Sometimes a couple's interests don't totally match up. One of you likes model trains while the other would rather crochet sweaters for the cat; one partner aspires to trek the length of the Appalachian Trail while the other's idea of an ideal evening involves a large plate of barbecue, a half-ounce of high-quality weed, and a Fast and Furious marathon. This is all fine and relatively easy to sort out within the bounds of a healthy long-term relationship, but when the different interests are of a bedroom nature the negotiations can get complicated. What do you do when one of you prefers missionary and considers even relatively tame moves like the Alleged Kanye to be beyond the pale, and the other can't get off without involving sounding, feeding, or laying "alien eggs" inside their body cavities?

"Partners will have different sexual interests," says Dr. Zhana Vrangalova , an adjunct professor at New York University and founder of The Casual Sex Project , an initiative that encourages people to anonymously share stories and experiences related to casual sex. "With kink, those desires and needs can be very strong. If you can't get those needs met in your long-term relationships, you won't be very happy. Just like non-sexual needs, sexual can be critical to who you are."

Take Wendy and Matt, a pair I met through Reddit who've been in a relationship for 11 years. Wendy likes "consensual non-consensual scenes," such as "forced" anal. Matt, ironically, isn't into that stuff. Or at least he wasn't at first. Through a willingness to explore and communicate about Wendy's sexual preferences, the two were able to figure out a way they could both satisfy their carnal itches.

"I think it's usually a good idea to stay open-minded about something you're not sure about," is what Vrangalova tells to couples who are struggling to match up their desires. "Give it a try and see what works for you or not." If anything, the longer you wait to test out your kinks, fetishes, and various sexual curiosities with your partner, the more difficult it can become to try together.

"Of course, if your partner is interested in something that you are absolutely disgusted by, or offended by, your response still might be, Not for me, ever," notes the sex therapist. But communication, compared to secrecy or repression, is an obvious factor to the success of any relationship, especially when it comes to sex.

And even if a couple can't get down with the same kink, there are other ways to make relationships work. For Mallory and Eric, another couple I met through the website FetLife, when one partner wouldn't budge on his resistance to her interest in sadism, the two made their marriage work through polyamory.

"With kink in particular, where one partner is vanilla and the other one is kinky, a can work really well," says Vrangalova. "Some of the issues that people have in opening up their sexual relationship has to do with fears that the partner will leave them for someone else because that someone else is better, or more attractive, or something like that. If the primary partner can feel less threatened if this other person is giving them something that they cannot give, it can be a very healthy and sort of safe way to explore kink in non-monogamy."

Finding someone whose company you enjoy enough to consider spending a few years—or a lifetime—with is a rare hand to be dealt. To learn how couples make true love work in the face of varying kinks, I spoke to three couples—including Wendy/Matt and Mallory/Eric with divergent sexual sensibilities to learn how they made their relationships work. (Names have been changed to preserve anonymity, and the interviews have been condensed and edited for clarity.)

For more on sex, watch our doc 'The Japanese Love Industry':

Mallory and Eric
Age: 31 and 32
Years Together: 15

VICE: How'd you two meet?
Mallory: We started dating in 2000 in high school when I was 15 and he was 16. I had started identifying as polyamorous before we were together. So when we started dating, I said, "We could try this, but I don't want it to be a monogamous relationship." And he, being a 16-year-old, was like, "Oh yeah, sure." We went from there.

How are your kinks different?
Eric: Well the question assumes that I have kinks, and that's something that I would dispute. I am about as vanilla they come.

How do your differences play out, then?
Eric: The short version is she likes hurting people and I don't like pain.

Mallory: I say to people that we are hilariously sexually incompatible for two people who are actually quite attracted to each other physically. My coming out as kinky involved going to college and reading message boards about BDSM and being fascinated. Eventually I got involved with a second person. That was my first attempt of having another relationship on top of mine with Matt. I was determined to make work.

So did you guys ever find a way to incorporate pain with each other, or does Mallory just do that with other partners?
Eric: I think the last time that we tried to do that... I just broke into uncontrollable laughter, which does put a damper on the mood.

Mallory: We definitely don't explore it with each other. I mean, I said we were hilariously sexually incompatible, even outside of pain and non-pain things. We've struggled a lot with sex because we're both looking for the other person to be the reactive one, where one of us is very vocal about wanting things or doesn't even need to be the first initiator. When we're both looking to feed off the sexual energy of the other person, it kind of clashes and doesn't really start a feedback loop. For a while we had a mutual girlfriend. She started the feedback loop and it worked really well until she moved to a different continent.

So what is your sex life like currently?
Eric: I don't remember the government statistic that defines a sexless marriage, but we're close.

Mallory: We struggled with our different kinks for a long time. We'd try to have sex and read Dan Savage's advice and work on things. When we were having sex with , when it was the three of us it went really well. Even though it wasn't kinky, we had the feedback loop. When she moved, there was a certain amount of coming around to the fact that sex just didn't work that well. We've both had partnered relationships for about three years at this point and sort of slowly stopped having sex with each other.

I think the question that a lot of people would wonder is, why stay together?
Mallory: Eric and I have a relationship where sex has never been very important. We're life partners, and if one of us were to start dating someone else I think we'd continue to be life partners. Sex is not the center of the relationship. It's not what binds the relationship; it's not what defines the relationship, even though it is a romantic relationship.

I think we'll probably continue to try to have our awkward version of sex because it does provide good intimacy from time to time. I feel like if you were to show our story to people that are just starting to struggle with this [same compatibility issue], it would be very easy for them to say that we're not a success story. But it's a relationship we both really like, and it works for us, and we're both happy that we're poly. I adore his girlfriend. I came back from the Netherlands, and she left me some chocolate-chip cookies and some cupcakes with a note that said, "Welcome back, here are American things to welcome you to America!"

Eric: People tend to think that a relationships equal sex or sometimes the other way around. And I don't think that you need to put yourself into that mold. If you're able to have a relationship that isn't sexual, then awesome for you.

Wendy and Matt
Age: 30 and 33
Years Together: 11

VICE: How did you two meet?
Wendy: We met in high school. We were just friends for a number of years, but started dating in our early 20s. We got married in 2007.

Can you tell me about your sexual preferences?
Wendy: I like to be verbally degraded, restrained, and made to feel as if I'm being used. I enjoy consensual non-consent scenes. Spitting, face slapping, "forced" anal—stuff like that. I have been this way as long as I can remember.

Matt: I love getting my wife hot and bothered through her kinks. By proxy I do enjoy being in a dominant position, since she is sexually submissive, but I enjoy it a more in the moment than as a total sexual need.

What was it like when you first realized you had different kinks? Were you scared about losing the relationship?
Wendy: I was pretty hesitant to share the breadth of my kinks. I wasn't comfortable putting myself out there all the way. I tried to introduce some of it slowly. I thought he would be really turned on by all of this, but he was indifferent. He would make some mild attempts at kink, but it always fizzled.

Finally, I just laid all my cards on the table, after numerous years together. I wasn't necessarily scared I would lose the relationship right then and there. Rather, I was scared that he would my my desires as just not something he cared about or could relate to, and that I wouldn't be able to get over the shame, embarrassment, and hurt of that. I couldn't even bring myself to do it face-to-face. I had to write him a letter.

Matt: There were a lot of conversations, honesty, and tears before we finally started to figure things out. My wife telling me she wanted to be slapped, degraded, and dominated was difficult—and somewhat surprising. Not only was it hard morally, I also didn't have much interest in it. We worked into it slowly, on my behalf, but after some experience things fell into place.

So I understand Matt did a bit of a 180, going from vanilla to kink.
Wendy: It is so different now, and honestly it's on a level now that I never really thought it could get to. It was like a switch flipped in him, and he became a different person, sexually. The dude who once said that he thought anal was gross and that he had no interest in role-play or BDSM whatsoever actually surprised me by building a dungeon in our basement while I was out of town.

We are on Fetlife now, and we have also been opening up our relationship a bit to include some threesomes, which has been really fun. Exploring BDSM together sort of opened the door for the non-monogamy thing, which is something I don't think either one of us thought we would try. But here we are, and it's going pretty fucking great.

What advice would you give to another couple that is very much in love but has different sexual tastes?
Wendy: Don't wait too long to lay your kink cards on the table. It won't get easier to talk about over time, you'll just end up feeling like it's more and more weird to be suddenly bringing this up, and in the meantime, you'll each be getting more sexually frustrated. Be willing to try things for your partner—you might be really surprised by what you end up loving. We both were. Just be willing to communicate, that's the most important thing.

Mark Michaels and Patricia Johnson
Authors of Partners in Passion
Age: 56 and 51
Years Together: 17 Years

VICE: When I started doing this story, I thought of your book, Partners in Passion, which is about to make love last and keep sex satisfying, and got curious about your advice.
Patricia: I think there are some powerful teaching grounds around our story.

Your differences came out during an event you attended, correct?
Maybe ten years ago, we went to an event called Dark Odyssey, which is a weekend-long, pansexual erotic workshop. At the time, it was heavily attended by people in the BDSM community. We went as an experiment to expand our sexual horizons, to grow as individuals. We were petrified. The first night they had a mixer with a stage with a wheel on it that they called the Wheel of Destiny. It had various words and various types of BDSM activities written on it, and when it was your turn to spin, you'd be able to sample each activity for about two minutes. I got up, spun the wheel, and just stared at the options. There was one word I was staring at that my brain couldn't comprehend at first. The wheel, of course, went click...click...click...and landed on that word— punching.

She [the sex educator] started aiming blows with the back of her hand to my shoulders and chest, but it was more like a deep repercussive feeling in my body. She suddenly came across my chest with a big blow with her entire forearm. At that moment, I was jettisoned into another realm that I did not have words to describe. And it was a complete aha moment.

Mark Michaels: I went to the wheel and I landed on caning. There were all these experienced kinksters around there like, "Oh you're in trouble." I took my pants off and I bent over the horse and the woman doing the demo wasn't hitting me very hard, but it wasn't unpainful. It was definitely not a turn-on for me. But what I did experience is insight into what kink is all about I really went into an altered state of consciousness, a trance, within 30 seconds of getting started. It gave me a lot of insight into why people might do these things. Before I intellectually understood them, but I didn't have the knowledge in my body for the physical aspect.

So would you say when it comes to BDSM kinks you were the more vanilla one of the two?
Mark: I would say I am the more vanilla one, certainly when it comes to BDSM. So we came back from this event and all of a sudden Patricia liked impact play. I grew up with 70s-era feminism, and this whole idea of hitting a woman was just, like, not OK. And she wanted me to hit her, which was a very, very hard obstacle to overcome.

Patricia: The thing is that this related to our background in tantra. Tantra is a practice; it's an exploration. And, as such, you're always opening up to new things. So it's not like you come [pre-packaged with set kinks], at least that's been our experience.

What is tantra?
Mark: Our nutshell definition of tantra is that tantra is an ancient Indian tradition that recognizes sexual energy for personal and spiritual empowerment. Tantra is also a tradition that treats practice as experimentation. Going to was an example of that experimental attitude—pushing the boundaries and doing something outside of our comfort zone.

How did you you work to satisfy Patricia's kink?
Mark: The way that I overcame it took two forms. One was instruction from people who really know and really know how to do it well. So I had spanking lessons and I took a flogging workshop and got a little bit of experience with a flogger. I still had to get past this mental piece, and what I was able to do to accomplish that was to tap into the fact that it's pleasurable for her. And so even though I don't feel like I'm particularly kinky, by tapping into her excitement, I, in turn, became excited.

So what advice would you have for a couple where one is vanilla and one is kinky?
Mark: Finding a middle ground on the level of kink in your sex life is a great solution for people. It's not the only one by any means, but it can really work out well. If the communication is there, and they value maintaining the relationship or opening the relationship, then this can be just as valid and satisfying as finding middle ground. The important thing we advocate for people, whatever their relationship structure is, is to be collaborative with their sexual lives.

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Tito and his wife Jovanka (center) on New Year's Eve 1956 at the Winter Palace hotel, during an official visit to Luxor, Egypt

This article first appeared on VICE Serbia

When communism took hold of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia after World War II, Christmas as a religious holiday was banned in the now-secular country. New Year officially became the festive season's biggest event.

Yugoslavia's beloved leader Josip Broz Tito, praised for the guerrilla warfare tactics that drove out Nazi troops, won Western hearts by turning his back on Russia's strongman Josef Stalin. Tito smartly allowed his people slightly more rights than were given to his communist colleagues in the Eastern bloc, while keeping an iron grip on politics.

His influence led to the grouping of freshly independent post-colonial countries in the Non-Aligned Movement, created in 1961, and brought him support among the leftist forces who turned a blind eye to his sometimes luxurious lifestyle and personality cult. Many Hollywood types, including Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, visited Belgrade for the glamorous parties hosted by Tito and his wife Jovanka. Others were invited to celebrations on his famed transatlantic yacht Galeb.

New Year's Eve 1957, Ljubljana

Tito organized New Year parties for his friends, family, and closest allies, but also visited public celebrations and walked along packed streets to enable "ordinary citizens" to wish him their best.

VICE spoke to curators Ana Panic and Radovan Cukic from the Museum of Yugoslav History about Tito's guests, parties, and New Year celebrations menu.

New Year's Eve 1957, Ljubljana. The tallest man in the background is Franc Leskošek, once Secretary of the League of Communists of Slovenia

VICE: Why were New Year celebrations so important and so big in Yugoslavia?
Ana Panic and Radovan Cukic: New Year was declared a state holiday in 1955, and thanks to a mix of propaganda and forced pressure in the post-war years, its celebrations almost completely overtook Christmas traditions. It emerged as a real people's holiday. During the first years of Socialist Yugoslavia, as a religious figure even Santa Claus nudged off guest lists.

Where, how and with whom did Tito usually celebrate?
His main partner was his wife Jovanka, but he would also be with his closest political allies. His numerous family members joined them in public celebration only several years before his death.

