled by technology, so demanding of himself to not just move with musical trends but to spearhead them, I find it disappointing that his time working with Quantic Dream didn't lead to more interactive adventures.

Speaking at a late-1990s press conference for Omikron's then-publishers Eidos, he told the assembled reporters, "My experience with computers goes back a long time." He added: "I've played Tomb Raider, and like every other hot-blooded male, I was in love with Lara." He expresses enthusiasm for contributing a soundtrack specially commissioned for a video game, and talks about the process of becoming a character in it. But throughout the video, above, Bowie kept the potential of gaming at arm's length. At that point in his life, he clearly saw gaming as more of a tech discipline than a genuine form of art, flexible to fit almost any inspiration, saying that the point of doing the music was to "provide an emotional heart to the game." Today, some of the most affecting video games barely have music at all.

Bowie understood film, and bent the medium to suit his ideas for what it could mean to people. Music flowed through his veins, and he let it run both simmering and ice-cool across 27 studio albums and so much more. He wasn't always the maverick-spirited pop polymorph some are quick to paint him as—he arguably blossomed fullest beside compatible artists, visionaries and engineers, like Ken Scott, Brian Eno, Tony Visconti, and Nile Rodgers. I can't help but feel that he would have done the same in gaming, given the chance, which in turn makes me wonder if his experience on Omikron actively put him off future projects.

David Cage is a single-minded creative, a man who still wants to connect video games to motion pictures, even though his own form argues that he shouldn't. But games are capable of so much more, of a far deeper emotional resonance and greater heights of innovation than any passively consumed media, like film and music. We see this every year: in Gone Home, Journey, Actual Sunlight, The Last of Us, Spec Ops: The Line, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, Life Is Strange, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. And that's without dipping even the tiniest toe into the really wild stuff, of no precedent whatsoever, at gaming's fringes. I can picture Cage speaking to Bowie between takes, telling him how he sees gaming evolving: into Fahrenheit, into Beyond: Two Souls. Games where you're a distant director, not a central player. The story happens around you, your palpable influence on it minimal. The fourth wall remains strong. You can forgive Bowie for running a mile in the opposite direction.

'Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain' screenshot by Steve Haske

VICE's number-one game of 2015, as voted for by our gaming writers, was Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Hideo Kojima's final Metal Gear title prior to his departure from franchise owners Konami, The Phantom Pain is both a stealth-action masterpiece and a shameless love letter to the director's favorite musical artist, David Bowie. The first song that plays in the game is "The Man Who Sold the World"; later, the private military company that forms around the leading character, Big Boss, is called the Diamond Dogs. Kojima's a gaming talent out there on his own, undoubtedly capable of brilliance yet also of completely alienating admirers with a single tweet about a squeezable action figure. He exudes an aura of being able to do what he likes, when he likes, and whatever that is, nobody else will have made anything like it. The same could be said of Bowie.

Imagine, then, if it'd been these two who'd collaborated on a video game back at the end of the last millennium, or anytime since. What might Bowie have ultimately given the gaming world? What might Kojima—or Yu Suzuki, or Peter Molyneux, or Keita Takahashi, or Ken Levine, or Tim Schafer, or Shinji Mikami, or the Stamper brothers, or the daddy of the lot of them, Shigeru Miyamoto (and I could go on, easily)—have taught Bowie about games that someone like David Cage just couldn't express, because of the blinkers he's so eager to wear? When I look back at what Bowie meant to video games, I'm almost angry that Omikron is what he'll be most remembered for. The man deserved better; he just needed gaming's own Eno, or someone like him, rather than a guide who is to the widening of gaming's horizons what Michael Bay is the subtleties of the silver screen.

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

It all started with this shot of a Tinder profile. Image via

It came as a surprise when 25-year-old Zane Alchin stood recently in a Sydney court and pled not guilty. Alchin was widely expected to plead out. He stood accused of threatening to rape Paloma Brierley Newton on Facebook and there were screenshots of the comments. Turns out though, it's very hard to send your online troll to jail.

This story actually starts with Drake. Back in 2015, a Facebook friend of Alchin's named Chris Hall posted a screenshot of a young woman's Tinder profile. In her photo, the woman—Olivia Melville—is smiling broadly. She's got long dark hair and a nose ring, two friends pose behind her. Below the photo, her bio references Drake's line from the track "Only" reading, "Type to wanna suck you dry and then eat some lunch with you." Hall captioned the post, "I'm surprised she'd still be hungry for lunch."

Pretty early on, Melville was tagged on Hall's post by a friend. It was actually the second time someone had shared her Tinder profile online. "Olivia, why don't u show your parents your tinder profile?" Chris Hall asked her. "I'm sure they'd be so impressed." "Why would they care?" she commented back. "It's just a song lyric." The post soon went crazy and with the traffic came a torrent of abuse directed at Melville.

Some pretty nasty comments. Image via.

Melville shared Hall's original post to draw attention to the abuse she'd faced and mutual friends soon tagged in Hall, Alchin, and others so they could comment. "Chris Hall brother the Calvary (sic) has arrived," Alchin allegedly said in his first post. It was on Melville's Facebook page, where Alchin first crossed paths with a 23-year-old friend of Olivia, a woman named Paloma Brierley Newton. She entered the Facebook conversation unaware that she would later send Zane Alchin to court. She's not sure which of Alchin's comments first made her angry, but says "there was something about 'so sluts complain about being sluts and then get upset when they get called out for being sluts?'" she recalls. She decided to call him on his shit.

Image via Facebook

From there Brierley Newton says the thread just devolved into what she saw as explicit rape threats: The best thing about raping a feminist is that they don't get any action so they are 100 times tighter... I'd fuck your mum if I saw her.

"I was just like, 'you know what, fuck this,'" she says. "I was so angry, I was shaking. Every time I read the YouTube comments on anything it just suddenly turns to rape threats... let's just threaten to rape her because she's inherently scared of that." That day, she wrote a post on Facebook about the incident, and then went straight to the police. She says she didn't even know if there was anything Alchin could be charged with but was just convinced his threats couldn't be legal.

Image via Facebook

Brierley Newton says when she first took screenshots of Alchin's threats to the cops, they didn't take her seriously. Officers tried to tell her the case would be too hard to prosecute, not least because they'd have to find a way to prove that Alchin was actually the person on the computer making the threats. She left, enraged, only to get home and find her post had been liked over 500 times. The women commenting on her post banded together to form a group called Sexual Violence Won't Be Silenced, and launched a petition against Alchin.

It shouldn't have taken 16,000 people signing an online petition to get the police to properly investigate. In Australia, online harassment falls under section 474.17 of the Criminal Code, which was first introduced in 2004 and amended in 2012. "Everyone is saying if there wasn't an actual, direct threat like 'I'm going to come to your house and rape you' then that's not against the law. That's not actually true," Brierley Newton says. "The law is called 'Using a carriage service to harass, menace, or cause offense.'"

Paloma Brierley Newton, left. Image supplied

According to University of Sydney Law School associate professor David Rolph this broad offense criminalizes menacing, harassing, or causing offense using mobile phones, Facebook, Twitter etc. "In order for there to be prosecutions for this offense, people have to report the incident to the police. If people do not report the offense, or indeed, if they are unaware of the offense, then the police and prosecutors can can't do anything," he explains. "There would probably have to be a level of seriousness in the conduct in question—for instance, a one-off comment would be unlikely to be reported or prosecuted."

When cases of online harassment are prosecuted there is often concern about stifling freedom of speech. Can a law have the nuance to tell the difference between a joke and a threat? In 2012, a British man named Paul Chambers was found guilty of breaching England's Communications act and ordered to pay the equivalent of $2,000 in fines and costs. Two years earlier, sitting at his local airport when his flight had been delayed, Chambers had tweeted: Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!! The authorities took this as a serious threat.