The vice president of Egypt, Hussein el-Shafei and his wife stand to the right of Tito and Jovanke

Regular parties were held in the presidential residence in Belgrade—or in the other Yugoslav towns that became capitals of new states after the bloody breakup of the communist federation—but Tito's favorite spot was his semi-private island of Brijuni, where he spent seven New Year's celebrations.

He also liked to spend holidays on his yacht Galeb, usually during his visits to the Non-Aligned Movement member countries. He celebrated 1955 close to the shores of India, 1956 in a hotel in Egypt's Luxor, and 1959 in Indonesia.

While celebrating in Yugoslavia, he would sometimes join public celebrations, or marched along the streets. He'd sometimes spent the night with workers in a factory or with soldiers in their barracks.

Hartini, wife of Indonesia's first president Sukarno, on New Year's 1959 around Galeb yacht crew members

Who entertained Tito and his guests?
The most popular Yugoslav stars were always chosen for the parties. And one could judge who were his favorites by comparing how many times they entertained him. Although the presidential protocol department would plan the party and pick out the lineup, Tito, as in all other things, had final say. The menu was made up of mostly local dishes and wines.

Not only Tito's but also other guests' suits and dresses, were often embellished with imaginative accessories, like caps, hats, Mexican sombreros... In Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, the mayor wore a cap shaped as a tram—an homage to the public tram service granted to his town in one year.

Thanks, Ana and Radovan.

1977, Novi Sad

1979, Brijuni

1958, Ljubljana

1964, Brijuni

1973, Milocer

1960, Belgrade

1956, Egypt

1963, Zagreb

1955, during an official visit to India

1961, Sarajevo

1952, Belgrade

1963, Zagreb

1967, Brijuni

1959, Indonesia

1962, Brijuni

1971, Brijuni

1970, Brijuni

1978, Brijuni

This article originally appeared in The Trace.

Were Senator Ted Cruz of Texas elected President of the United States, Tim Macy, chairman of Gun Owners of America (GOA), says he would have a few urgent matters to address. Chief among these would be to work with Cruz on abolishing the federal background check system, which prevents dangerous people from purchasing firearms.

"I would hope we could do that together," Macy tells The Trace. "We would like to get rid of the background check law"—known as the Brady Act—"because it clearly doesn't work, and never has worked."

GOA is a no-compromise gun lobbying group far to the right of the National Rifle Association (NRA). In early September, it endorsed Cruz for President. Shortly thereafter, the Republican frontrunner touted the backing of the obscure group during a nationally televised debate—a dog whistle to hardcore gun voters meant to signal his Second Amendment bona fides. The move was also unprecedented, according to Alan Schroeder, a debate historian who spoke with The Trace at the time. GOA is as an extremist organization: for decades it has been affiliated with white supremacists and the country's anti-government militia movement. For most candidates, publicly associating oneself with such a group would be too politically risky.

"I honestly cannot think of a parallel example from previous presidential primary debates," Schroeder said.

Yet the connection between GOA and Senator Cruz goes much deeper than a mere endorsement. It's a collaborative effort, with both sides working together to shape pro-gun policy."In a Republican primary, everybody is God's gift to guns," Macy says. "But when the rubber hits the road and they get elected, you find out what's really going on. With Cruz, we got somebody who would work with us."

On a GOA-sponsored town hall-style conference call with gun owners last year, Cruz credited GOA with playing "a critical part in helping get me elected" to the Senate. In that 2012 race, Cruz started out as a long-shot candidate running against then-Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst, the deep-pocketed establishment favorite who had an A+ rating from the NRA. Cruz, meanwhile, was a latecomer to gun culture. Despite coming of age in Texas, he hadn't purchased his first handgun until he was in his early thirties.

Gun Owners of America is most interested in eliminating "anti-gun laws that are already on the books," says the group's chairman. Near the top of that to-do list is the dismantling of the background check system.

But as he made a name for himself at Tea Party rallies, Cruz attracted the attention of Gun Owners of America, whose endorsement would lend him credibility in gun circles. Researching his legal background, they found what seemed to be a natural ally. In 2008, as Texas's solicitor general, Cruz filed an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court representing Texas and 30 other states in support of Dick Heller, who challenged Washington, DC's gun ban. That year, the justices ruled in Heller's favor, overturning the law in a decision that established an individual's right to bear arms.

"We saw that he understood what the phrase 'shall not be infringed' means," says Macy. "We actually endorsed him with very little conversation up front."

Macy visited Cruz in Texas several times in 2012. As the two men became acquainted, Macy believed he had found a kind of ideological soul mate.

"The more I was around Cruz," he says, "the more comfortable I was that he says what he means and does what he says." Macy adds, "We have many thousands of members in Texas. We alerted them to go to work for Cruz, send him money, do whatever they could." GOA, for its part, maxed out their direct contributions to the Senator's campaign, giving just under $6,000.

Larry Pratt, GOA's controversial executive director, recalls that period fondly. "We were all in," he says. "We did mailings. We did a lot of phone banking, getting the word out that we were supporting him. We kept up the drum beat, and I think that's part of what brought him over the finish line."

Cruz ultimately won 56 percent of the vote in the general election. When he took office on January 3, 2013, the nation was still reeling from the mass shooting that had taken place a few weeks earlier at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. In the shooting's aftermath, gun reform seemed to have its best prospect in years. The most notable bill introduced at the time was the Manchin-Toomey amendment, which would have expanded background checks. Even the NRA tentatively supported it, but GOA considered the measure unacceptable. In an effort to combat the bill, they reached out to their newest asset, Senator Cruz.

"There were lots of emails and phone calls," Macy remembers. "Some of our input was very instrumental in killing that legislation, and Senator Cruz was crucial in making sure it didn't pass."

The group contended that Manchin-Toomey would lead to the creation of a federal gun registry. It wouldn't have, but that argument, appropriated by Cruz to whip up hysteria among his colleagues, was a decisive factor in the death of the measure in April 2013. A month later, a reporter from Capital New York interviewed the Senator, who repeated the claim. The reporter then informed him that the bill specifically outlawed such a database.

"It purports to do so," Cruz said. "But if it were passed, the next day the argument from the Justice Department, from the Obama administration would be, this legislation is utterly ineffective because we don't have a registry, and I think a registry would be deeply inconsistent with the constitutional right to keep and bear arms."

Since then, according to Macy, the two staffs have continued to share ideas. They discuss "a lot of potential legislation down the road," he says. "One of our biggest issues is reciprocity nationwide," a law that would allow gun owners with concealed carry permits to carry their weapons in any state. "I guarantee we'll be working closely with his staff on legislation along those lines."

But ultimately, Macy says, GOA is more interested in eliminating "anti-gun laws that are already on the books." Near the top of that to-do list is the dismantling of the background check system. According to a 2015 poll taken by the Center for American Progress, 83 percent of gun owners support background checks for all firearms sales. But GOA has been vocally opposed to the Brady Act since its implementation in 1993. Background checks, Macy claims, only prevent law-abiding citizens from legally purchasing guns.

GOA has not yet discussed ending the background check system with Cruz, but the group knows it has the Senator's ear.

"We've been in the same foxhole," says Larry Pratt, the executive director. "And that's an important bond."

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Howard Brookner and William Burroughs during the shoot of 'Burroughs: The Movie'

Film stills courtesy of Aaron Brookner

Director Howard Brookner is the eponymous figure at the center of Uncle Howard, a feature-length documentary that premiered this week at Sundance. In the 1980s, Brookner was involved with New York-based filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch, Tom DiCillo, Sara Driver, and Spike Lee, a group that would later became known as the godfathers of American indie. Their films, informed by the free spirit of French New Wave, were delivered raw and real like a slice of New York pie with a big piece of hair stuck on it.

Brookner was arguably the light to first shine brightest. In 1983, he made a celebrated and authorized documentary on William S. Burroughs, featuring Patti Smith, Allen Ginsberg, and Francis Bacon. In 1987, Brookner put his camera essaying skills to work on Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars, a documentary that followed avant-garde artist Robert Wilson's attempt to organize an epic, 12-hour opera for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games only for the show to be cancelled at the last minute. Then when Brookner veered into scripted feature films, he persuaded Madonna and Matt Dillon to star in his Roaring 20s tribute Bloodhounds of Broadway.

Tragically, Brookner died a victim of the AIDS epidemic before he was able to see Bloodhounds premiere at Cannes in 1989. When Brookner passed, his films seemed to die with him. The Burroughs documentary went out of distribution and the Wilson film was considered lost.

Enter the director's nephew, Aaron Brookner. He was seven years old when his uncle died, but having been invited to the set of Bloodhounds, he knew that he wanted to follow in his uncle's footsteps and be a filmmaker.

Twenty-five years later, Aaron has picked up his kin's creative torch for a project that also restores Howard's legacy. In Uncle Howard, Aaron documents his own mission to reclaim the lost negative of the Burroughs feature, supposedly buried deep in "the bunker," as the Junkie writer's former apartment on the Bowery is known. Legend has it that the bunker is guarded like Fort Knox and hasn't been entered in decades. When he finally gained access, Aaron found a massive, untouched archive of stuff left by both Burroughs and his uncle. The director talked to VICE about exploring this time capsule alongside Jim Jarmusch, as well as how the documentary serves as not just a requiem for his family, but also New York's creative spirit of yesteryear.

VICE: Howard is a mythical, larger-than-life figure to you, but for most people who see the doc William S. Burroughs is the larger-than-life figure. What sort of influence did the pair have on you?
Aaron Brookner: I thing it's a very interesting intergenerational story like that because Burroughs was a larger-than-life figure for Howard and for Jim , Sara , who are also in the film. And then that generation has become so influential on my generation. I grew up idolizing all those filmmakers. What's interesting about the moment when Howard was making [ Burroughs: The Movie] is that you have Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Terry Southern living amongst NYU students and the punk rockers of the Lower East Side.

You struggled to get into the bunker, but when you did you found all your uncle's film rolls. It's almost as if you're time traveling.
There is a great line in the Burroughs doc my uncle made where Burroughs talks about time traveling. He says it's not possible, but if it were, he would only do it as an observer. Going into the bunker was like time travel. I couldn't touch anything but suddenly I was plummeted into this whole other planet, especially with the nature of footage being so kind of free and loose. It was really important to channel that experience that I was going through into one that could be shared by the audience. Part of the joy of watching this film is the trip down that rabbit hole at the other end of the looking glass.

What did it feel like walking into the bunker?
I was totally overwhelmed. The inside hasn't changed; there are spice racks in the kitchen and the spices on them are dated 1978. There is a handgun in Burroughs' dresser; there are Howard's film rolls with literally 30 years of dust on it. It was really powerful. When Jim Jarmusch came by, he felt it too and was like, "Woah, this is really intense."

Jim Jarmusch and Aaron Brookner at the bunker

How did the stories of Jim, Sara, and Tom help you understand the time and your uncle?
I think to see it in the movie, the bunker is just a space. It's a bunker; there are no windows. But when you're in there, it's so crazy because the Bowery is so loud—there are huge trucks going by there all the time—but the bunker is completely silent. It is completely hermetic and meditative.

I remember Jim telling me this story about when James Grauerholz went away to Kansas, he left Jim and Howard in charge of Burroughs for the weekend. They were just going to pop by for a little while, but ended up drinking Great Wall of China vodka and taking some strange drugs. At some point, Burroughs took out his handgun and started to fire into an iron box. Of course the bullets started ricocheting off of it, and then off the bunker's walls. Jim said he had to get going, and when he went outside he thought only a few hours had passed, but an entire day had and morning traffic was passing down the Bowery. This story really resonated because it showed the relationship that they had with Burroughs and also how removed Burroughs and the space were from everyday life.

What was it like revisiting the era when New York was dealing with the AIDS epidemic?
It was really important to me to show how it was happening on the ground and take through Howard's experience of AIDS. Howard's partner Brad told me that at one point they thought that a virus was coming in through the air ducts in the night clubs. Burroughs was talking about a potentially deadly virus that could be administered by the government, done deliberately to the community. There was so much noise and so much hysteria and disinformation, so I wanted to show the kind of whirl of different perspectives.

Also, when Howard came of age, artistically and socially, in the late 70s, it's such a moment of freedom. It was the first generation where homosexuality was open, when there was the second wave of feminism, and all sorts of arts were mixing together. Plus, there was a decrepit downtown New York that was dirt cheap. Howard had a loft on Prince and Bowery that cost $100 a month. To a certain type of person, it was a utopia in a way. Then suddenly there's this thing that comes in, that starts bringing fear, that starts bringing outside, right-wing forces who their lifestyle. I really wanted to show the audience how AIDs started to directly, negatively affect the way this beautiful artistic movement had been going.

Do you see this film as your way of keeping Howard's memory alive?
Well, I wanted the opportunity to bring back his films so that people could see them. The Burroughs film obviously wasn't known, nor do we know too much about the Wilson film. And Bloodhounds had been forgotten in some way, so I wanted to shine a light on that. More important to me, though: I wanted to conjure something of Howard's spirit, his openness, the joie de vivre , the way he lived his life, the risks he took to make his art.

Uncle Howard is currently screening at Sundance. For more on the documentary, visit the movie's website here.

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All photos by the author

Shinjuku 2 Chome is like a gay bar buffet. Located across two small city blocks in Tokyo, the special ward is said to have the highest concentration of gay bars in the world. But unlike the large, loud, and perpetually-sticky drinking house and dance clubs familiar to Americans or Europeans, the queer-friendly spaces in the district are small, intimate, and stylized or themed, each with a capacity fewer than a dozen heads.

Each bar is run by a mama, typically both the owner and bartender, as well as the person who picks the theme of his micro-bar. Some bars in Shinjuku 2 Chome are curated to attract clientele with specific sexual preferences, such as chubby chasers, BDSM enthusiasts, and exhibitionists. Others are designed around a hobby or shared interest, like J-pop or sports.

In some bars, the spaces are so small that it's often easier to identify the queer community or subculture the bar caters to based on the customers, rather than what's on the walls: Clientele may have similar hair styles or body types, or everyone could be sipping drinks through leather gimp masks.

There is something for everyone in Tokyo's gay, boozy epicenter. Mamas and their watering holes become known as one-of-a-kind local legends, of sorts, especially if they're one of the many barkeeps who have kept their businesses open for over multiple decades. On a recent trip to Shinjuku 2 Chome, I interviewed various bar owners about their mini-speakeasys to learn what makes one nine-foot-long bar stand out from countless other boozy cubbies.

BAR: BUMPY
OWNER: ARATA
THEME: NO THEME, BUT BEAR-FRIENDLY

Arata grew up near Kyoto where his parents were involved in an artist and scientist commune. He thought it was typical to have geologists, writers, painters, and musicians come to the house to drink and talk. He wants to see something similar with his gay friends, extending his family beyond blood relatives.

In his early 20s, he partied a lot and went to lots of drag shows in Osaka. Then, at age 39, Arata suffered an attack of transverse myelitis. When he recovered, he decided to open a small bar called Bumpy so he could spend more time with his friends. Bumpy is nine-feet-by-nine-feet and seats six people, not much wiggle room given that Arata is 300 pounds and over six feet tall. It's so small that everyone has to get up when a customer at the end of bar wants to use the toilet. The bar is un-themed, but Arata is a big, gentle bear-like guy and the bar attracts both bears and bear-lovers.

Bar: DONPAN
Bar owner: Hideki
Bar theme: Folk Art/Countryside

Hideki grew up in Akita, the northern countryside of Japan, but moved to Tokyo roughly 11 years ago. During the day, he worked as an electrician, and spent nights serving drinks at a friend's bar. He eventually decided that he wanted to focus on opening his own gay bar, and opened Donpan this past June. He describes his current career as his "true calling."

His micro-bar is about 10-by-12 feet and seats nine people. The interior reflects his rural upbringing, including handmade crafts and folk art that adorns the walls. Hideki wants the atmosphere to feel homey and relaxing, a respite from the busy Tokyo streets just outside.

His parents and sister recently visited Donpan, and subsequently told the young bar owner they support his decisions, even though they previously had rejected his gay lifestyle. Hideki says, "Dad is sending more folkcraft from home to make this place look like my hometown."

Bar Name: DOCK
Bar Owner: Yoshino
Bar Theme: Sake and Cruising

Yoshino has owned a notorious cruising bar in Shinjuku 2 Chome called DOCK for the past 13 years, though his life was very different in his 20s. Yoshino was doing very well as an IT engineer and even owned two sports cars. Eventually, his career floundered and he lost everything, leading to a suicide attempt. He says the former owner of Dock changed his life by offering him a job. "The previous mama picked me up when I was sinking to the bottom and saved me."

Dock originally opened in 1999 and Yoshino is a "third-generation mama" at the micro-bar. He thinks there are too many gay bars in the area that mainly serve shochu (Japanese distilled vodka), but not enough good sake (rice wine). His goal is to make his bar filled with "erotic energy, naked men, and the best selection of sake in Shinjuku 2 Chome."

Bar: Cream
Bar Owner: Fujio
Bar Theme: Literal Equality

Fujio always dreamt of living in a big city and moved to Tokyo when he was 17. He opened his bar Cream seven years ago when he was in his mid-30s.

The inside of his well-lit bar is painted all white and also reflects Fujio's personal style. It's almost too bright and conspicuous for a bar in Shinjuku 2 Chome, where other spots tend to be dark, unassuming holes-in-the-wall. Gay bars in Shinjuku 2 Chome can serve as a physical "closet," where men who aren't out can escape from their everyday lives. Not at Cream, though.

Fujio believes in literal equality: No matter who his customers are or what they do, he greets them with a straightforward "What do you want?"

"Everyone is equal here, no matter what they do for their day job," he says. "Lawyer, policemen, graphic designer, musician, they all pay the same price of $15 per drink."

Name of Bar: Gai's Bar
Bar Owner: Gai
Theme: For Everyone

Gai plays two roles: Actor by day, bar owner by night.

He thinks Japanese workplaces are hostile to openly gay people, so he celebrates the same-sex marriage movement in Japan. At the same time, he often questions why people can get married, but why being out is still taboo.

At Gai's Bar, where he is the mama, Gai welcomes every gender, where most of the gay bars in Japan are gender-specific. Being an actor, Gai has learned to play many different roles, and his bar reflects that, often hosting men, women, transgender, old, and young customers at the same time. On special occasions, Gai and his staff cross-dress to mix things up.

Gai has a partner he's been in relationship with for 22 years. The mama is out to his family and hides nothing about his identity at his bar, but that's not the case with his partner who hides his Shinjuke 2 Chome life to his family.

For more of Kaz's work, visit his website here.

In the days leading up to the Iowa Caucuses, Bernie Sanders supporters are going all out to keep the #bern aflame through the winter. The Senator himself is campaigning hard in the midwest, where last night he organized a rally and concert at the University of Iowa, featuring a rendition of "This Land Is Your Land" with help from Vampire Weekend and Cornel West.

Back on the east coast, "Berners" made up for a rally that got cancelled last week due to Winter Storm Jonas with a march that went from Union Square to Zuccotti Park. An estimated 3,500 people attended the event, and, as we've come to expect from Sanders fans, they showed support through DIY ingenuity and grassroots mobilization. Whereas the internet is flooded with countless Bernie memes and social media assemblage, the crowd in New York turned the URL love into IRL campaign props, mostly through handmade signs.

While many supporters' signs played off the "Bern" pun, some were far more creative. There were homemade Bernie puppets, signs fastened into hats, and sculpture-esque objects in the Democratic candidate's likeness. One of the more adventurous signs read, "Fear is the cockblocker of dreams, Bernie 2016," and pictured a unicorn with a rainbow streak. Another enthusiastic Bernie fan had a sign which simply stated, "I'm On Acid."

Visit Jackson's website and Instagram for more of his photo work.

This dude, yeah? He's you. He's adorable. And almost completely useless.

I'm about a third of the way into another playthrough of LucasArts' seminal The Secret of Monkey Island. I couldn't tell you how many times I've seen the game to its conclusion prior to now. It's in the tens, easily, which might not seem all that many given its age—it came out in 1990, and has been available ever since (I've owned it on Amiga, iOS, and now PlayStation 3)—but since the game plays essentially the same way, every time, its "replayability" is questionable by some standards. So, too, is its length—at around six hours, assuming you suss every puzzle without too much trouble. It's a game that's going to cause some gamers, and we've all met the type, to stink up the place up with their thoughts on its value, based on some fictional ratio between money spent and screen time.

Of course, you're allowed to think whatever you like about this game, or any others for that matter, regardless of what someone you've never met writes about it on the internet. But for me, The Secret of Monkey Island remains golden, a release that I can still look to and see everything I want in any video game. Here, let me explain, beginning with how long it takes to actually play.

IT'S THE PERFECT LENGTH

There comes a point in every self-identifying gamer's life when they catch sight of themselves in the mirror and see the hollowness of their eyes, the paleness of their skin, the cracks in their lips, and yellowing of their nails, and conclude: I need to spend less time playing these fucking things. Long-ass games are amazing when their worlds are constantly rewarding—Bloodborne, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and Fallout 4 all qualify from 2015. But so many games get bloated through pointless distractions, needless collectibles; developers swell their products with acres of shit we just don't need. The Secret of Monkey Island doesn't do that. You'll finish it in a couple of evenings. Everything you pick up has a vital part to play in the game's progression. (OK, most things.) It's so perfectly streamlined, with every ounce of fat that'd get added to proceedings if it were made today left on the proverbial cutting room floor. What you're left with is a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle. That's what you need to zip across a cable connecting the starting (chapter one) area of Mêlée Island to the small hideaway of Meathook, the Sea Monkey crew member in waiting. Obviously.

See, the chicken works

IT HAS BRILLIANT PUZZLES THAT MAKE NO SENSE, UNTIL THEY DO

Case in point: the rubber chicken. Monkey Island is full of stuff, stuff that you—as wannabe pirate Guybrush Threepwood, who I'll get onto in just a second—pick up and shove inside your blouson, a shirt with infinite pocket space. There's room enough in there for a shovel, a sword, a couple of cooking pots, a red herring (get it, you see, at the bridge, with the troll, a red herring?), a box of delicious cereal, umpteen bananas, a fantastic idol that could get you killed, if you're a fool (or simply want to see Guybrush dead), and so much more. Sometimes items need combining to solve a story-blocking puzzle, but once it all clicks in your head, the logic jumps up and down on the skull like a blood-lusting big cat on a children's inflatable castle: It's all you can see, terrifyingly apparent now you've noticed it. The route to finding the Treasure of Mêlée Island, using dance steps, is simply glorious game design. Look, you know how when you played Portal 2, and you got to a really tough room, but then you cracked it and wow, the rush, eh? The Secret of Monkey Island has that in spades. OK, so the solutions can be more oblique, cerebrally befuddling and occasionally adroitly testing (in as much as sometimes you need to move quickly through the menus, or risk losing your grog all down your trousers), but there's no doubting their genius.

WATCH VICE'S NEW FILM, THE REAL 'BETTER CALL SAUL'?

IT HAS GENUINELY FUNNY JOKES IN IT

Not one-liners, as such, although it features its share of running-gag quips that pop up across the series, and the odd gem of a pun: "LeChuck? He's the guy that went to the Governor's for dinner and never wanted to leave. He fell for her in a big way, but she told him to drop dead. So he did." But Monkey Island has a strong sense of physical comedy to it, and a certain pungent pithiness to its patter that relays the impression that its writers might have once watch a Curtis/Elton production. Or, in other words, it's got the same high-quality ensemble cast banter—Threepwood, Governor Elaine Marley, the villainous LeChuck, the castaway Toothrot—as made Blackadder (after series one) such a treat. And it smashes the fourth wall at its end to take the piss out of itself, and you, the player, for spending your money on it in the first place. Ah-haaar.

Your man Guybrush here, and a Moon approximately way too fucking big to not kill us all by raising sea levels across the world

IT HAS A RELATABLE PROTAGONIST

Guybrush Threepwood, our protagonist who begins with no goal greater than to become a mighty pirate, is almost utterly useless at everything. His one talent from the outset: an ability to hold his breath under water for ten minutes, which may come in handy later on—assuming you're not so immediately handy with that weighing-you-down idol. We can all relate; most of us are completely without skills. This is the 21st century—robots do most things for us. Have you filled up a car lately? You can pay at the pump. It's like somebody made the world of Minority Report a reality 50 years ahead of schedule. Ask an average man to start a fire in a forest using just stones and twigs and he'll burst into tears, try to call an Uber, fail, and die there on the spot, because what's the point of going on any longer if you can't even get a 4G signal. But Guybrush is a sweetheart, a pure soul, as simple as a blank sheet of A4 and every bit as beautiful. You want him to succeed. And he will. Eventually. Not that he needs to.

BECAUSE WHILE YOU DO SORT OF HAVE TO "RESCUE THE PRINCESS", SHE'S A TOTAL BADASS

Guybrush, aka sugar boots, falls for Elaine; and Elaine, aka honey pumpkin, for Guybrush. It should be straight back to her mansion after said dockside epiphany for slaps and tickles atop some waxy lips, but the game's antagonist LeChuck, a ghost pirate terrorizing the waters of this entirely fictional Caribbean setting, goes and kidnaps her. Threepwood snaps into action, getting a ship and a crew and sailing to her rescue. Except, she keeps on escaping. She's the most resourceful character in the whole game. While the situation for her appears desperate come a climactic wedding scene, she's got the whole situation under control. Which is more than can be said for Guybrush, who ultimately needs Elaine to save him from getting his ass handed to him right across Mêlée.

Elaine rules, and is the real "hero" of the game

THE WORLD FEELS REAL (IT'S NOT, BUT LOOK, YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN)

Obviously Monkey Island isn't an open-world game, but its locations all feel legit, like "real" places. The jigsaw pieces all come together properly. Mêlée is a believable, albeit fantastical, hideaway for pirates without guts enough to even stitch up a sail, let alone take a vessel out onto the open sea. Monkey Island itself is a tropical paradise overrun by imbeciles—a castaway with a thing for giant monkey heads, and a bunch of cannibals who'd rather watch their weight with a steady diet of nutritious fruit than dine on red human meat night after night. It all fits within the fiction. Fast travel would be nice, though, as rowing that boat is a pain in the dick.

PIRATES, OBVIOUSLY

I don't feel any need to expand on this point.

THE MUSIC IS GORGEOUS

There are moments in modern open-world games when a crescendo rises in time with your ascent of some incredible peak and you're just yes, you know, video games. Monkey Island's not like that, but the music (oh, shit, here's a cliché, strap in) is just as much a part of its character as any of its central players, amazing places, or perplexing puzzles (think I got away with it). Composer Michael Land didn't exactly get along with the tech he had to work with, unsurprising given this game dates from the Iron Age of the industry. But his arrangements, ultimately made using a bespoke music system called iMUSE, absolutely capture a Caribbean that wouldn't feel out of place in a Saturday morning cartoon. And they're wonderful today, immediately evocative of the horizons they were designed to accompany—unless, that is, you've the misfortune to stumble across some no-name dance producer's absolute butchering of its main theme.

Probably the least-threatening cannibals ever encountered in video gaming

IT'S A GAME THAT ANYONE CAN PLAY, LIKE, ANYONE, EVEN YOUR MoM WHO HATES THESE BLEEPING, BUZZING THINGS

No fiddly controls. No cursing, no violence. (Well, sort of, you know, I'll get to that, hold on). You can't die. (OK, you can. But you really have to be committed to it, or distracted by a leaking tap, or champion-gobshite Jehovah's Witnesses at your door.) That makes the game sound completely challenge free. And in terms of contemporary obstacles, it is: You need not learn crazy button combinations, or muck about with dialogue wheels while a timer shrinks, or make any decisions that will lead to the demise of an ally. It plays at the pace you want it to—save for the grog-in-the-lock bit, and the point-the-cannon-at-the-island part, and probably a couple of others I've forgotten about. But if they're proving tricky, call a mate over who's handy with the quick reactions. For the most part, it is a game that anyone, whatever their age or previous experience with the medium, can play, and, more importantly, enjoy.