Another classic comment by Zane Alchin. Image via Facebook

It's cases like these that make the news but there are many others where the law fails, because it targets behavior we'd never put up with in real life but often tolerate online. In late 2014, 22-year-old Billy Bartolomeus Tamawiwy set up a fake Facebook profile under the female pseudonym "Tayla Edwards." Under this guise he sent a friend request to a teenage boy, then started sending sexual messages.

In early 2015, Tamawiwy was found guilty of luring the teenage boy over Facebook, promising sex with Tayla Edwards if the two met, and then raping him and filming the act with his phone. Tamawiwy even tried to blackmail the young man into having sex with him again, threatening to circulate the video, and eventually sent it to the boy's younger brother.

Alchin's case is unique from most online harassment cases successfully prosecuted in Australia. Unlike Tamawiwy's case, it exists entirely within that grey area between our online lives and our everyday ones. If he's found guilty, it will be one of the first local cases of its kind.

Zane Alchin faces up to three years imprisonment, but Brierley Newton believes community service at a women's shelter would be a more effective punishment. She says that since Alchin's case hit the news, she's been flooded with more online threats by people angered that she took the case to the police. At the same time, however, she says she's been inspired by the scores of women contacting her and thanked Sexual Violence Won't Be Silenced about raising awareness of their rights online.

Zane Alchin will face court again on March 1, 2016.

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Photo by Bobby Viteri

Read our article on Martin Shkreli here, and check back for our video interview with him coming soon.

The first thing you notice—really the only thing you notice—when you walk into Martin Shkreli's midtown Manhattan office is the elaborate gold box that served as the packaging for one of the most legendary albums of all time and is now just resting on the ground like a piece of garbage.

The album, of course, is The Wu: Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, which the Wu-Tang Clan notoriously made only one copy of and sold for $2 million last year. The fact that the buyer turned out to be one of the most reviled men in the world (thanks to his jacking up the price of a life-saving drug and allegations of fraud, among other things) made people very upset. How could a unique musical artifact like this end up in such undeserving hands? Would the 31 tracks ever find their way to the public?

When the news broke, RZA told Bloomberg, "The sale of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin was agreed upon in May, well before Martin Skhreli's actually used to be for the privileged elite," he told me. "When Mozart and stuff wrote, music was for the very few."

According to Shkreli, who grew up the son of immigrants in Sheepshead Bay, he pitched himself to RZA as being an authentic New Yorker when they were discussing the sale. "I said, look man, I'm from Brooklyn," he recalled. "That's 80 percent of what you need to know about me. He was like, 'That's a very good start.'

"I said, 'I'm from New York City, I'm a poor kid, I did my best to grow up in New York and do well,'" he continued. "And I told him, 'I'm not your biggest fan. I'm not even close. There are people who are much bigger Wu-Tang fans than me. But I still wanna buy this album.'"

And when RZA asked him to name what Wu-Tang songs he liked? "I said I liked the songs that reminded me of punk rock."

Forbes got access to 51 seconds of the album, and about 150 people heard 13 minutes of it at a listening party last year. Other than that, no one but Shkreli and the Wu know exactly what's on Once Upon a Time, which spans two discs titled the "Shaolin School" and the "Allah School." During the course of one of the many interviews I did with Shkreli for my article on him, he played some of the latter as background music. What can I tell the world about it? Not much, I'm afraid: It was definitely a Wu-Tang Clan album complete with kung-fu sounds, movie samples, and, yes, a guest appearance by Cher.

"The track and the track numbers and all the track titles are not known to the public," Shkreli told me. "I have the manuscripts that reveal them." I was able to jot down a couple of the track names, which were "Dirty Bomb" and "Stone Him! Swine " (The track list previously compiled by Complex is incorrect, for what it's worth, but I don't have the full correct version.)

Shkreli told me he was thinking of destroying it—I wish I knew if he was kidding—so for the sake of historical record, I took a few photos of the album art and those aforementioned "manuscripts" with my cell phone. You can find them below, but one last thing:

Shkreli's phone number is, unbelievably, publicly listed, and he gets a ton of phone calls every day from strangers. At one point he played me some at random, from both fans and trolls. There was a guy who called himself Monkey Boy and babbled gibberish, and an earnest-sounding man who wanted to say, "You've taught me a great deal about life, and I'm proud of you."

Then suddenly we got to a voicemail that just said: "Hey Martin, it's RZA. Call me back."

I wonder what he wanted to talk about?

This elaborate-looking "certificate of authenticity" says that there will never be another copy of 'Shaolin.'

These are some illustrations of ODB and Inspectah Deck that were in the lyrics book.

"The Magnificent Butchers" appears to be the name of one of the tracks, and it's also a reference to a 1979 martial arts flick from Hong Kong.

Here's the outside of the lyrics book, as well as a receipt complete with a wax seal that Shkreli called "ridiculous."

Here's a copy of one of the two actual CDs.

The album is described here as a "tale of swords and wisdom."

I'm so sorry for fucking this one up, because it's so blurry.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Alberta teen Ty Greer, pictured above, after an e-cigarette blew up in his face. Photo via Canadian Press

An Alberta teen who lit up an e-cigarette was rushed to the hospital after the device exploded in his face, leaving him with second-degree burns and broken teeth.

"It lit my kid's face on fire," said Perry Greer, father of Lethbridge 16-year-old Ty Greer who purchased the detonating e-cig, during an interview with the Canadian Press.

According to his dad, Ty recently purchased a Chinese-manufactured e-cig called Wotofo Phantom, which is the same size as a cigar. (In Alberta, it's legal for minors to buy e-cigs!) When he went to exhale, "it was about two inches from his mouth and it just blew apart."

Greer said his son suffered from first and second-degree burns to his face, throat, and tongue, and that he likely would've damaged his eyes had he not been wearing glasses. Photos of Ty in hospital show his the skin around his mouth and cheeks blackened and bleeding. He's received two root canals since the incident.

"He wanted to die. That is how much pain he was in."

Greer told Global News that his son, a hockey player, isn't a tobacco smoker; he said he spoke to the owner of the store that sold Ty the e-cig and "he cried the whole time I talked to him."

Additionally, Greer is now calling for a ban on e-cigarette sales to minors, which are also legal in Saskatchewan and Newfoundland and Labrador.

Alberta Health Minister Sarah Hoffman said the province has formed a working group with the federal government and is looking at regulating e-cigarettes.

The Edmonton-based charity Action on Smoking and Health is also calling for e-cig reform.

"We absolutely need product standards. For instance, they shouldn't explode in your mouth," said spokesman Les Hagen told CP.

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Don't accept friend requests from those random hot women with no mutual friends who add you on Facebook. Just don't. Photo via Flickr user Sean Murray

Police in York Region, just north of Toronto, are warning of a string of cases in which men are being tricked into performing sex acts on webcams and then extorted for money. In these instances, men are being approached by catfish Facebook accounts of women, convinced to get on webcam, take off their clothing, and perform sex acts. During the webcam sessions, images and video are being captured for use in blackmail.

"They're telling people that if they don't send money that they'll share the photos with family and their friends," Constable Andy Pattenden, a spokesperson for York Regional Police, told VICE. He said that between early November and January 26, when they put out a media release, there were six cases reported to their department. Since the media release, Pattenden says more victims have come forward.

Though Pattenden said the police department is unable to release details about the specific sex acts men are being asked to perform on webcam during these scams, he said that it "could be different for each one." He also added that they believe it could be more than one person responsible for the string of scams.

"The challenge with these cases is that they're difficult to figure out who's responsible for them because they could basically be anywhere in the world," Pattenden told VICE.

According to police, some of the catfish profiles have typical seductive photos of attractive women in lingerie or bikinis, but they've also had cases where "it was just an ordinary, plain-looking person, not someone or a photo that was all glammed up."