With its own form of grinding, too, as you couldn't just crash into insult sword fighting while green around the gills. You needed to walk the mean paths of Mêlée, stopping swashbuckling sorts and challenging them to a trade-off of pun-tickled put-downs. Losing is necessary to learn enough comebacks to go up against the island's legendary Sword Master, Carla—the second main female character in the game, and another who's way tougher than any of its dudes. Best her and she'll join your crew on the voyage to rescue Elaine—who, as we've established, really doesn't need any help. Insult sword fighting was removed for Monkey Island's sequel, LeChuck's Revenge, but reinstated for the third game in the series, The Curse of Monkey Island. Because it's great, and while LeChuck's Revenge is arguably better than its predecessor, the lack of witty ripostes while engaged in blade-clashing combat inarguably made it less memorable.

IT'S AVAILABLE AS A REMASTER THAT DOESN'T SHIT ALL OVER THE ORIGINAL VERSION

Play the game's special edition, as I am right now on PS3, and with a simple tap of the select button, the screen shifts back to the visuals I remember from the Amiga. So even if you hate the voice acting and "improved" visuals of the 20th anniversary revision, the original game's still in there, just beneath the hood. Still funnier than a game you've played a dozen times has any right to be. Still the right side of frustrating. Still fantastic, whatever other options argue their cases from the growing pile of shame. I'll probably still be playing it another 20 years from now, assuming the rising tides haven't done us all in by then.

Follow Mike on Twitter.

More from VICE Gaming:

Tim Schafer Discusses the Classic Video Games, 'Grim Fandango' and 'Monkey Island'

'Metal Gear Solid 3', I Love You With All My Heart

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For what it's worth, Donald Trump has squandered the Muslim vote in Iowa this year.

Obviously all the scare-mongering around Muslims appeals to a broader base of perpetually fed-up conservatives, and polls show that their votes are probably enough for Trump to win the caucus on Monday. But in the "ground game" phase of Iowa Caucus season, when campaigns fight tooth and nail for every last vote, it's easy to imagine a campaign manager on the verge of defeat in one precinct or another, pausing for a split-second to question the wisdom of reducing an entire religious group to collateral damage.

On April 7 of last year Trump was in Des Moines, Iowa, to strategize with Iowa Campaign manager Chuck Laudner. It was also Muslim Day at the capitol building in Des Moines. Miriam Amer, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in Iowa, was there that day, and watched as Trump strode through the building and rebuffed an offer of a free Halal lunch with what seemed to be a scowl, but could easily have been Trump's neutral expression.

Photo courtesy of Miriam Amer/CAIR Iowa

CAIR Iowa President Lisa Killinger went after Trump, Amer told me. "She introduced herself. He had pictures taken with her and another woman wearing a Somali headscarf. He was fairly pleasant," she said.

The following month, Trump came back to Iowa for the 2015 National Security Summit. This time he spouted some wildly inaccurate remarks about Muslim Syrians entering the country more easily than Christian Syrians, and the speech sowed the seeds of one of the centerpieces of his campaign: a ban on Muslim immigration.

It was Ben Carson who spoke out against the possibility of a Muslim president, and called dangerous Syrian refugees "mad dogs," but Trump is the frontrunner, and he's got myriad serious policy proposals that affect Muslim Americans.

In Trump's words, it's time for a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States." He also supports a database of Muslims. He thinks Muslims should be profiled by suspicious neighbors. Also, a Justice Department under President Trump would likely be tasked with carrying out surveillance of "certain mosques."

It goes without saying that his remarks have mostly alienated him from American Muslims. But Iowa happens to be among the 20 states where Islam is the largest non-Christian religion. Bolstered by the presence of a large number of Bosnian refugees who arrived under President Bill Clinton, Iowa now has more Muslims than Jews. It's also one of only seven states with a Muslim in its state legislature.

But that doesn't mean they all vote the same way. "People think of Muslims as one big monolithic mass of people," Amer said. "We're individuals." Indeed, I searched for the political conscience of Muslims in Iowa, and apart from opposition to Trump, they were all over the place.

"The Republican Party is a party of faith, safety, and security. I am, to be honest, a registered Republican because of these values," Imam Taha Tawil told me over tea and dates in the meeting hall below The Mother Mosque of America in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The Mother Mosque is the oldest continually operating Mosque in the United States, and the first building in the US built specifically to be a mosque. It holds a spot in the National Registry of Historic Places.

Imam Taha, in the Mother Mosque's prayer room

Tawil has a gentle tone of voice, a wise-man inflection, and a tendency to steer the conversation toward spiritual aphorisms—as any Imam should. But he's also an Iowan, meaning he's willing to talk politics at the drop of a hat, as long as you don't ask him to endorse a particular candidate. It doesn't sound like he'll be caucusing for a certain billionaire TV personality. Tawil called Trump a "great man," and praised his charisma and business acumen, but then added, "he just has some bad ideas."

As a Palestinian born in Jerusalem in the 1950s, Tawil told me he was forced from the city and into Shuafat Refugee Camp in 1967. "I know what occupation is. I know subjugation. When Trump talks about camps, I know where it leads, and that's not America," he told me.

Tawil wants to tell all of this to Trump in person. He went to great lengths to invite the candidate over for a meeting—a reasonable request since Trump's whistle-stop tour of Iowa brought him within 1.3 miles of the Mother Mosque. The national media helped him publicize the invitation, but it went unheeded.

Tawil sees Trump's snub as a shame most of all because he has a vision for the Republicans. "The Republican party needs to rejuvenate and restructure itself. It needs to embrace instead of alienating."

But while the loss of loyal Republicans like Tawil might be costly to an individual candidate on Monday night, the loss of another group could be even costlier during the general election in this swing state: centrist Muslim Iowans.

Hassan Igram

According to Hassan Igram, president and CEO of Cedar Graphics, a giant printing facility in Hiawatha, Iowa, "Muslims by nature tend to be more conservative." But this year, Igram feels torn between Democrat Martin O'Malley and Republican John Kasich. He was impressed by a Bernie Sanders rally, but he called the Vermont Senator, "a little too left for my taste."

Igram, a third generation Iowan who sounds like actor Stanley Tucci when he speaks, said in the past he has voted for George W. Bush, and caucused for Ron Paul. Conservatives tend to be more his speed, because he's a businessman, but he told me he had voted for Democrats in the past as well.

This year, though, all the Islamophobia troubles him. "It's one thing for the media, especially the right-wing media to bash Muslims," he told me. "Right now, everybody's paying attention to the politicians and what they're saying when they focus their campaign on fear-mongering."

The roots of Iowa's Muslim community are Syrian and Lebanese, which made it something of a personal affront to Igram when Republican Governor Terry Branstad blocked Syrian refugees from entering Iowa. "We were going to accept 600 Syrians. They were going to be here last month. We got clothing and furniture—you name it—for them. The governor slammed the door shut because of what happened in San Bernardino," Amer told me.

So Igram says he confronted Branstad in person about it, and "really worked him over." At a reception for business leaders on January 4, Igram recalls railing about the economic drawbacks of closing Iowa off to refugees. "Our community has been extremely productive, and our history is known to everyone. You're afraid one bad apple is going to come in," he says he told the governor.

"Unfortunately ISIS has found a way to sabotage us," Igram added, his tone changing slightly. "Fear is somewhat justified because it's happened."

Iowa, though, has not seen a terrorist attack. Members of Iowa's Muslim community like Almardi Abdalla, a social worker and expert in terrorism and national security, was eager to point out to the Des Moines Register earlier this month that Muslims in Des Moines police themselves for radicalization.

Islamic Center of Cedar Rapids

What seems to be Iowa's single brush with terrorist activity occurred in the weeks just after 9/11. Youssef Hmimssa was a Moroccan immigrant based in Detroit who was busted as part of a terror probe in Cedar Rapids 18 days after the deadliest terror attack in US history. He had only lived in Cedar Rapids for a few months. Hmimssa wound up being a witness in the terrorist case, and was only charged with credit card fraud. I asked the local chapter of the FBI if they could point me toward any other Islamic terror-related events in Iowa. Their representative said anything considered public information would be on the FBI website. There was nothing else.

I also asked Ahmed Souaiaia, an professor of religious studies at the University of Iowa, if there was any sign of Islamic extremism in Iowa, he explained that the Islamic State appeals to members of the Wahhabis sect or believers in Salafi jihadism, which aren't typically part of the conversation in your friendly neighborhood mosque. "I must say that I am not aware of any ISIL influenced Wahhabis or Salafis in the area," Souaiaia told me in an email.

Still, Igram says it's natural for the community to be a little paranoid when someone in the Muslim community seems like their beliefs are becoming extreme. "Before 9/11, I wouldn't have thought much of it," but, he imagined what would happen if the next San Bernardino were planned in his backyard. "If he comes from Cedar Rapids, all of a sudden we're harboring terrorists."

Imam Hassan Selim, the Egyptian-born head holy man of the Islamic Center of Cedar Rapids just became an American citizen last year. This is the first time he'll get to participate in Iowa's odd form of democracy, and he picked a weird year to jump into the fray.

"To be honest, I'm confused," he told me when I asked if he was ready to caucus. "I need to have a crash course on how it works. My wife is American by birth. She's lived here her entire life, and she's been politically active, so she teaches me how the whole thing works," he said. "I'm kind of set on who I'm not going to vote for. So that limits my options and makes it easy for me," he added, playing the clergy card and keeping his specific choice to himself.

Growing up in Egypt during the three-decade reign of Hosni Mubarak, Selim didn't grow up with things like participatory democracy, or political dissent. But he says political discourse existed. "I can make the argument that it's more mature than what's here," he told me. Egyptians, he said, used to discuss "real issues that affect everyone, no matter your race religion ethnicity or background. What's really taken into consideration is the wellbeing and future of the country, and economic progress," he said.

The Mother Mosque of America

He was frustrated by how often he turns on the news and sees the conversations reduced to the absolute rudiments. "You only hear people saying 'Oh, we need to get rid of the Muslims, and we need to keep our guns,' and those are the only things being said." But he prefers the US, because arguing in Egypt, he said, is, "not really productive in the sense that it can really reflect real life."

But while the campaign might be fomenting paranoia about their religion, no one I spoke to seemed to be trembling in fear about any possible outcome of the election. Igram said nothing the candidates said to get through the caucus season, not even the "hatred" and "fear-mongering," were likely to have any effect at all. "The rhetoric is absolutely meaningless," he said.

Amer relished the thought of it all being over. "They're going to be licking their wounds. And we'll go back to being what we were before the elections, and the last reporter that leaves Iowa after the caucuses, please turn out the lights."

Meanwhile, Imam Tawil seems to relish his role in the democratic process. "I do my best to show the best face of Muslims in Iowa. We are very important," he told me. "I may find a better job somewhere else, but without the people, the love, the cooperation, the respect, it's not worth it," he said.

"It may not be a famous place like the big cities, but we are Iowans, and we're proud of it."

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Bernie Sanders. Photo via Flickr user Phil Roeder

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

US News

Sanders Raises $20 Million in One Month
With hours to go before voting begins in Iowa, Bernie Sanders's campaign has announced it raised $20 million in January. He received more than 770,000 individual donations last month, pushing his total past 3.2 million, a number not seen before at this stage in previous presidential campaigns.—USA Today

CIA Uses 'Eyewash' to Fool Employees
US officials have revealed that the CIA circulates false information internally—a tactic known as "eyewash"—to protect operations overseas. Critics say there is no way to distinguish between truth and falsehoods in the records turned over to Congress.—The Washington Post

Trump Staffer Claims Sex Discrimination
A former Donald Trump staffer, 26-year-old Elizabeth Mae Davidson, has accused the campaign of sex discrimination. She claims Trump told her and another female volunteer, "You guys could do a lot of damage," referring to their looks.—The New York Times

Virginia Students Charged with Murder of Teenager
Two Virginia Tech students have been arrested in connection with the death of 13-year-old Nicole Lovell. David Eisenhauer, 18, has been charged with murder. Virginia police said Natalie Keepers, 19, who faces accessory charges, "helped Eisenhauer dispose of Nicole's body."—NBC News

International News

WHO Holds Zika Emergency Talks
An emergency meeting of the World Health Organization (WHO) is being held in Geneva to discuss whether the Zika virus should be declared a global emergency. WHO officials have said Zika is moving quickly "from a mild threat to one of alarming proportions." —BBC News

Boko Haram Firebomb Nigerian Village
At least 86 people, including several children, have been killed in a series of attacks on a village in northern Nigeria. Witnesses said suspected Boko Haram militants firebombed huts and and opened fire on families in the village of Dalori.—Al Jazeera

Myanmar Kickstarts Democracy
Myanmar's parliament will choose its first democratically elected government in more than 50 years today. One of the first jobs of the new parliament, dominated by Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD), will be choosing a new president.—Reuters

Islamic State Behind Damascus Bombing
The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for a car bomb and two suicide bombers that killed at least 60 people in southern Damascus. The explosions occurred as Syria's government and some opposition representatives met in Geneva for peace talks.—VICE News

A human embryo at three days. Photo via Wikipedia.