Through communication with other police departments in Canada, York Region believes that these types of "sextortion" cases are becoming increasingly widespread. They are also concerned that there are likely many more victims who could be too embarrassed to come forward after being sextorted. Moral of the story: don't show your dick to strangers on the internet—in case you haven't figured it out by now, it's probably a bad idea.

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Photo courtesy of Sonnet Ehlers/Rape-aXe

South African doctor Sonnet Ehlers first came up with the idea for an anti-rape device when she treated a rape victim who said she wished she'd "had teeth down there." So Ehlers invented Rape-aXe—similar to a female condom, except lined with jagged teeth. An intruding penis can get inside just fine, but when it moves back outward, the teeth clamp on and rip into it, rendering the perpetrator incapacitated with pain. It's like the vaginal version of "do not back up; severe tire damage."

Rape-aXe stays attached to the penis afterward, and only digs in tighter if the user attempts removal. You can't pee with it on, so it must be removed by a doctor—thus identifying the rapist as such. I asked Ehlers if it really works, and she told me it had been tested with great results. "The guy was in excruciating pain and immobile," she said.

The product has not gone to market yet, but it's been a source of controversy on the internet for years. Some have criticized Rape-aXe for its violent nature; others have accused the device of being "medieval." For her part, Ehler retorts on Rape-aXe's website: "A medieval deed deserves a medieval consequence."

Anti-rape inventions have flourished for nearly as long as rape has been a thing. Just this month, a new device called Athena started accepting pre-orders. It's a piece of clip-on jewelry that "emits a loud alarm and sends text messages to loved ones with the wearer's location" when the wearer presses a button in the event of an attack.

Looking through the patents for anti-rape devices, it's clear this is fertile ground for innovation: One of the earlier ones, from 1979, was an internal device that would inject tranquilizer fluid into the unwelcome organ during penetration, rendering the rapist unconscious.

Then there was the Trap, patented in 1993—basically an insertable rubber pocket with plastic spears arranged in a circle at the front. Like Rape-aXe, it doesn't prevent initial penetration, but on the first pump outward, the Trap's sharp teeth pierce underneath the head of the penis and clamp on.

A South African doctor named Jaap Haumann dreamed up a "killer tampon," a hard plastic cylinder containing a spring blade that would simply slice off the tip of any intruding penis.

One particularly elaborate needle-based device would collect a tissue sample upon sensing a foreign object, before releasing an identifying dye onto the penis, as well as a tissue irritant. As a bonus feature, it has the ability to connect to an audio recorder that would capture the sounds of the assault and vibrate to let the user know the device has been activated. As thoughtful as some of these ideas were, none of them have been made.

The Trap

Still, the very nature of these devices raises a host of concerns: If a device injures an already violence-prone rapist, will he lash out in retaliation against the woman, thus putting her in more danger than she would have been otherwise? Since most of the devices require penetration in order to be activated, how much are they really doing to prevent vaginal rape (besides the fact that they do nothing to stop oral or anal rape)? And how much should we invest in devices that treat rape as inevitable, rather than focusing our efforts on educating men not to rape women?

Awareness efforts targeted at men do seem to actually work: The year after Canada sponsored the "Don't Be That Guy" campaign, Vancouver's rape rate went down by 10 percent.

But devices like Rape-aXe were designed specifically for places where protection, rather than prevention, is urgent. South Africa, for example, has one of the highest rates of rape in the world, where it's estimated that more than 40 percent of South African women will be raped in their lifetimes. According to a 2009 Amnesty International report, one of four South African men have admitted to committing rape, half of whom have done so multiple times. Lesbians in South Africa live in constant fear of violence: "Corrective" rape, intended to cure lesbians of their sexual preferences and often resulting in HIV, severe injuries, or even death, is still a prevalent practice.

Plus, the perpetrator identification tools that some of these devices have are their own type of deterrent: If there were some way to force a rapist to seek medical attention for damage to his special area in a way that clearly identified him as having forced his way in where he wasn't invited, maybe the concrete existence of that evidence would make it just a little bit easier to report that rape. And maybe some of these perpetrators would actually begin to fear the consequences of their actions.

That said, these gadgets probably won't be available any time soon (with the exception of Athena, which is expected to go to market this fall). Despite the numerous patents for anti-rape devices, none of them have actually become available to the public. When I asked Ehlers about the status of Rape-aXe, she told me there was one last hurdle in the design to overcome, which a final round of investment will be needed to resolve. The product was announced in 2005 and hasn't gotten much closer to release since then.

That doesn't stop people from worrying about their potential problems: What happens when anti-rape devices really do go on the market? Are women supposed to wear them at all times? How often do the intravaginal devices need to be removed by the user? Are they comfortable? And what about the possibilities for abuse? Are they just a misandrist's twisted fantasy of a way to get revenge on men, or are they a practical solution to a real-world problem?

It's a good question. What if a person had a disproportionate amount of physical power over another, and used it to harm someone else via a sexual encounter? That would simply be unacceptable. We'd have to do everything within our power to make sure that doesn't happen. Right?

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September 1984 photo of Mafia boss Tommaso Buscetta arriving in Rome's airport after being extradited from Brazil to testify for the 'Pizza Connection' case. (AP Photo)

On the morning of April 9, 1984, legions of federal agents swarmed homes and pizzerias across America. They found all sorts of guns, thousands of rounds of ammo, and a shit ton of cash. Soon the numbers grew, with more people bagged by international law enforcement.

Nearly three years later, in March 1987, 17 of those people, two of them allegedly crime family executives, were found guilty in federal court in Downtown Manhattan for orchestrating an international, Mafia-led narcotics ring that stretched from Brazil to Sicily, and from New York to the rural Midwest. According to the feds, the mobsters used neighborhood Italian-American pizzerias as fronts for cash—and, of course, heroin.

The Pizza Connection, as it was wonderfully dubbed in newspapers, produced one of the longest-running criminal trials in American history. The prosecution team originally said it would last six or seven months—it lasted 17. What resulted was an astonishing legal circus that sucked in 35 defendants in total and cost at least $50 million.

By the end, only 19 people actually stood trial, as other suspects had their charges cleared. One of them—who was believed to have skipped town after posting bail—was found dead in a garbage bag in Brooklyn. And while lawyers were delivering their closing arguments, another defendant was shot three times after leaving the since-closed Balducci's Italian market in Greenwich Village. (He survived and eventually pleaded guilty from his hospital bed.) Two others pleaded out for lesser charges, and another was acquitted.

Needless to say, the case made for a massive media spectacle, and it seemed to reflect the old mafia adage that aspiring made men should steer clear of drugs. But decades later, the Pizza Connection saga arguably serves as a parable for how the application of justice en masse can spin wildly out of control.

"It was a trial with no end in sight involving a billion puzzle pieces," David Amoruso, an expert on organized crime and founder of the website Gangsters Inc., told me. "All its participants—defendants, lawyers, prosecutors, jurors, and the judge—had to do their best not to be driven totally insane."

Check out the new episode of 'The Real' about NYC Criminal Defense Lawyer Howard Greenberg, who says he was inspired to get into law by the Pizza Connection case.

The early-morning raids in 1984 were the result of a four year investigation conducted by the FBI. It was an operation that spanned several continents, tying together two major organized crime affiliates: the original Sicilian Mafia, and the Bonanno crime family, in New York. There were arrests made in Switzerland, Italy, Newark, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit.

According to federal prosecutors—who were led by Assistant US Attorney Louis Freeh—the groups wove a globalized web. Morphine was procured from Turkey; heroin was processed in Sicily; and through a shadow network of banks and brokers, dozens of pizzerias—some newly minted—were used to fan the product out across the United States. Cocaine was also sent from South America, prosecutors said in their summation, and sales were secretly transferred through "suitcases full of cash."

At the time of the raids, William French Smith, the US attorney general, called it ''the most significant case involving heroin trafficking by traditional organized crime that has ever been developed by the Government.'' In all, between 1979 and 1984, 1,650 pounds of heroin was smuggled into the country through this scheme, according to the feds. The street value of the heroin was said to be $1.65 billion.

Naturally, the mob bosses were alleged to be the chief provocateurs. In the US, that was Salvatore "Toto" Catalano, a boss of the Bonanno clan, who owned a bakery in Queens and barely spoke any English. (According to mob lore, the idea to start a massive heroin ring was actually his predecessor Carmine Galante's—but the old boss got whacked in 1979 when he was murdered at a restaurant.) Catalano's status as a "zip"—or a Sicilian-born mafioso who immigrated to America—connected him to Gaetano Badalamenti, one of the former heads of the Sicilian Mafia in Palermo. The day before the FBI crackdown in the US, Gaetano and his son, Vito, were arrested in Madrid by Spanish police after years of intense surveillance.

Catalano and Badalamenti deployed soldiers to do the legwork. They established relatives and friends both in Sicily, and in a string of pizza fronts across the country. (The man who was shot, Pietro Alfano, was Gaetano's cousin, who ran a pizzeria in Illinois.) And the vast majority of those involved were Sicilian, and didn't speak English—which produced one of the first major obstacles that dragged the trial on.

"Many of their conversations were not just in the Sicilian dialect, but in code," Amoruso said. "On top of that, men remained silent and loyal to Cosa Nostra, refusing to reveal to authorities anything about the operation."

When presented with some of the feds' tens of thousands of wiretapped phone conversations—which comprised the bulk of the case—Badalamenti, who was one of the only two defendants to actually testify in the trial, admitted that they were, in fact, using code. Drugs were never spoken about; instead, there was much talk of "precious stones," "shirts," and "precious cotton."

Meanwhile, violence engulfed the trial almost from the start. Around the time it began in October 1985, a civil crime war broke out in Sicily against Badalamenti's people, which put the boss and his cohorts in danger—even in New York City. And in December 1986, Gaetano Mazzara (his pizzeria was New Jersey) was found dead while out on bail. At one point during deliberations, a juror even recused herself from the case, after allegedly receiving a death threat.

These things, naturally, scared the shit out of everyone.

"After that, several of the other defendants asked to have their bail revoked and go inside," Pierre Leval, the federal judge presiding over the case, told theNew Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin in 2009. Even Leval himself grew weary: He later admitted that he, too, stopped taking the subway to the federal courthouse in Foley Square, out of fear for his life. "They kill judges all the time in Sicily, and I was counting on the idea of 'when in Rome,' you know?" he said.

In the end, while the rest of the defendants were given shorter sentences, the alleged masterminds—Badalamenti and Catalano—were handed 45 years each in a federal penitentiary. Badalamenti died in prison in 2004, and Catalano was released in 2009, after serving 29 years of his term.

A Forest Hills, Queens pizzeria that—under previous management—was allegedly wrapped up in the heroin trade. Photo by the author

Most of the implicated pizza parlors in the New York area have closed, or are under new management. When I entered Al Dente's, in Forest Hills, Queens—one of the alleged former fronts—on a recent afternoon, there was no tangible sign of past criminality.

(Photo by Gage Skidmore via)

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

The candidates were chummy before the debate, but when the cameras came on, things got heated. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

Thursday night's mud-wrestling match on Fox News was an experiment that seemed doomed from the start: a debate without the centerpiece and frontrunner, a television event without a star, a showcase for candidates no one really likes all that much.

With 35 per cent support nationally, Donald Trump always brags about how hard he's crushing everyone in the polls. He's got a point. Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Ben Carson, Paul, and John Kasich all have their fans, but the most popular among them, Cruz, has about 20 percent support nationally among Republicans. Paul and Kasich are down around the 3 percent range. (Cruz is close behind Trump in Iowa, then comes Rubio, with everyone else an afterthought.)

Unlikable protagonists may make for good cable dramas, but not for great debate fodder. It doesn't help that after six—six—pre-primary debates everyone who cares is pretty well-versed in who these seven men are and what policy positions they have. (Mostly, they want to bomb ISIS, limit immigration, and get rid of Obamacare.) But there were still lessons to be learned from the debate. For instance:

This Campaign Is Going to Be Brutal

Fox News is obviously the most right-leaning basic cable channel out there, but it was fairly aggressive in going after the candidates on their misstatements and contradictions. Moderator Megyn Kelly told Christie he was wrong about the details of what the neighbors of the San Bernardino shooters saw, and the network ran clips showing how both Cruz and Rubio had contradicted themselves during the immigration debates of the past several years (both candidates squirmed away by saying, "I didn't say what those clips show I said"). At another moment, Cruz was asked why so few of his fellow politicians had endorsed him—or, in other words, why no one who worked with him liked him—and he replied, smarmily, "You are right that I am not the candidate of career politicians in Washington."

Even without Trump on stage there were a number of testy exchanges, including Cruz vs. the moderators (on unfair questions), Cruz vs. Paul and Rubio (on Cruz being unlikable and inauthentic), Paul vs. Rubio (on whether the NSA needs to be reformed or beefed up), and Rubio vs. Bush (Rubio: "You used to support a path to citizenship !"Bush: "So did you!"). The candidates are mostly alike in their policies, so what's inevitably going to separate them is the strength of their personalities—and clearly everyone wants to be the toughest, straight-shootingest, least flip-floppingist son of a bitch on the ballot. Add to that a group of politically aware primary voters who hate nothing more than a phony conservative, and you have plenty of incentive for name-calling. Attack ads are on the rise, and we've still got a long primary campaign ahead of us. If the presidential election is a reality show, and it is, none of these guys came here to make friends.

ISIS Is Bad

Throughout the night, there was competition to see who could talk the most loudly about war. Rubio promised to "rebuild" a military that Cruz said had been "dramatically degraded" by Obama; Cuban also promised multiple times that he would send captured ISIS affiliates found at home and abroad to Guantánamo Bay—which would include US citizens, I guess? Cruz, not to be outdone, promised to "carpet-bomb" ISIS, by which he just means "bomb more." Christie even found a way to pivot from a question about Kim Davis, the infamous gay marriage–denying county clerk, to a line about how bad ISIS was. On this the Republicans can agree: ISIS is bad and we need to bomb it and also arm the Kurds to fight it, and also maybe coordinate with undefined Arab allies (so I guess the Saudis?), or something.

Rand Paul Fans Are the Loudest

The Kentucky senator is hopelessly far behind in the polls, and you can see why. On Thursday he talked about topics no other candidate would touch, including NSA reform ("I don't think you have to give up your liberty for a false sense of security") and ramping down the war on drugs (a segment that made him the only candidate to say the words African-American or refer to black people at all). He's obviously out of touch with an electorate that favors Trump and Cruz, but there were a bunch of his supporters in the audience, and they cheered every remark he made. Somewhere out there, there's an alternate universe where he's at the helm of a very different Republican Party.

Ben Carson Is the DJ Khaled of the Campaign

Sometimes when you take psychoactive drugs like magic mushrooms you get to this place where you are constantly forgetting what happened a second ago, making conversations impossible—you'll start a sentence, lose your train of thought in the middle, and by the end you're just hoping what you just said made sense. That's how Ben Carson talked on Thursday—he meandered, he made points that you sensed were probably incorrect but were also incomprehensible, he uttered the phrase "Putin is one-horse country, oil and energy," which became the line of the night. Has anyone else in America made a career out of utter nonsense? I can only think of one man, and I can't help but think that he'd poll pretty well among GOP voters:

There Were a Lot of Guys Onstage Who Won't Be President

Carson is too odd, Kasich is too moderate, Paul is too out of step with the base, and Bush, despite not having a bad debate, is probably too unpopular and has an albatross of a last name. Christie says the right sort of stuff at these debates, but it's unclear who his constituency is. That leaves Rubio—vulnerable to charges of changing his positions as the wind shifts—and Cruz, who is despised by his colleagues. If Trump ever gets around to watching a tape of this debate, chances are he's not going to be too scared. And that's scary.