Everything Else

Diversity Reigns at SAG Awards
Idris Elba won two awards for Beasts of No Nation and his TV series Luther at the Screen Actors Guild Awards in a ceremony that presented a stark contrast to the #SoWhiteOscars. Queen Latifah, Uzo Aduba, and Viola Davis also won acting prizes.—Variety

British Scientists to Start 'Gene Editing'
Scientists in the UK have been given the go-ahead to genetically modify human embryos for the very first time. The experiments will attempt to figure what goes wrong in miscarriages.—Sky News

Greek Soccer Stars Protest Refugee Deaths
Players from AEL Larissa and Acharnaikos sat down in silence for two minutes after their match began to protest the treatment of refugees crossing the Aegean Sea. The stadium announcer told the crowd it was a call to action.—BuzzFeed News

YouTubers Use Minecraft to Prey on Fans
One Minecraft YouTuber called LionMaker, with over 600,000 subscribers, has allegedly tweeted naked photos of an underage fan. An investigation reveals it isn't the first time an adult allegedly preyed on children using the game.—Motherboard

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Photo by Nick Sethi

On August 13th of last year, Kerby Jean-Raymond stared down the barrels of three Glock 19 handguns aimed at him by a trio of blue-clad New York City police officers. The 28-year-old is the designer behind Pyer Moss, the high-end fashion label that makes $3,000 leather jackets and dresses celebrities like Usher and Rihanna. He's about as far from a "thug" as you can get. And yet, there he was in some coppers' crosshairs, one false move away from having his name added to that long, sad list of unarmed black men who've been gunned down by police.

He hadn't done anything to provoke the confrontation. He'd just decided to take an evening stroll around his neighborhood in Jamaica, Queens, while he talked on the phone with his cousin. His free hand was wrapped in a cast, a casualty of a recent jet-skiing trip in Ibiza. Being a fashion designer known for his dark palette, he had opted for a black-colored cast. But in the eyes of the boys in blue that night, Kerby wasn't a young man just taking a walk, and his cast wasn't just a cast; he was someone threatening, carrying something lethal.

As Kerby lifted his injured hand to scratch his face, he heard a voice bark out at him: "Put it down! Put it down!" He turned to his left and saw three police officers pointing their firearms at his body. They thought his cast was a gun. "I felt like I wanted to piss on myself," he told me. "I just yelled, 'It's a cast! It's a cast! It's a cast!'"

After they lowered their weapons, one of the cops came over and patronizingly patted Kerby on the back. "Next time, get a yellow one," he said, furthering the notion that it was Kerby's fault that he'd almost been shot while walking around his own neighborhood, minding his own business.

Photos by Getty. Courtesy of Pyer Moss

That moment wasn't the first heated encounter Kerby, a New York City native, had with the NYPD, but the intensity of it gave him the push he needed to radicalize his work in fashion. It wasn't long after that incident that the designer dedicated Pyer Moss's entire spring/summer 2016 show to protesting American law enforcement's extrajudicial killings of unarmed black people. "I realized I had to use my show to talk about this problem. It's not going away, it's happening everywhere, all the time."

This stand was an extremely bold move for New York Fashion Week. Despite all the claims of artistic expression, at the end of the day, NYFW is about commerce. It's where fashion editors and buyers who run retail businesses go to decide what they want to sell. It's certainly not a political space. By practically staging a Black Lives Matter demonstration during his show, Kerby stuck his neck out in a way that not only put him at odds with his fashion peers, but also fucked up his business. The now infamous collection and show cost him $63,000 dollars to produce, and it lost his label more than $120,000 in business when retailers pulled their orders because they saw his message as bad for their bottom line.

Photos by Getty. Courtesy of Pyer Moss

Although the show was attended by the usual cohort of magazine editors, professional buyers, and fashionable celebrities such as rappers A$AP Ferg and Angel Haze, it was no ordinary NYFW presentation. Before Kerby's models even hit the runway, he played a searing video consisting of pointed interviews with the family members of black people murdered in acts of police violence, such as Sean Bell's fiancée, Nicole Bell, and Eric Garner's daughter, Emerald Garner. The interviews were interlinked with graphic video footage of police brutality and photographs of victims such as Tamir Rice and Walter Scott.

After the video began, male and female models wearing Kerby's latest collection came streaming down the catwalk. But these were not your typical runway looks. Their shoes were doused in fake blood, and their garments bore the names of dead citizens such as Eric Garner. One model wore white shoes with Garner's last words—"I can't breathe"—scrawled on them in black marker. But the pièce de résistance came in the form of radical graffiti.

"Kerby told me, 'Now go out there and shake the can,'" said artist Gregory Siff, who ran onto the catwalk and spray-painted the garments of three models during the show. The stunt, which was intended to look impromptu, symbolized the indiscriminate and inevitable nature of police violence against the black community—it's a brand of violence that Kerby feels we're all a bit too comfortable with.

Photo by Nick Sethi

I met Kerby a week after that show at his design studio and production factory, located on the 14th floor of a midcentury building in Manhattan's Garment District. There were rows and rows of silver rolling racks stuffed with the clothes from his past collections. A mood board sat above a makeshift office desk, plastered with pictures of models in his typically elongated garments. And in the back, there were several sewing machines and cabinets full of colorful fabrics stacked on top of one another, ready to be cut into handmade samples.

Kerby's lanky six-foot frame floated toward me on one of those electric hoverboards that got Wiz Khalifa arrested. He was rocking a look that seemed to come straight out of his runway shows. He sported a low-cut fade, a T-shirt of his own design that borrowed the cut of a baseball jersey, black shorts over skin-tight Nike compression pants, and a pair of perforated Air Jordan 6 Retros in black, grey, and infrared.

This was an intense time for the young designer. He was still grappling with both the critical praise and the financial setbacks of his last show, but he seemed to take it all in stride—possibly because the trials he faces today as a designer are nothing compared with the obstacles he's had to overcome in his journey from growing up in a three-story walk-up in a rough part of East Flatbush, Brooklyn to owning his own global million-dollar business.

Photo by Nick Sethi

Since launching Pyer Moss, in 2013, Kerby has produced five successful collections. His gear is retailed in 21 stores worldwide, including the iconic British boutique Browns of London, which is known for supporting the likes of Alexander McQueen and Christopher Kane early in their careers.

Unlike many other designers, he also owns his own factory, which is in the same space as his design studio. He uses the factory not just for Pyer Moss but for making the clothes of emerging designers who "don't have the facility space or who are getting gouged because New York is such an expensive place to produce." Not to mention, when he's off work, he whips around New York City in a sophisticated Batmobile.

All these things—the car, the factory, the long list of orders—seemed to embody Kerby's ascendance. But in light of his near-death experience in Queens, these material and professional successes haven't insulated him from being treated like any other black man on the streets of New York City. And it's that painful duality that's ever-present in his best work.

"I can't imagine myself doing anything else," Kerby said to me about the firestorm caused by his last collection. "I live to do this, but at the same time, I don't like the industry. People assign this magic to fashion, but for me it's about what you can do with fashion."

Although he's lost some business, his approach has earned him the respect of fashion vets such as Marc Ecko, who said to me, "I respect that he uses his platform and his time in this place to express something more than simply fashion as a product. He doesn't have to do that, but he does—and that's bold to me."

Photo by Nick Sethi

The sense of responsibility that Kerby brings to fashion can be traced back to his youth in East Flatbush. I rode there with him in his souped-up car to get a better understanding of who he is. Typical for New York City, the historically Caribbean neighborhood has changed a great deal over the past ten years. Today, it's becoming increasingly gentrified, with a Target and homes that can fetch $1,000,000. But when Kerby was growing up there in the 90s, the crime rate was more than 70 percent higher, and the neighborhood was ground zero for the crack epidemic and all of the violence that came with it.

Like Kerby, many of the artists who grew up in this area tinge their expression with the struggles of black urban life: Local rappers who've come to national prominence such Bobby Shmurda and the Joey Bada$$ use their music to paint grim pictures of the violence that Kerby saw growing up. Meechy Darko of the Flatbush Zombies put it like this in the song "Blacktivist": "My biography is gory. / My life like an American horror story... / Second Amendment, nigga, grab your guns. / Invest in a vest if you're from those slums..."

Kerby saw this kind shit on a daily basis. His face still bears the scar of a stabbing he suffered on the playground by another student when he was only 11 years old. And our first stop in East Flatbush was the corner where his cousin, Maton Pierre, was shot in the back of the head in January 2012. It was also only a few streets away from where 16-year-old Kimani Gray was killed by two plainclothes police officers the following year. The fact that Kerby was able to avoid the perils that have decimated so many of the people he grew up with is not lost on him. "I have a certain survivor's guilt of being somewhat removed from the neighborhood," he said to me.

Next we went back to his childhood home, a red three-story walk-up across the street from his elementary school. He was raised there by his Haitian father, who still resides in the house. Kerby's mother, however, died in 1994, when he was only seven years old. The designer didn't find out she had passed until a neighborhood kid teased him about it when he was 11 years old. He came home and confronted his father, demanding to know what had happened. But his father felt that a young Kerby "couldn't handle" the truth. Instead, his dad told him that she was on vacation in Haiti. Kerby's father still hasn't revealed to him how his mother departed.

"My stepmother told me had sickle cell anemia. But I was a science wiz at the time. if she had the trait, then I'd have ." Kerby said these misdirections only made him lash out more when he was young. Today, the pain is still with him. So he inscribes the number "94" on many of his garments, a nod to the year she died. And his brand's monicker is a direct homage to his mother's name, which was Vania Moss Pierre.

"My brother's mother passed when he was really young, and I think that has shaped him into a very ambitious person," said Florence Duval, Kerby's cousin, who considers Kerby her brother because they were raised together. "You know, when people go through things, it makes them want to have more and live better. He was always a very determined and focused child, and he always went for what he wanted."

Photo by Nick Sethi

When Kerby was young, what he wanted was sneakers. Even in his preteens, he was lusting after the kicks worn by the older high school kids, because they had everything—Air Max 95s, Jordan XIs, Huaraches...

"I couldn't really afford Jordans, so I would get the Eastbay catalogues and circle and cut out the ones I wanted," said the designer, who now has a collection of more than 700 pairs of sneakers he keeps in storage. His obsession with sneakers grew until those sneaker cut-outs covered his bedroom door and school notebooks.

When it came time to apply for a high school, Kerby saw in the New York City high school catalogue a course called "Garment Construction," held at the High School of Fashion Industries. He decided to apply there because he thought that class would get him one step closer to the sneakers he wanted and maybe a job designing at Nike. But it didn't work out quite the way he planned.

"The first thing I had to do in the class was make a baby romper out of fabric with M&M logos all over it. I hated it," he said. "The whole time I was making it, I was thinking, This is stupid. Who would wear this? But my sister had her first baby around that time, and I gave her the romper. It was a testament for me. It was like a launching pad, because I thought, What else could I make ?"

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The High School of Fashion Industries, located in Manhattan's affluent Chelsea neighborhood, was an escape for Kerby from the Brooklyn street life that was swallowing up so many of his friends. But it wasn't a totally smooth transition. "I got in trouble for the first year for being disruptive in class, and my homeroom teacher gave me an ultimatum to either take a suspension or intern with her roommate, who was an assistant to fashion designer Kay Unger. I took the internship because I didn't want my dad to kick my ass."

Kay Unger is a veteran New York designer who's a member of the Council of Fashion Designers of America. Her brand is found at nearly every major department store, and powerful women such as Oprah and Hillary Clinton wear her clothes. She met Kerby a week after he started his internship and quickly made him her personal apprentice.

"Right off the bat, I saw in Kerby an innate talent for design thinking and solving problems," Unger said. "He has always had an element of genius for understanding a consumer and for finding the straight line between two points."

In 2003, when Kerby was 15 years old, Unger gave him $150 so he could start his own T-shirt line, which was first called Mary's Jungle and later called Montega's Fury. In 2009, he sold that line for $14,000 to help pay for his tuition at Hofstra University, on Long Island. When Unger helped actress Georgina Chapman and model Keren Craig start the high fashion label Marchesa, she brought Kerby on board so he could see firsthand how to build a successful brand. This was essential training for his future work with Pyer Moss.

"Kerby is an intellectual designer," Unger told me. "He has seen so much in his short life. Now a very successful brand, Pyer Moss is a platform for Kerby to share his knowledge, to voice his own perspective, and to interject against racism and unfair treatment of blacks throughout our country. Kerby's vision is all about how we move forward as a culture and as a society in order to redefine the narratives that haunt our past and define our present."

By weaving messages that question systemic inequality in America into his designs, Kerby Jean-Raymond is providing a new model for what high fashion can do and whom it can come from.

Kerby showed the first collection of Pyer Moss almost two years ago. "I needed stuff that would fit my long arms," he explained to me, holding his arms. "I made a motorcycle jacket and a few shirts that fit my arms and long torso. My girlfriend at the time said I should make it into a collection." His former girlfriend and current operations manager for Pyer Moss, Brittney Escovedo, helped Kerby's first camouflage motorcycle jacket get on the back of pop singer Rihanna, who wore it immediately and set the blogs on fire, creating hype that propelled the brand.

"I am a supporter of people realizing their dreams, so it was natural for me to push Kerby to start Pyer Moss," said Escovedo. "His passion was undeniable. He had a unique perspective that I knew would be well received. He worked tirelessly to get the fit and aesthetic just right, and I leveraged my relationships to make sure that Pyer Moss was getting the attention of the fashion elite."

Pyer Moss is all about mixing old-school tailoring and more futuristic athletic-inspired gear. As such, according to Kerby, "the Pyer Moss aesthetic is shorts over compression pants and a leather jacket." This blend of utility and luxury quickly attracted fans like LeBron James and performers like Usher, who had Kerby design his entire wardrobe for his last tour. "The man understands shape well," Usher told me. "He cuts his clothes in a way that represent the culture but doesn't bastardize it."

Photo by Nick Sethi

Today, Kerby's Pyer Moss label sits at the cutting edge of American fashion, not just because its unique pairing of sportswear and tailoring, but also because of its bold use of fashion to spark awareness about bigger issues. This political consciousness didn't start with the last collection; instead it's been growing steadily as a defining element of the brand. With this approach, Kerby puts himself alongside innovators like Alexander McQueen and Hussein Chalayan, who challenged dominant perceptions in society with their bold presentations.