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The Alcor operating room, ready to receive a patient. Photo courtesy of Alcor Life Extension Foundation

Josh Bocanegra has a vision for the future, and it involves eternal life. Bocanegra, the CEO of tech startup Humai, announced in November that his company will be able to "resurrect the first human within 30 years," by freezing peoples' brains in liquid nitrogen and transplanting them back into bionic bodies in the future. The first step is an app called Soul, which will learn everything about the person while they're still alive, so as to better replicate them once their carefully-preserved brain is transplanted.

While Humai's stated approach is somewhat novel, they're not the first seek a cure for death through science. The primary vehicle in the pursuit of immortality has been cryonics: freezing people in liquid nitrogen, in the hopes that they can one day be safely defrosted and revived. Wayne State University teacher Robert Ettinger is widely credited with starting the cryonics movement with his 1962 book The Prospect of Immortality, in which he wrote: "Sooner or later our friends of the future should be equal to the task of reviving and curing us."

On Motherboard: The Art of Not Dying

The first organization to explicitly practice cryonics was the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, founded in 1972. Ettinger followed suit and founded the Cryonics Institute (CI) in 1976 in Clinton Township, Michigan along with three others. Alcor and CI are today the main providers, with 279 "patients" between them in storage. (They use the term "patients" to indicate their disagreement with the current medical and legal definition of death.) Alcor charges $200,000 to store a full body in perpetuity, and $80,000 for just the head (referred to as "neuropatients"). CI charges $28,000 and only offers the full body option because they believe it offers better survival chances, and because they fear the practice of decapitation has "negative effect on the public's perception of cryonics."

Cryonics is based entirely on the hope that future scientific advances will be able to make use of these bodies and severed heads to achieve "life after revival." Nothing close to a proof of concept exists so far. Cryonics advocates like to point out that there's nothing inherently infeasible about the prospect, but at the same time, providers have to be prepared to wait centuries before they achieve their goals.

"It's unlikely that someone preserved today will be revived before around 2100. The technology for uploading a person is really, really hard." — Kenneth Hayworth

Perhaps the most well-known body in cryopreservation is that of baseball player Ted Williams, who died in 2002. His body now hangs in a tank of liquid nitrogen and his head is stored separately in a steel can at Alcor's facility in Arizona. Kim Suozzi, a 23-year-old neuroscience student, also received notoriety after she successfully crowdfunded the fee to have her head stored by Alcor in 2013.

Photo courtesy of Alcor Life Extension Foundation

But Alcor and the other companies haven't yet figured out exactly how to turn a cryogenically frozen brain back into a living person. Recently, the Brain Preservation Foundation (BPF) announced a $100,000 prize for the first person who can develop a way to preserve an entire human brain for more than 100 years (something they doubt Alcor is currently able to do). The technique will be tested on both small and large mammals to demonstrate its potential for humans.

As of now, the entry that seems to be closest to winning the prize isn't exactly cryonics, but rather a new brain-banking technique where brains are removed before death and are treated with both a cryoprotective agent and a chemical fixative. Then, they're stored at room temperature.

Watch: Matthew Deutsch is a teenager, who's already made plans to put his brain on ice after he dies so that he might be revived in the future.

Kenneth Hayworth, one of BPF's co-founders and a neuroscientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, considers this proof that brain preservation is "technically possible," but he says significant research is needed.

"It's unlikely that someone preserved today will be revived before around 2100. The technology for uploading a person is really, really hard," he told me. "None of these techniques are going to revive someone without really advanced technology."

There's also a legal mandate to wait until someone is dead before freezing their brain, which Haywoth says damages the quality of the brain tissue. He thinks that Alcor and CI have "given up on the idea of society and the medical community accepting cryonics," but he's holding out for changes that will allow people to preserve their brains before they die, as part of a continuum of care offered by healthcare providers everywhere.

"The way that I think these people will be revived is that their minds will be uploaded into synthetic brains and bodies," he told me. The idea is that as long as the brain's synaptic connectivity is kept intact enough for extremely high resolution imaging, that will allow for the eventual ability to access someone's memories.

Given that even the most optimistic expectations suggest this technology is at least a century away, it seems like a tricky sell. I asked Hayworth what he would tell someone considering preservation even though the outcome is uncertain. Should their loved ones mourn them? Or should they be viewed as the "patients" cryonics vendors would have us believe they are? "I would counsel them to feel that they are going to be alive in the future," he said, adding that "there's a good chance they're not coming back."

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons

On January 14, rapper, actor, and activist Yasiin Bey, formerly known as Mos Def, tried to board a plane to Ethiopia when he was detained by South African immigration authorities. South Africa's Department of Home Affairs charged Bey with breaking local immigration laws, including overstaying his tourist visa, and, most notably, presenting a "world passport" as his travel documentation for departure.

Media outlets were quick to report that Bey's passport was fraudulent (or, as the NY Daily News put it, "Mos Definitely wasn't valid"). He's being charged with using a false identity and an "unrecognizable travel document." But what exactly is a "world passport," and why was he using one?

The history of the world passport goes back to 1954, when Garry Davis—a World War II bomber turned peace activist, who had renounced his American citizenship years earlier—founded the World Service Authority (WSA). He envisioned a world without borders, and the WSA was to be an administrative agency that would act like an international government, issuing world passports and recognizing "world citizenship."

Even early on, there were problems with recognition: Davis was arrested multiple times for using the world passport as a travel document. Arthur Kanegis, a filmmaker working on a forthcoming documentary about Davis, recounted the time Davis was charged in 1987 by French authorities for creating a counterfeit passport.

"Garry responded, 'Are you saying this is a counterfeit copy of a real world passport?'" said Kanegis. "And they said 'There's no such thing.' And he said 'So I'm being charged with creating a counterfeit copy of a document that doesn't exist?'" He was released after that.

Today, the WSA doesn't guarantee that any country will accept its passports or other travel documents. The agency operates as a small non-profit in Washington, DC, staffed mostly by volunteers and funded by fees from processing requested documents, plus donations.

By its own count, the WSA has released 750,000 world passports to date, among 4 million total documents issued to verify "world" identity, births, and marriages. According to current WSA president David Gallup, a human rights attorney, each of these forms of certification is intended "to affirm human rights for anyone regardless of their economic, social, religious, ethnic, 12, so for them to say they don't recognize it is a misrepresentation of the truth."

Gallup also wrote a "legal validity letter" to the South African government on Bey's behalf to assert the state's legal obligation to respect Bey's freedom of travel. Gallup noted that this is considered an innate, inalienable right by most governments, and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Gallup says that the WSA grants this kind of supportive advocacy (but not legal representation) to anyone who calls for help in asserting rights to travel, identification, or recognition—regardless of whether the caller actually possess WSA documents. They fully advise applications on both the legal limitations of world documents and the best practices for persuading authorities to accept them.

There have been accusations that this unquestioning support could allow world passport holders to use the documents for criminal purposes: In 2006, an American-born terrorist used one to travel around South America, where he planned two hotel bombings; in 1996, a cruise ship hijacker used one to flee from Italy to Spain before he was eventually recaptured. But of the 750,000 world passports issued since 1954, the rate of abuse seems fairly low.

Gallup emphasized that WSA strictly complies with US national security laws: They don't work with anyone based in heavily sanctioned countries like Syria, Iran, Sudan, Somalia, and North Korea (despite these states' dire human rights regimes), or support anyone who appears on an FBI or terror watch list, and they claim to fully research the background and identity of all applicants.

While the practical effect of WSA's advocacy may not always be as apparent, as in cases like Bey's, their philosophical logic regarding international human rights is sound—that is, "the World Passport represents the inalienable human right of freedom of travel on planet Earth."

Bey is due to appear in South African court on March 8 to face the charges against him.

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Illustration by Cei Willis

Self-harm among teenagers is pretty close to an epidemic in the UK. Evidence about the exact number of self-harm cases is scattered, but almost every report published in recent years has shown that it's on the rise. In 2014, figures were published showing a 70 percent increase in 10- to 14-year-olds attending A&E for self-harm—related reasons over the preceding two years. Last year, a wide-reaching survey conducted by leading civil servants found that a third of 15-year-old girls had reported harming themselves on purpose. Earlier this month, a report from ChildLine found the charity is now mostly receiving calls about low self-esteem, bullying, and self-harm. In 1986, when the 24-hour helpline began, children's top concerns were sexual abuse, family problems, physical abuse, and pregnancy—calls about self-harm were not recorded at all.

What's unclear is whether these manifestations of extreme self-hate and turmoil are increasing or simply better recognized and recorded.

Glyn Lewis, Professor of Psychiatric Epidemiology at the UCL Division of Psychiatry, believes that we aren't witnessing a new phenomenon. "Self-harm has always been a relatively common event in adolescence and I think the current increase in reporting is, if anything, a sign that these sorts of issues are being treated more seriously than before, despite cuts to mental health services."

In fact, the concept of self-mutilation first came into use in the late 19th century. Medical books tended to concentrate on more extreme acts—castration, amputation, or enucleation (removal of an eye)—though in hospital and asylum medical notes, the definition was much wider: skin-picking, hair-plucking, knocking any part of the body, cuts and other injuries, swallowing foreign bodies, inserting things like needles under the skin, and eating trash.

Unlike today, though, cutting was not common. As UCL's Dr. Sarah Chaney, author of the forthcoming book The Psyche on the Skin: The History of Self-Harm, explains: "In very few cases, patients cited bloodletting—an ancient medical practice that remained popular in some circles into the 20th century. While self-performed bloodletting was frowned upon, even some psychiatrists described self-inflicted cuts as therapeutic."

Chaney also says the connection between self-harm and young people is a modern one. "No one associated self-mutilation with children or teenagers in the Victorian era or the first half of the 20th century. Doctors did, however, link it to unmarried people, especially women, whatever their age. Being unmarried, so they thought, put you at risk of hysteria or other nervous disorder."

Some of the first psychiatric nurses, in 1908. Photo via Wikipedia

Fast-forward to the 1960s and self-harm, particularly overdosing, started to be considered a cry for help, a last option to communicate to a partner or friend that you couldn't cope. While it was often seen as attention-seeking, this wasn't, generally, in a pejorative way. "If you look at the political environment of the 60s, it was all about about social work and collectivity, and the role of the health worker was instrumental in getting self-harm recognized at home," explains Chris Millard of QMUL and author of A History of Self-Harm in Britain.

This change in attitude was partly down to the decriminalization of suicide in 1961 (previously, attempted suicide had been punishable by death). After that, self-harm became an issue for psychiatrists, not the police. According to Millard, it slowly became accepted that a highly stressful pathological incident in your life wouldn't have to stain your family forever. Psychiatric wards started becoming attached to general hospitals. Prior to this, if it wasn't serious enough for someone to be committed to an asylum, the vast majority of patients were patched up and sent home.

Self-harm only started to predominantly take the form of arm-cutting in the late 60s and bizarrely, it was, at the time, linked to being unable to menstruate. "Because the majority of people doing it were young women, and because it was delicate cutting that appeared not to hurt them, one explanation was that these women weren't menstruating and so were trying to find blood," says Millard.

By the 1980s, with the rise of Thatcherism and the emphasis on the individual, opinions shifted, but even then, a belief remained that women could be inherently crazy, especially regarding men. "Even in A&E, self-harm was often seen as a weapon for girls to bring back their boyfriends. It was seen as an attention-seeking act that people should just stop," says Millard.

Related: Watch our documentary 'LARPing Saved My Life'

While it seems that self-harm has always been an issue, its presentation as something that affects young people is a fairly recent development. Perhaps 90s goth and grunge culture created a sheen of "cool" around self-mutilation, but that doesn't seem to account for the most recent reports of a sharp rise in cases of self-harm among teenagers.

Psychologist Oliver James suggests that there has been an increase in mental illness in both children and adults since the 1970s as a consequence of "selfish capitalism"—of wage disparity and the high value that is placed on possessions, money, appearance, and fame. He says that capitalism stokes up unrealistic aspirations and the expectation that these aspirations can be fulfilled.

Many more, including Lucie Russell of the mental health charity Young Minds, have argued that social media is effectively super-sizing peer pressure.

"I'd been bullied for years and I always thought that meant there was something wrong with me. Social media made it a lot worse," says Nikki Mattick, 18, from Croydon. "When I put up a picture on Facebook and people commented by saying nasty things or it only got so many 'likes' I would overanalyze it. I'd go on Facebook seeing people at parties, so happy, and I'd think, why I am I not like that, why am I not normal? It definitely made things worse."

But, Russell argues, there are other pressures at work too, such as more testing in schools and an increase in families breaking down, which may also accelerate instances of self-harming.

Professor Fiona Brooks, Head of Adolescent and Child Health Research at the University of Hertfordshire, says: "The challenges of the future job market have been found to put massive pressure on young people. Unpaid internships, zero-hour contracts, and schools demanding and expecting higher grades are all having an impact."

All of this comes at a time of huge financial cuts to mental health services. During the coalition government's term, mental health funding was cut by £600 million . A recent study found that just 14 percent of people received appropriate care for a mental health problem.

We are living in a unique time. Self-harm has gone from being misunderstood and not discussed, to common enough to be almost an accepted part of the adolescent experience. Concerns about how technology may affect teenagers' mental health are well-founded but, paradoxically, the internet might also be the answer to many of the problems around teenage self-harm.

Allie Heslop, 24, from South Shields, says communities online showed her new ways of coping, and she hasn't cut herself for nearly two months. She learned techniques such as holding an ice cube or ripping paper when you feel the urge to hurt yourself, and she credits the support she received from CAHMS (the NHS child and adolescent mental health service) and years of therapy with saving her life. "The help I've had basically kept me from killing myself," she says. "It's something I still struggle with, it's part of my mental health and there will always be that natural instinct, but I've become more resilient."

Follow Tess Reidy on Twitter.

If you are affected by any of the issues in this piece, help is available from the Mental Health America website.

Note: Thumbnail image is a Peshmerga soldier in Kurdistan, not an ISIS jihadist.

The invasion of Iraq was supposed to turn the country into a democracy that minimized the external threat to the United States and potentially the rest of the world. Thirteen years later however, Iraq has collapsed into warring states. A third of the country is controlled by ISIS and the extremist group has also annexed huge amounts of land in Syria, increasing its influence in the Middle East.

Next Sunday, HBO will premiere our latest Special Report, Fighting ISIS. In it, VICE journalist Ben Anderson embeds with Iraqi fighters battling the Islamic State and gains access to three separate front lines in Iraq, where Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish forces are fighting for their lives.

In anticipation of the report's premiere on January 31, we're releasing a special sneak peek of the documentary today.

Watch the video above, and make sure to tune in for the full-length version of Fighting ISIS on HBO Sunday, January 31, at 10PM EST—five days before our Emmy award-winning HBO series kicks off its fourth season on February 5 at 11PM.