Kerby is also having an impact by simply being a black designer in the upper echelons of the fashion industry, which has long been plagued by diversity issues. Right now, African American designers only account for 12 of the CFDA's 470 members. Not to mention, black designers only made up 2.7 percent of NYFW's officially scheduled 260 shows in the fall/winter 2015 season. And unfortunately, there are still a lot of institutional obstacles keeping things that way. Kerby commented on this with his fall/winter 2015 collection, which was partially inspired by the fact that a PR company who repped Hood by Air passed on representing him because they said they "already had a black designer" on their roster.

Photo by Nick Sethi

Of the small number of black designers who have actually reached the level attained by Kerby, the majority of them chose to remain silent about the injustices that plague the black community. By weaving messages that question systemic inequality in America into his designs, Kerby is providing a new model for what high fashion can do and whom it can come from. He's also creating a new lane for more youths from urban communities to drive down.

I saw this impact firsthand as I sat in the passenger seat of his Audi R8, racing west down 47th Street. When we stopped at a light in Midtown, a young Dominican boy wearing a baseball uniform saw Kerby, a young black man who looked like him, behind the wheel of his very expensive, elite car. He ran up on us and asked what kind of car Kerby was driving. Kerby told him with a smile. Then he started to guess what Kerby did for a living to have such a nice ride—but he couldn't get it right. Of course, design never crossed his mind. "Are you in real estate?" the kid asked. A stunned expression washed over Kerby's face. He poked his head out the window as he rolled through the light and said, "No, I'm a fashion designer."

Pyer Moss will be showing its fall/winter 2016 collection on February 13th during New York Fashion Week. Check back to VICE.com later this month for our coverage of Kerby Jean-Raymond's latest creations.

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A man in Cambodia's Anlong Veng district stands with a homemade rocket. Photo by Beth Ann Lopez

It was on an overcast January day in Cambodia when I saw what must be one of the world's most bizarre and dangerous gambling events: betting on homemade rocket launches.

The gamblers' site was a large clearing on top of the thickly-forested Dangrek Mountains in northern Cambodia, just a five-minute drive from the Thai border.

Unfortunately for the Cambodians living in the valley below, the cloudy sky did little to dampen the spirits of the hundreds of Thai gamblers who had gathered there to launch around a dozen 30-foot-long bamboo rockets in the space of a couple hours.

Equipped with wide-brim hats and binoculars, the Thais—men, women, even children—chatted underneath parasols while Thai pop music blasted from speakers. Sellers hawked whiskey, beer, and grilled meats to the crowd as they waited for launch.

Suddenly, the countdown began, and a massive puff of white smoke erupted underneath a rocket. A few earsplitting seconds later, the missile was already thousands of feet high, screeching across the Cambodian countryside like a bamboo banshee.

As the rocket became a speck in the sky, a spotter shouted a number of variables—how long the rocket stayed up, how high it went, whether it disintegrated in mid-air or plummeted straight to the ground. The missiles are crudely assembled on site with duct tape, so each one's performance is anyone's guess.

A rocket takes off. Photo by the author

At stake are vast sums of money and the spectacle is undeniably captivating. But, amazingly, the gamblers don't seem to give a damn about what happens to the rockets after they're fired off. And, apparently, neither does the Cambodian government.

The rockets have become a part of everyday life in the villages by the mountains of Cambodia's rural Anlong Veng district. You can spot them pretty much everywhere: lying in someone's yard, leaning on trees, even being used to build a fence.

Touch Nim, who lost his leg below the knee in the Khmer Rouge conflict and whose day-to-day life has been greatly affected by the nearby rocket gambling. Photo by Beth Ann Lopez

Last September, 64-year-old farmer Touch Nim and his grandkids were nearly struck by one as they worked their field. Realizing a rocket was hurtling directly towards them, they jumped into a bamboo thicket and narrowly escaped almost certain injury or death.

"The rocket got stuck in the bamboo right above my head," Nim told me.

From disabled veterans like Nim to the schoolchildren in the nearby primary school, the fear of being struck by a rocket is constant.

Chuon Ny's grandchild carries a spent rocket. Photo by Beth Ann Lopez

Chuon Ny's tiny wooden home near the village of Srah Chhouk has been under constant aerial assault for the past few months, as evidenced by the four massive spent rockets lying around her property.

"We are so nervous and afraid of the rockets coming," the 52-year-old said as she chopped cassava crops.

The projectiles aren't high school science fair material—they're dozens of feet long and powered by a giant blue PVC pipe packed with potassium nitrate and charcoal. "The smoke from one rocket got into our water supply, and the kids got very sick," Ny said. Out of fear, she has sent her grandchildren to a different village.

Prom Su, whose rice fields have been burned by the rockets. Photo by Beth Ann Lopez

"You can hear the noise, but you just don't know where it's going to fall down," said Prak Phoan, a 65-year-old farmer. He said one once fell only 30 feet away from him.

So far, no human casualties have been reported, but they cause plenty of real damage. Entire fields have burned down, and one rocket managed to obliterate the roofs of two adjacent houses in one go.

"It burned my rice field in two different places—I had to put out the fire myself," said farmer Prom Su, 61.

"There were some little girls in the field at the time. They ran and hid in the trees like chickens," he recalled.

The entrance to a gambling den, from where rockets are launched. Photo by Beth Ann Lopez

Rocket gambling has grown increasingly common in Thailand's northeast as a corruption of the traditional Bang Fai festival, during which rockets (some shaped like penises) are fired into the sky as part of an ancient fertility ritual to herald the rainy season.

But illegal gambling rings hijacked the festival for profit, setting up massive arenas where the rockets are launched on and off season with no oversight. Even though gambling is illegal in Thailand, the dens became so popular that they spiraled into a perverse competition about which outfit could build the biggest and baddest rockets.

Worried that the souped-up projectiles would down airplanes, the Thai army began cracking down on the gamblers in 2015.

Around that time, a savvy Cambodian man named Phal Samom cashed in on the ban by setting up a rocket launch arena right next to a Thai border crossing area.

Since mid-2015, usually three days a week, the gamblers launch at least 12 rockets a day, spreading panic below.

Workers prep a rocket for launch. Photo by Beth Ann Lopez

"We think the authorities get bribes from this company," said Khan Mao, a farmer and English tutor from Srah Chhouk.

"During a forum... we asked what would happen if someone got killed by a rocket. They just said they would make sure compensation was paid. Everyone got so angry. They really look down on people's lives," he said.

The locals' theories seemed to be confirmed by my first visit to the gambling den in October, back when the launches were located slightly closer to the border crossing. A Thai rocket builder said authorities were paid 100,000 baht ($2,800) every day the gambling went on.

Despite its obvious dangers, the operation has a prominently displayed "license" signed by one of Cambodia's most senior officials, National Police Chief Neth Savoeun. But Savoeun claimed to know nothing of the scheme when VICE contacted him, leaving it unclear whether the certificate was genuine or a forgery.

Spent rockets. Photo by Beth Ann Lopez

Meanwhile, a previous time I wrote about the rockets, a spokesman for Phal Samom attempted to bribe us not to publish the article. And during my latest visit, Cambodian soldiers guarding the gambling site questioned my driver, asking him if I was a journalist.

Sophal Ear, the author of Aid Dependence in Cambodia: How Foreign Assistance Undermines Democracy, told me that officials in Cambodia—which is routinely ranked as one of the most corrupt countries in the world—have a rich and sordid history of selling off licenses for dubious activities to the highest bidder.

"The authorities in countries like Cambodia act as gatekeepers, ensuring that those who pay win, and the poor lose," he said. "It's setting fire to people's homes and property, and never having to say you're sorry."

Additional reporting by Lay Samean

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A 16-year-old who pleaded guilty to two murder counts in court in Utah. (AP Photo/Deseret News, Laura Seitz, Pool)

Hundreds of Americans convicted of homicide as kids have a shot at freedom after last week's Supreme Court ruling Montgomery v. Alabama, which centered on 69-year-old Henry Montgomery killing an East Baton Rouge, Louisiana, police officer while he was skipping school in 1963.

As the New York Times reported, the decision basically requires retroactive enforcement of a 2012 Supreme Court decision, Miller v. Alabama, that banned mandatory sentences of life without parole for juvenile killers. Taken together, the rulings mark a dramatic shift in how America punishes young people convicted of violent crimes. But these changes didn't emerge solely from decade-long court fights.

In fact, they began in the laboratory.

In the 1990s, advances in neuroscience allowed experts to study and map the adolescent brain in ways they never had. As Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority in Roper v. Simmons, a 2005 decision that banned the death penalty for juveniles, studies were confirming what "any parent knows": Adolescents are, in fact, serial risk-takers who often give into peer pressure.

Or, to put it more scientifically, adolescents are "environmental sponges," says Dr. Judith Edersheim, co-founder and co-director of the Center for Law, Brain and Behavior at Harvard Medical School. Edersheim says the neurological studies began showing what psychological studies had indicated for decades: Children, and even young adults, are a product of their environments.

"Adolescence is a period of time when the brain is hyper plastic. It's a period of rapidly-changing brain," she says. "Adolescents are supposed to take risks. That's what their neurotransmitters and their brains are telling them. But they calculate risks differently from grown ups, and it has an evolutionary purpose and a neurological basis."

According to Edersheim, the adolescent brain undergoes a period of "pruning" before adulthood. So it's not that teens just turn into crazy people—rather, their brains begin to learn to "process efficiently." And to do that, they need to take cues from their surroundings.

The neuroscience, she says, debunked the myth of the young "superpredator" that preceded it. Buoyed by sensational cases like that of a Somerville, Massachusetts teen who stabbed his friend's mom to death over 90 times, experts in the 1990s predicted the era's troubled children would grow up to wreak havoc on society. Princeton Professor John DiIulio suggested in 1995 that there would be up to 270,000 "young predators" in the street by 2010, and criminologist James Alan Fox famously warned law enforcement, "Unless we act today, we're going to have a bloodbath when these kids grow up." (Both later conceded the trend was not borne out.)

While the latest high court ruling leaves room for judges to sentence juveniles convicted of murder to life without parole if they are deemed beyond saving, Edersheim argues "the new neuroscience of adolescent brain development is what makes 'incorrigibility' vanishingly rare." In other words, she believes the science shows that most juveniles can, in fact, be rehabilitated—even if the crime they committed is especially gruesome.

Laurence Steinberg, a professor of psychology at Temple University, was the lead scientist in all three of the American Psychology Association (APA) amicus briefs used in various Supreme Court rulings over the last decade reining in how we punish young killers. Each brief summarizes dozens of studies in the field of juvenile psychology and neuroscience.

"Rather than point to one specific study, we basically said, 'Look, there has been an accumulation of evidence showing that brain maturation, especially in regions that regulate self control, is still ongoing in late adolescence and maybe into early adulthood,'" Steinberg says.

Though psychological differences between adolescents and juveniles had been presented to the court in the past, Roper v Simmons was first big case where neurological data seemed to play a starring role.

Steinberg describes these findings in neuroscience as an "identifiable biological basis for the kind of common-sense observation that kids have more difficulty controlling their impulses and thinking ahead and resisting peer influence than adults do."

According to Steinberg, what was so revolutionary about these studies wasn't the conclusion that young people are impulsive and easily coerced into peer pressure. It was that for the first time, the Supreme Court took the research seriously.

"It took brain science to have people finally accept that," he said.

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Joyous scenes. Photo via Flickr user Andreas Kollmorgen

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

One of the worst stereotypes of big-city career ladder climbers is that they consider themselves better than people who live in small towns. They can't imagine why anyone would want things like strong family networks and affordable housing over pop-up Korean restaurants and the ability to buy booze after midnight. As you move from teens to 20s to 30s, there's the sense that you have to choose between a great job title and a shared flat with mold problems, and sticky-fingered babies in towns where Uber doesn't run and shops shut at 6 PM on a Saturday.

Happiness indexes point out similar issues each year that most likely contribute to people's well-being—money, proximity to family, a feeling that what you do is worthwhile, nice weather—but there also isn't necessarily one route to contentment. "What society teaches about finding fulfillment in life isn't the formula for everyone," says Laura Carroll, author of The Baby Matrix and a general expert on not growing up like your grandparents did. "We have to focus less on the 'life script' society pressures us to adopt, and more on creating a life that makes us happy—as we define it."

As the years roll on and I've found myself increasingly jaded about my mid-level media career, I start to wonder whether the "boring" route might have been the better one. The "happy families" Facebook pictures and new-build homes that I used to scoff at now spark twinges of jealousy. Dammit.

"If you know you want a family one day, then you need to be realistic," fertility expert Emma Cannon tells me. "Statistically if you want two children, you'll have more chance if you have your first before the age of 30. At 30 the chances of conceiving each month are 20 percent and at 40, this reduces to 5 percent." Ah. Cheery stuff for those who don't decide on children early. Carroll says that "settling down doesn't automatically lead to greater life satisfaction," but living in London hasn't given me financial stability, a loving relationship, or a neatly planned-out future. Were these people, whose lives I used to sneer at, now happier than me? I decided to ask, speaking to four friends back in Ipswich aged between 27 and 31, and all at different life stages.

Sherise, 28, Teacher

Sherise, with her boyfriend

VICE: What's your living situation like right now?
Sherise: I've just bought a house with my boyfriend, which we're renovating. We wouldn't have been able to do it without living at my parents' place.

What do you like about Ipswich?
Having my family so close. I know when we have children, my mum will be nearby to help out. I have lots of friends and a job I love too.

What's not so good?
It's small and everyone knows everyone—not great when I bump into my students' parents on nights out.

Do you encounter snobbery from friends who've moved away?
Yes. I have friends who are totally fixated on living in London. They'll come home and say, "Oh, I feel so sorry for you being stuck here." But it bothers me far less these days.