No one skips an event he doesn't want to go to like Donald Trump. Earlier this week, he announced that he wouldn't be attending the latest Republican debate in Des Moines, Iowa, because he doesn't like Fox News, and it was a bad deal, or something. Instead, he hosted a fundraiser for veterans down the road from the debate, thus earning a lot of headlines, avoiding a venue where he'd have to argue with Ted Cruz et al, showed how much he cared about the men and women who have fought in wars, and demonstrated his independence from the usual political machinery.

Given that Trump avoided serving in Vietnam and criticized the war record of John McCain, was it a cynical stunt? In the days leading up to the Iowa caucuses, is there such a thing as a non-cynical stunt? In any case, there would be crowds on cameras at Drake University, where the shindig was, so I showed up too.

The students I met on the way in didn't seem to be typical Trump supporters. Alec Grant, 19, told me he's not sure whether he's leaning Democrat or Republican, but doesn't expect to caucus for Trump. Anna Bertz, 20, is supporting the Democrats, but came with Grant anyway. "It's more for the experience," she told me.

"It's not every day we get someone like Trump here at Drake," she added.

There were also actual veterans waiting in the line snaking through the Drake campus. Organizers eventually came around to each one and ushered them to the front—with temperatures close to freezing, and a three-hour wait for admission, it was probably a good move to get the aging vets inside as soon as possible.

Attendees seemed excited and slightly confused. There were still empty seats when I finally got inside thanks to people slowly going through Trump's rigorous security screening.

Diamond and Silk

One of opening acts was a pair of internet personalities called Diamond and Silk, who create videos with titles like, "DIAMOND AND SILK ARE MAD AS HELL! DONALD TRUMP PLEASE BUILD THE WALL." One of them (I'm not sure if it's Diamond or Silk) does all the talking in these videos, and the other one goes, "uh huh!" and "mm-hmm!"

Onstage, the one who talks urged veterans groups who weren't accepting donations from Trump to have a change of heart. "When they throw you a lifeline, it doesn't matter where it comes from, as long as it's a lifeline," she said.

Then Mike Huckabee showed up. The former Arkansas governor had appeared on Fox News's "undercard" debate earlier that night and apparently knew free publicity when he saw it. "I like Mr. Trump. We're opponents in the campaign, but we're not opponents in supporting veterans," he said as he moved through the crowd proffering handshakes before disappearing out a side exit. He came back later in the evening to talk onstage, as did fellow candidate Rick Santorum. (As CNN points out, those two guys won the last two Iowa caucuses; it doesn't hurt Trump to tie himself to them.)

When Trump finally arrived, he talked up the success of the debate, bragging that there were more cameras than at the Academy Awards, and that his event was timed to start about 15 minutes into the debate so that he could catch people who switched channels to get away from the boredom of a GOP debate without him. Whatever you want to say about him, he's a populist as well as a capitalist: The most important thing is how something sells, and if people like something, it must be good. "We get the biggest crowds by far, much bigger than Bernie , although I have to say he's in second," Trump said.

Trump talked about veterans, of course, in particular how badly they were being screwed over. "Illegal immigrants are treated better in many cases than our vets," was a big line. The implication was that where the government has failed vets, rich people were stepping in, including himself. Trump said he gave $1 million to the cause, as did real estate mogul Phil Ruffin. In total, Trump said in his speech that donors gave over $6 million. Where exactly is the money going? To the veterans! No, but where specifically? As of now, no one knows.

Phil Ruffin with Donald Trump

Next was a speech from a former Special Forces solider named John Wayne Walding, who wrote a book about the battle in Afghanistan that took one of his legs. His organization 22kill.com is aimed at preventing the 20 veteran suicides in America that take place every day. He was an excellent speaker, I have to admit, and at one point surprised me by pointing out from the podium that the guy next to me had fallen asleep.

John Wayne Walding (left)

After it was all over, I asked a Dick Tremain, an Army and Air Force veteran who supports Trump, to explain what I'd just seen. Trump didn't want to do the debate, Tremain said, and "he also said to himself, 'Well we had to do something.'"

Say what you will about Trump or his fundraiser, it certainly was something.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Life Inside is an ongoing collaboration between The Marshall Project and VICE that offers first-person perspectives from those who live and work in the criminal justice system.

I'm moving cells today. A guard issued the order at 6:30 AM this morning during rack-out, when the cell doors first open for the day. He read my name and prisoner number off a list. Soon I was piling all my books—my dictionary, my thesaurus, my Illustrated Birds of North America—and all my belongings into a cart outside my cell.

I'm conscious of a not-unfamiliar physical sensation, like a piece of me is being torn away. I try to push the feeling aside and keep myself moving, moving around my familiar six-foot by eight-foot space.

I put a pile of books into the cart. Then my plastic clip-on lamp, my small fan, my small bronze Buddha, which has sat at my side for more than 25 years, and my small bell, given to me by a prisoner 16 years ago, the day before he died.

I have to move; there's no choice. Guards wouldn't tolerate it if I refused, nor would they exercise patience if I merely went about the process slowly.

It's almost ironic: Even though one in five prisoners in this state are sentenced to a term they won't live to see the end of, they are always moving around. There are always prisoners being buoyed around, from cell to cell, from prison to prison, on the tide of administrative whim.

Yet I've managed to spend five years in this cell—the longest stretch I've spent in any cell over the course of the three decades I've been in prison. Maybe that's why the ripping feeling is so strong this time.

Now I'm loading up my pictures. Here's one of the former warden and his wife, who have visited me over the years, welcomed me into their family, and spoken out for my release.

There is so little solidity in prison, so little to depend on, that a picture like this—or a cell that's mine, that's home, that I can always return to—is a treasure.

Part of the dread lies in where I'm headed: the oldest cell house in the prison, where I've already lived for a year and a half back in 1999. A four-story mausoleum of weathered red brick and eroded mortar. The place feels haunted, even when all the lights are on. The arched windows were bricked-up a quarter of a century ago, and the corrugated steel sheeting on the ceiling has rusted. The water that dribbles in when it rains is the color of tea.

Countless convict shoes and guard boots have worn paths into the concrete cell house floor. The slabs down the central corridors have settled in such a way that they slant upward, which is fortunate, because whenever the building's plumbing gives out, the floor acts as a gully, channeling water away from the cells.

The cell house is split into a pair of antiquated cellblocks four tiers high. The cell walls are crumbling from age and moisture, and they're patched in many places. The only reason a wall hasn't fallen completely is because they are a foot thick.

Check out our documentary on America's for-profit bail system.

It's freezing in the winter, causing friction between guards and prisoners. Guards work their shifts in heavy coats while enforcing rules that prevent prisoners from possessing an extra blanket.

There are prisoners so old and infirm they rarely leave their cells. They can't make it down the stairs to the chow hall, so younger prisoners bring food to them.

This is the cell house where a prisoner was in a bunk for two days before guards discovered that he was deceased, with days worth of unopened mail piled on his chest.

This morning, as I was packing, a guard told me I'm moving to cell #224. I know the prisoner I'm trading cells with—my friend, Wade, who has a 63-year sentence.

No one sent here when they're young makes it that long: The living conditions are too poor, the health services too lacking, the mental deprivation too total, and the temptation of suicide too real for us to survive into old age. Young prisoners won't ever have to bring food to Wade's cell, or mine.

I understand what the ripping feeling is now. It's prison taking my life. Because that's what incarceration does. It tears life away in pieces.

As I load the last of my possessions into the cart, I'm conscious of how long I've been inside these walls. I wonder how many pieces I have left before there's nothing left to rip.

Arthur Longworth is a 51-year-old inmate at Monroe Correctional Complex in Monroe, Washington. He is serving life in prison without the possibility of parole for an aggravated murder he committed when he was 20.

Photo courtesy of Makode Linde

The first time the world heard about Swedish artist Makode Linde he was in blackface and pretending to be a cake, in a performance art piece at a Museum of Modern Art event in Stockolm in 2012. The cake was made in the form of a black woman's torso—a "black-faced Venus of Willendorf," as he puts it—while the artist's actual head was painted in full black make-up.

His body hidden under the serving table, Linde screamed when the first piece of the Painful Cake was sliced to reveal a red sponge—giving the impression of a woman whose genitals were being cut. Quite literally adding insult to injury, the person cutting the cake was then-Swedish Minister of Culture Lena Adelsohn-Liljeroth. At the time she thought she was taking part in an art installation aimed at drawing attention to female genital mutilation in Africa.

Obviously, photographs and video footage from the event went viral, with many calling both the piece and the minister's part in it racist, insensitive, and offensive. The Afro-Swedish society actually called for Adelsohn Liljeroth to resign, while Linde made it clear that his work focuses on nitpicking at racial stereotypes.

Three years later, the controversial artist is working on a new exhibition titled Negerkungens återkomst—which in English roughly translates to "the return of the negro king." Understandably, the show (set to open tomorrow at Stockholm's Kulturhuset) has already divided Swedish art and culture circles. So much so that Kulturhuset Art Director Marianne Lindberg de Geer resigned to protest the venue's attempt to censor Linde's title.

I recently sat down with Linde to talk about all that.

VICE: How does it feel to be preparing for an exhibition while you're in the middle of a media scandal about it at the same time?
Makode Linde: I've been working on this exhibition for the last two years with Marianne Lindberg de Geer, so at the moment I am simply sad that she is not here anymore. Marianne is not only an artistic director but also an artist herself, and we've always had a mutual understanding and an open dialogue. Now it feels like people can still edit my exhibition, even though they do not have the same artistic authority. It's quite difficult but I refuse to say goodbye before the fat lady has sung. Well, in this case, it's an old, fat, straight white man. In spite of all that, I am excited and I believe that it will be a good show.

There are so many different voices in the conversation surrounding the title of the exhibition. Some seem to think it's just a PR trick and others are deeply offended. But nobody really knows what the art is actually going to be like. Could you reveal a bit for us?
From the beginning I've wanted to do a show that is related to the world of the fairy tales. Kulturhuset is a place that is very related to the children's world for me. When I was a child, I would go there and watch Pinocchio and other classic children's plays. My art is about much more adult and rather unpleasant topics, but I wanted to interpret tales for adult children. My previous artworks have dealt with historical events, such as the transatlantic slave trade. I would use them as a starting point and write my own fantasy scenarios. This time I took classic tales and transformed them into a story about Africa and blackness.

Obviously, I understand that the title is controversial, and that is definitely why I chose it.

Fairy tales include universal symbols that are open to interpretation. In my work, I deal a lot with the symbol of the dark forest. When it's dark we cannot see everything, so our brain starts filling in the blanks. This light phenomenon translates directly into a metaphor for our fear of the unknown. I like to work with simple symbols that even children can understand in their own way. Some years ago, when I was still in art school, a seven-year-old kid came to my studio. She looked at my Afromantics figures and said, "They smile, but they do not look happy." She just hit the nail on the head. She didn't know anything about post-colonialism or racist stereotypes but she could see the real image.

It's the second time your work has raised strong feelings. The first time around, when you presented the now infamous Painful Cake at the Museum of Modern Art, you said that it was time for a debate about racial issues in Sweden. Can you see any difference in the shape of the debate now?
I feel the conversation is more open now. The similarity between then and now is that many people seem to overestimate how smart and tricky I am, and how much I actually plan. It's quite humbling to be judged as being so calculating. Obviously, I understand that the title is controversial, and that is definitely why I chose it. But I never expected to be censored, nor did I foresee the actual size of the scandal. I didn't expect the resignation of the art director. Instead, Kulturhuset's administration should have expected a controversial title from me. Actually, I'm just doing what I am expected to do. It's quite surprising that it's such a shock to everyone.

Let's get to the title then. Who is the "Negro King" you refer to in your exhibition?
The character itself has appeared in Pippi Longstocking, the world famous children's book written by Astrid Lindgren. Astrid Lindgren is a Swedish national treasure and her books are in every Swedish library. The title is actually understandable in the Swedish context, but in English it loses a lot of its cultural connotations. It's interesting to compare Lindgren's king with mine. It differs through context and the times. And the real problem is not the word she used; it's that a white, fat guy moves to the South Pacific and rules over the black natives.

I'm just doing what I am expected to do. It's quite surprising that it's such a shock to everyone.

Under all these layers, my art always points back to me. As far as I know, I'm the only well-known Swedish black artist. The last time I presented a piece of art in Moderna Museet there was a lot of buzz about it. And now I am back at another big Swedish institution. I'm back.

About the second part of the title [the word återkomst means "comeback" in Swedish]—why does the "Negro King" come back?
I chose the title because I wanted something that sounded like a fairy tale or a Hollywood film. There's something quite threatening about a comeback. Where is he coming back from? What was he doing wherever he was before? Is he coming back for revenge?

What do you hope to achieve in the Swedish art scene?
Somehow, among all that media buzz, I hope maybe some other black person in Sweden will see my exhibition and think that he or she can be an artist as well. When I went to art school, I was the only black person there. I wish I'd had another black Swedish artist to compare myself to back then.

Part of Makonde Linde's Afromantics at the Theatre Gallery at Uppsala City Theatre, 2009

What about all the people who feel offended by your title?
It is interesting to see how often we misinterpret what is offensive. For instance, how often do we see black people in ads in the metro? If you did, they would probably be in an ad for cheap calls to Africa or dental services. You wouldn't see many black people in a holiday travel ad. It may be problematic to see a black person on a beach: Is he or she a refugee? As if black people only have bad teeth and never go on vacation.

Which begs the question: What kind of images of black people should we have in the media? Should it just be the empowering images of good and heroic black people? There was a period in film history when all black characters needed to be the good ones. But this took all of the nuanced, complicated roles away from black actors and made the portrayal of the black community very one-dimensional and narrow.

You once said that you wished there would be no further need for the questions you ask with your art. How do you feel about that now?
Sadly, I don't believe that will happen in our lifetime. I do not think our society will become so mixed that there won't be some kind of "otherness." And as long as there is somebody "different" there's going to be room for racism. As soon as people have a chance to band together and decide that they are a "we," and that another group therefore constitutes a "them," prejudice will flourish and spread. That's why I also think blackness can be a metaphor for otherness, for being the underdog, the villain, the black worker. As long as these structures exist, there will always be a need for the expressions that I create.

Swedish racism is particularly sneaky—so polished and subtle, so hidden in the smallest of gestures.

You live in Berlin and create art both there and in Stockholm. How do you feel your art is influenced by these two cities?
I do appreciate that I can do my art thanks to Sweden, but it's also in Sweden that racists and homophobes attack me. Not in Berlin. It's in Sweden that my art provokes a shit storm, seemingly out of nowhere. I would not be able to live here if I didn't have my sanctuary in Berlin. Berlin is more inspiring, free, and careless. People have fewer filters, they do not pretend. For instance, they can actually say quite racist things right in your face. Like this dude that came up to me at a club, hugged me, and said: "You know what, I accept black people." That would never happen in Sweden.

But Swedish racism is particularly sneaky—so polished and subtle, so hidden in the smallest of gestures. It is not even possible to defend yourself against it. You cannot just explode each time someone stares at you or rolls his or her eyes. There's little room for otherness here. I will probably not have many more exhibitions here for a while. I'm afraid many may not dare to invite me after this. To fight the authorities may seem fun at a distance but the consequence is you may not be welcome any more.

The exhibition Negerkungens Återkomst will open at Kulturhuset in Stockholm on January 30 and continue through April 24. More information can be found here.