What's the key to a happy life for you?
Having a good work-life balance, and being with my boyfriend, friends, and family. So I guess that's Ipswich!

Hannah, 31, Mature Student

VICE: How would you describe your home life?
Hannah: I've got a 12-year-old son, and a baby on the way. I live with my fiancé and am in my last year of a social work degree.

What's the upside to staying in your hometown?
It's better economically. I received a bursary for students from the local area, which meant I could return to education. But I'm here out of necessity, rather than choice—I have a child in school.

What don't you like about it?
It's not very diverse, and there's a lot of cultural ignorance.

Would you recommend your children stay here?
To be honest, I'd encourage them to move away, just for the life experience. I do feel I missed out a bit.

What's a happy life for you?
Financial security. I'm not materialistic, but it's no fun being stressed about money. And, personally, I need access to art galleries and theaters.

Justine, 27, Engineering Manager

Justine, with her boyfriend

VICE: What life stage are you in?
Justine: I live with my boyfriend, who I've been with since I was 16, and we're thinking about emigrating to the US or Canada in the next few years.

Why did you stay in Ipswich?
I stayed at home to do my degree, because I was in a relationship here—there wasn't anything drawing me anywhere else. Often, I'll hear people say, "I can't wait to leave this town," but when you ask them why they can never give a proper answer. I think it's something they just feel like they have to do.

What's made you consider emigrating?
We went traveling around the USA—where I have family—and couldn't help wondering if we could have a better quality of life elsewhere. It's not that we're unhappy where we are, we're just wondering, Is this it?

What's happiness for you?
Having a job you love. And good relationships, whether that's with your family, friends, or a partner.

Lauren, 27, Social Worker

VICE: Why did you stay in Ipswich?
Lauren: I stayed at home for university. I was in a relationship with a footballer, and his career ended up coming first. I was young and naive, thinking I had to stay around for a boyfriend.

What's the upside to staying in your hometown?
I own two properties, which I rent out—there's no way I could've done that if I hadn't been at home. It's put me in a good financial position. I also have a strong social circle here.

And the downside?
I hate how early everything closes. Also, I'm single—and happy—while most people here are focused on marriage and kids. I don't think it's as bad as people make out, though. It's just like anywhere else, really.

Do you think you'll ever move?
I've always thought about moving, and still consider it, but it's so difficult to build a social circle from scratch. I've done placements in other cities, and I've been traveling, but always end up coming back.

What's key to a happy life for you?
Being happy with what you have, having the confidence to be yourself, and following your own vision.

In anticipation of the upcoming fourth season of our HBO show, which will premiere February 5 at 11 PM, we are releasing all of season three for free online along with updates to the stories. Today's installment follows up on a segment exploring the ongoing aftermath of the US invasion of Afghanistan, and what the withdrawal of American troops means for the country and its people.

Ben Anderson has spent an enormous amount of time in Afghanistan. "I went there in 2007 to make a film about the vicious fighting between undermanned, under-equipped British forces and the Taliban in Helmand, Afghanistan's most violent province," the reporter wrote in 2013. "But I became obsessed with what I witnessed there—how different it was from the conflict's portrayal in the media and in official government statements."

His extensive reporting in the country has informed a feature-length VICE documentary, a 2012 book, and, more recently, the above VICE HBO segment about what problems Afghanistan is facing now that America has withdrawn the vast majority of its troops. The prognosis is not good: The Taliban is still as powerful as ever, and the men, women, and children who fight them seemed desperate and embattled when Anderson visited them for the segment. President Barack Obama is reportedly reconsidering a plan to reduce the number of soldiers in the country from 9,800 to 5,500, but Anderson says that even with current troop levels the US isn't doing anything but making sure Afghanistan doesn't collapse suddenly—the prospects for anything that looks like victory, or peace, are looking increasingly remote.

We talked to Anderson about the best-case scenario for Afghanistan, how everyday Afghans feel about the country's deterioration, and what mistakes America made to get to this sad point.

VICE: You first visited Afghanistan in 2007. What were your initial impressions of the country back then?
Ben Anderson: There was still ferocious fighting on the ground every day. But the troops on the ground and the diplomats and everybody else had some optimism that they could pull it off—that they could beat the Taliban, that they could train the Afghan army and police. There were soldiers living 24 hours a day beside Afghan soldiers of Afghan police trying to train them.

Of course, as the years dragged and there were more and more attacks by the Afghan police and army against US and UK troops, the training became less and less serious. Eventually I think they gave up on the whole idea and decided to pull out.

Do you think that pulling out is a mistake, or were more serious mistakes made before Barack Obama decided to withdraw the troops?
Dozens of mistakes were made before pulling out. And because of those mistakes, the withdrawal was supposed to be "conditions-based"—that was the phrase Obama used. And it wasn't conditions-based at all. Had they looked at the conditions on the ground they would still be on the ground in just as many numbers. I just think the American public had no appetite at all to keep seeing soldiers return without legs or in body bags, not having any idea what the end goal was.

As we saw in that HBO episode, the country is still a war zone.
It's worse now than it was at the height of the US and UK presence there—in terms of casualties, the war is now in its bloodiest phase. And the Taliban control more land than they have since the initial invasion.

Do you think the failures in Afghanistan are a result of small-scale tactical errors or larger strategic blunders?
Tactically, every time I saw US or UK troops fight the Taliban, they won. I rarely saw the Afghan army or police succeed against the Taliban. Strategically, it was a massive failure. We didn't even try nation-building seriously until 2008 or 2009, and by then I think it was far too late—we had put some of Afghanistan's worst warlords back into power, which enabled support for the Taliban. And it meant that the population was very mistrustful of us and were very resentful of the government we were trying to impose. So much damage was done that by the time we actually took the mission seriously in 2008 or 2009 it was almost too late.

The big problem, of course, was the rush to Iraq. We thought we'd defeated the Taliban in a matter of days or weeks , and then rushed all the best men and equipment to Iraq. And that's the problem. I think the quote from George W. Bush back then was "we don't do nation-building"—they weren't interested in anything beyond a shock-and-awe bombing campaign to get rid of the Taliban, declaring victory, and then moving on. People always describe [the Afghanistan War] as "America's longest war," and technically that's true, but we took the first six or seven years of the war off.

How does the Taliban win so many victories against Afghan government forces? Is it better trained?
I think Taliban fighters battle in areas that they come from, which means they have relationships with the local population and can move around freely. They're fighting for their homelands, so they'll fight for years and years and years—whereas if you send some from the north of the country to the south, a lot of them don't really want to be there and they don't have that same level of commitment.

Also, doing what the Taliban do is relatively easy. Laying IEDs, attacking civilian targets, doing hit-and-run ambushes—that's much easier than clearing areas of Taliban, holding on to those areas, building up government infrastructure.

Can the West do anything to help Afghanistan that it's not doing, given that there doesn't seem to be much public support for sending more troops on the ground?
This is the problem: I think we've lost the appetite for nation-building, which you can't do without a big security force. So at the moment all we're seeing is a fairly limited training role , a fairly high—certainly increasing—number of airstrikes, and of course we continue to fund the Afghan security forces, because there's no way on earth the Afghan government could fund its own security forces. Right now, we're just about preventing catastrophe, but not much more. We're certainly not doing anything to improve the situation.

Has the attitude of everyday people in Afghanistan changed since the start of the war?
I think in the beginning there was hope that we would defeat the Taliban and provide all the services we promised. I hear much more scathing comments now about how we failed and then cut and run. Every Afghan I know who has a bit of money has an escape plan that he or she could enact at very short notice if needed.

What do you think is going to happen to the country in the next five or ten years? Will we just get perpetual war, or will there be some kind of ceasefire or equilibrium reached?
At the minute, peace negotiations are not looking good at all and they haven't for years. So yeah, perpetual civil war. I honestly think the best case scenario now is that the Taliban control the southern and eastern areas, and the Northern Alliance control the other areas, with a whole bunch of warlords having individual fiefdoms, and each side is happy with what they've got and don't push for more. But I think it's quite naive to think that that status quo could hold.

If you had told American officials back at the start of the war that that would the best-case scenario so many years later, I think they would have been appalled.
Oh, absolutely.

Do you think American politicians and officials have learned anything from Afghanistan?
I was going to say that they've learned there are no simple solutions to complicated problems like Iraq or Afghanistan, but if you listen to, in particular, the Republican presidential candidates, they seem to have learned nothing.

Certainly, the military has learned a great deal and will probably be reluctant to go in in any large numbers to Syria or Iraq again.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

A British prisoner before, during and after smoking spice. Screen shots via YouTube

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

Synthetic cannabis is big in Britain's prisons. It doesn't show up in piss tests, it doesn't smell anywhere near as pungent as the real stuff, and it's a very time- and cost-effective way of getting fucked up—though it does have the undesirable potential to make inmates shit themselves or attack stationary objects.

Now, the BBC reports, prison officers have started to get involuntary hallucinations off the legal high—often branded "spice"—after entering cells where inmates have recently been smoking it.

Staff members at HMP Holme House in Stockton, Teesside, have reportedly been getting hysterical, emotional, and dizzy, while also having to deal with the Spice-driven increase of violence among inmates.

Andy Baxter, the chairman of the Prison Officers Association at Holme House, said: "We had an officer who we believe was exposed to it. During the night he said he got a fierce burning sensation in his head which felt like his head was covered with nits, and spent the night tearing at the top of his head."

A former inmate told the BBC: "I've seen lads going berserk on it, turning on their best mates, and fighting over it. I've also seen it where lads have dropped down dead, had heart attacks, gone into comas, gone loopy, and ended up being sectioned because of it."

A Prison Service spokesperson said: "Governors use sniffer dogs, cell searches, and mandatory drugs tests to find drugs in prison and punish those responsible. We have also passed laws so that people who smuggle packages over prison walls, including drugs, face up to two years in prison. However, it's clear we need to do more. The Justice Secretary has asked the Ministry of Justice to look at how we can ensure prisons have the right tools in place to tackle this problem."

Sarah Kane. Screen shot via

Curtains open on a hotel room in Leeds. A vile, middle-aged journalist is there to seduce a much younger woman. He's homophobic, misogynistic, and racist. She is emotionally fragile and intellectually simple. Over the next hour or so, the hotel room becomes the site of a brutal war; we'll watch rape, violence, a bombing, suicide, masturbation, prostitution, and someone eating a dead baby.

Naturally, when those same curtains go down, the chaos continues.

It was 1995, and the average British theater-goer apparently wasn't ready for the grim subject matter of playwright Sarah Kane's Blasted. Journalists relished the chance to tear down a young, female, playwright. The Daily Mail branded the play "a disgusting feast of filth" for the "Looney Left," while the Independent compared watching it to "having your whole head held down in a bucket of offal."

Kane's crime? Writing a play so adventurous—not just in form, but content, too—that it puzzled and disgusted the people sent to review it. As she pointed out, "a play about a middle-aged male journalist who rapes a young woman and is raped and mutilated himself can't have endeared to a theater full of middle-aged male critics."

Can you imagine a similar media storm about a play today? It simply wouldn't happen—not least because of the current climate in the West End, with Shakespeare and Ibsen and financially-reliable adaptations of famous novels still dominating the playbills. Cuts to the arts have also made it increasingly difficult for young voices to make it to the stage, but without Kane knocking down every expectation of what British theater should be, it's likely many of those fresh, exciting playwrights would never have found their voices in the first place.

I came across Kane's work as a theater student, studying "in-yer-face theater"—which is exactly what it sounds like. Theater critic Alex Sierz characterized the genre as taking the audience "by the scruff of the neck," adding that "questioning moral norms, it affronts the ruling ideas of what can or can't be shown onstage."

It's important to note that the use of shock in this genre isn't just there to offend, but to be a part of a search for something much deeper, some meaning in a fucked world. Kane's name caught my eye in a textbook, purely because it was a female one; it came as a relief after weeks of reading lots of outspoken men. In her, I instantly found a teacher and a muse.

Her plays were like Pulp Fiction reimagined for the stage. It was the rape and sex and violence that drew me in, but re-reading her work over and over, it was the enduring hope in the darkness that kept me enthralled. The landscapes and social hierarchies and characters of the work are dystopian and ugly, but not hopeless. There's a desperate search for love and salvation through the mire of life that cut right to the heart of humanity.

There's a scene in Cleansed, for instance, where homosexual couple Rod and Carl discuss love. Carl has been pushing for commitment and some real proof of his feelings. Rod is a realist, in comparison to his idealist partner. Eventually, Rod replies: "I love you now. I'm with you now. I'll do my best, moment to moment, not to betray you. That's it, no more. Don't make me lie to you." It's not a conventionally romantic line, but doing your best and being brutally honest for as long as you love someone is perhaps the most anyone can ever truthfully promise, inadvertently creating—for me—one of the most romantic moments in modern theater.

By her following play, Crave, Kane is dealing in total desperation and the rawest of unrequited love. Stylistically, it's a departure: Her work has now dissolved into nameless characters and nonlinear poetry; the theme of the pain of love is all-encompassing, with the characters also being haunted by rape, incest, anorexia, mental illness, and other very real demons.

Despite all that, there is still hope. A beautiful speech tumbles from one (probably female) character during the play about the feelings toward another woman: "And I want to play hide-and-seek and give you my clothes and tell you I like your shoes and sit on the steps while you take a bath and massage your neck and kiss your feet and hold your hand and go for a meal and not mind when you eat my food and meet you at Rudy's and talk about the day and type up your letters and carry your boxes and laugh at your paranoia."

The observations of those insecure thoughts about someone you're in love with, or those strange intimate moments that make a relationship what it is, are articulated perfectly. (She continues: "And hug you when you're anxious and hold you when you hurt and want you when I smell you and offend you when I touch you and whimper when I'm next to you and whimper when I'm not and dribble on your breast and smother you in the night...") It's heartbreaking.

Kane herself was a beautiful but troubled character. Sexually fluid, she represented not only a young artist in a man's world, but a rare gay female voice in theater. She had turbulent mental health issues that plagued her 20s and informed her plays. She wrote what she knew because that was all she could write.

Despite depression, heartbreak, and other darkness, Kane shook up the art form like no one had for years. She heralded a new age of young writers after a lengthy period of few new works being put on in mainstream theater. She had a true vision of what theater should be—hating the idea of theater that trivialized itself as a pastime for the middle classes. When the idea arose in interviews that her work gave no answers, she replied, "For me, the job of an artist is someone who asks questions, and the politician is someone who pretends to know the answers."

Sadly, Kane killed herself at the age of 28, leaving behind her last—and darkest—play, 4.48 Psychosis, an unconventional, unsettling stream-of-consciousness; the swan song of a playwright destined to be remembered as a troubled female artist. The Sylvia Plath of theater.

Despite her youth and the fact she only wrote five plays and one short film, she was a true auteur. However, it's taken time for people to realize that. During her life, most critics eventually reconsidered their initial thoughts on her work. Since her death, theaters have slowly but steadily kept her work alive.

Now, just over 20 years after that fateful opening showing of Blasted, the transition of the playwright into the British theatrical canon is complete: The National Theatre is about to start showing a production of Cleansed. A piece still politically relevant today, it frames the world as a prison for both body and mind. A man named Tinker plays the role of doctor, jailor, and general authoritative figure, who continues to oppress, while totally denying responsibility, as everything falls apart around him. The best art is that which timelessly speaks volumes.

Sarah Kane was the best there was, a true poet, and no one has yet taken her throne. Until someone does, she will be celebrated accordingly—with sex, tears, violence, and hearts bleeding across the stage.

Find more information and tickets for the National Theatre's production of Sarah Kane's Cleansed .

Follow Hannah on Twitter.

Vincent and Catherine, quite probably about to be up to no good whatsoever

"What would you do if your significant other fell in love with someone else?"
I'd let her go.

"It is easier to love, or be loved?"
To be loved.

"Are you prepared to risk your life to get back together with a former lover?"
Maybe not everything.

"Confessional" questions asked throughout Catherine, with the answers I selected.

In 2009, Japanese developer Atlus released the latest in its Shin Megami Tensei line of RPGs, Persona 4, to critical acclaim. It combined a social simulator with a murder mystery, crammed in a load of JRPG mechanics, and immediately became one of the definitive games on the PlayStation 2. Inevitably, the question of what could possibly follow it soon surfaced, and when the studio announced a new title for the then next-gen PlayStation 3, the natural prediction was that Persona 5 was imminent.

Oh, how wrong we all were. Instead of announcing another game for the company's marquee franchise, Atlus revealed Catherine. Neither an RPG nor a proper Shin Megami Tensei entry, Catherine was a puzzle title that essentially combined the gameplay of Tetris and Q*bert. The developers also revealed that it would earn itself an M rating, with the story wrapped around the blocks-shifting sections swollen by themes uncommon in video games: sex, romance, adultery, and marriage.

Catherine is the tale of Vincent Brooks, a 30-something man in a long-term relationship with his girlfriend, Katherine. (Note the spelling gets confusing fast.) She's been dropping hints about marriage to him for some time, but something is holding Vincent back from popping the big question. Then, one night, he meets a young, attractive woman named Catherine at a bar and finds himself in the throes of an affair.

Catherine and Vincent are caught not quite in the act

There are eight possible endings the player can reach, assuming he or she can master the devilishly demanding climbs that make up Vincent's nightmares, the punishing puzzle sections of the experience. My first playthrough resulted in the "True Freedom" ending. For those of you not bothered by spoilers (and if you are, I guess just click away now), the "True Freedom" ending sees Vincent stay with neither Catherine nor Katherine. Instead, he decides that a relationship just isn't for him, gambles his money on a wrestling match, and uses his winnings to go to space... for some reason. Which ending you see depends on your answers to survey questions asked after successfully completing each dreamtime dungeon. These "confessionals," as they are called in the game, usually revolved around the topic of relationships, though not always. While I found the game's melodramatic premise engrossing, the lackluster ending I received felt unsatisfying, especially given pre-release commercials in Japan had featured interviews with real couples, asking their thoughts on love and marriage. I expected something more tangibly relatable, perhaps.

Then, five years after the game's announcement in 2010, I broke up with my girlfriend because I couldn't commit to our relationship.

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch VICE's film on the digital love industry

At the time I blamed a lot of my issues with commitment with my own family history. I mean, really, what chance does a child have when they've grown up against a ruined marriage?

But I don't want to describe my breakup with clichés like, "It was messy." The prevailing mood in my mind was disappointment. Disappointment that our relationship ended the way it did. That the potential for it would never come to fruition. And, ultimately, disappointment in the person I turned out to be. I don't mean to use this article as a public display of penance, but at the end of the relationship, it was clear to us that standing in the wreckage was my inability to conquer my own fears.

So I was single again, and after a few hazy months I was reminded of years earlier when I played Catherine, a game that illustrated that I had (and would have) a problem with commitment.

The last thing I want to do is equate the very real emotional consequences of my last relationship to the plot of a video game. I didn't suddenly find myself thinking about the ending I earned as Vincent; it never crossed my mind that I'd chosen freedom, just like I had in a video game a few years ago. I wasn't torn between two women/metaphorical stand-ins for lust and commitment. I was torn between genuine human affection and a self-preservation instinct that's been a part of me since I was a child. I didn't want to believe that a game, one I believe is actually rather shallow, would predict my own nature.

I don't want to give the game credit where none is due. It wasn't that Catherine had, and has, any real authority over its player's romantic nature—it just asked the right questions. "Who would be responsible if you cheated?" "What's your take on praying mantis mating habits?" "Have you changed your personal style for someone else?" These are clever questions that sorted the player into one of two categories, "law" or "chaos." Choosing too many answers that were designated either lawful or chaotic would net you a corresponding ending, with Katherine the lawful partner and Catherine the chaotic alternative. If your answers effectively split the difference, you would wind up with an ending like mine: Vincent heading off to the other side of the credits as a lonely space cowboy. Just like me.

But Catherine's story, even with its Freudian ticks and ultimately normative views of relationships, succeeded as the sordid telenovela it aimed to be. The red velvet atmosphere, colorful cast, and supernatural elements (which I won't detail here, because that's a whole new level of spoiler) were all highly tuned to titillate and thrill. But I feel like it was all just dressing for what would basically be an unusually crafty romance survey. It helps that some answers eschew their expected outcome. For example, the question of, "Your lover's into baby play. What do you do?" Now, answering that you'll try anything once would land you a lawful score, while answering that it was a "deal breaker" landed you firmly in chaotic territory.

Katherine, not Catherine

Choose the steady and stable Katherine and get hitched, or follow a mysterious seductress you meet at a bar into chaos. The fact that the player can easily manipulate the survey into giving him or her the ending he or she wants to receive undercuts the whole narrative, but strangely not the confessionals themselves. At the same time, the game's cleverness doesn't mean it possesses any great depth. While the questions asked can lead to answers taking you some way from expected results, they are still essentially offering you the choice between two contrasting personality types: black or white, no in-between. The very straightforward nature of Catherine's story is what resulted in my Vincent not fitting into its basic duality; it determined that he just didn't want any kind of relationship.

That's not completely true for me, however. It's not that I never wanted to be in a relationship—I did. But once it crossed an imaginary threshold I had drawn for myself, the urge to back out of commitment was stronger than the simultaneous desire to push through my fears for love. I didn't want true freedom; I just didn't want to be a coward.

On Noisey: Don't Fuck It Up When Picking "Our Song" in a New Relationship

In the end, I was a coward.

So does this change Catherine into a far more intricate experience than what I first thought it to be? The game's central thesis on relationships seems to hinge on what amounts to be a cheeky checklist—but a checklist made up of honest answers still holds weight, no matter if they're buried in an addictive puzzle game. I answered honestly at every confessional Catherine's fictional world threw at me, and the results did somewhat reflect the reality I live through every day. I was torn on commitment then, and I still am. I'm just a little pissed that the game considers this mentality as "true freedom." Because as Vincent got a little bit closer to the stars, I'm still down here, burdened by questions of my own.

Follow Matthew on Twitter.

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

For 45 years, America was locked in the Cold War with the Soviet Union and fear of global nuclear annihilation was constant. The end of the Cold War in 1991 was supposed to usher in a new era of peace and cooperation, but it didn't last. Tensions between the US and Russia have been simmering for years, and the ongoing conflict in the Ukraine has pushed the relationship to the point of full-blown crisis.

In this episode from season three of our HBO show that originally aired on June 26th of last year, VICE Founder Shane Smith met Kremlin officials and American leaders to figure out what was really driving the new standoff between the two global superpowers. We also followed VICE correspondent Simon Ostrovsky as he reported from the front lines of the bloody war in Eastern Ukraine.

An artist's impression of BO that smells like weed. Background photo by Nathan Mac via Flickr

The first time I noticed my BO smelled like weed, I'd just had sex with my girlfriend at the time. She nudged her nose affectionately into my chest. "Hey, you smell like skunk," she said. I sniffed my underarms—she was right, I did.

Turns out I'm not the only one to have experienced skunky sweat. A Google search revealed several discussions and a Reddit thread where others talked about the phenomenon. Like me, most were baffled. "I smelt my armpit after working out," Reddit user RIP_MAC_DRE told me. "I had been smoking for maybe two or three years at this point and noticed it smelled like weed; I thought it was pretty funny."

I stayed up all night trawling the internet for answers. But my search brought up little more than the "top answer" on Yahoo Answers, which was just a description of how to wash. Undeterred, and with nothing better to do, I sought out some of the world's most eminent biologists and cannabis experts and distracted them from far worthier business in order to discover, once and for all, why my BO sometimes smells like weed.

In an original piece of research for VICE, Dr. Matan Shelomi, a researcher at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, compared studies that broke down cannabis and human sweat into individual chemicals to see if there were any shared compounds. Out of 233 elements and compounds found in marijuana and nearly 100 in human sweat, 11 matched.

"It looks like several of the compounds most strongly associated with the distinct aroma of Mary Jane are also found in gym socks," Shelomi told me. "Now all we need are a statistically significant number of sensimilla-scented volunteers and an olfactometry lab that's totally down for whatever."

Scientific breakthroughs started coming thick and fast. It wasn't long before Dr. Shelomi realized the cannabis smell probably comes from apocrine sweat as opposed to eccrine sweat. Eccrine sweat is clear and watery, and used to cool the body down, while apocrine sweat glands, clumped mainly around the armpits and genitals, activate during sex and times of stress.

"I remember walking into a class before giving a presentation and noticing it," Trent, from Kansas, told me. "Eventually, I figured out that my armpit sweat only smells like weed during or before a stressful situation."

Dr. Shelomi used this as the basis for a potential hypothesis. "If experience holds true for others, then we can narrow down the source of the pot odor to apocrine secretions."

Another hypothesis, suggested by Dr. Justin Fischedick, a researcher at the Institute of Biological Chemistry at Washington State University, is that aromatic plant chemicals known as terpenoids and terpenes ("terps," for short) are present in the sweat. Plants release terps from their leaves and flowers in order to attract pollinators and repel munching insects. "It seems like people who work out are noticing it quite a bit," Dr. Fischedick told me. "Since are fat soluble compounds like THC they might be stored in fat cells and get excreted during exercise."

That covers people who still consume cannabis, but I haven't smoked any weed in years. Perhaps it's because, when I was young, I got through enough of it on a daily basis to permanently alter my body odor. "It wouldn't surprise me if heavy weed intake could alter your smell," Dr. Shelomi told me. "Others online also report having stopped smoking but still reeking of it."

I didn't want to second-guess an expert, but this just seemed impossible to me. The smell, I figured, is more likely caused by dietary plants that share the same terps as cannabis—an idea mooted in the Reddit discussion. "There can be some similarities between the smells," wrote user LarsHoneytoast. "I think weed, BO, and the lettuce at Subway are all in the same realm of scents."

Read on Broadly: Sticking Weed in Your Vagina Can Help Your Period Cramps

I needed to confirm this hypothesis, ideally with the help of someone who isn't named after a breakfast dish. "The smell of cannabis is produced by its terpenes," Dr. Franjo Grotenhermen, the executive director of the International Association for Cannabinoid Medicines, told me. "The consumption of other plants with the same terpenes may result in a similar smell."

Thanks to weed enthusiasts constantly breeding new strains, there are now a host of cannabis varieties that share terps with many other plants; famous strains like Blueberry Cheesecake and Orange Bud are two notable examples. So there are plenty of plants out there that could make sweat smell like skunk.

But if cannabis-smelling terps are so common, why don't more people smell like London's Hyde Park on 4/20? Well, BO is not just caused by terps, but also by skin-dwelling bacteria that break down sweat molecules into smaller, volatile compounds that evaporate into smells. Apocrine sweat is also a cocktail of minerals, pheromones, and urea. It seems the skunky smell is down to a particular combination of these composites, making it unusual but not outlandish.

There could be many more people out there who have the right combination of factors to produce the chronic whiff, even if they don't smoke weed. Naturally, they wouldn't notice because they've never smoked marijuana and so wouldn't know what to sniff for. Or maybe they know what it smells like but just don't care enough to spend all night on Google, before bothering multiple scientists about it.

All that can be done for now is to trot out the old scientific banality that "more research needs to be done." But at least Dr. Fischedick is up for it. "The only way to find out for sure would be to ask volunteers to smoke a bunch of dank, work out, collect some sweat, and measure it in machines," he told me.

Anyone interested?

Follow Nathan Thompson on Twitter.

On Monday, when Iowans cast their votes at the caucuses, the US presidential primaries will officially have begun. So it's appropriate that today's short film is documentarian Sean Dunne's examination of the most divisive of all of the candidates, Donald Trump. While attending a recent Trump rally in Las Vegas, Dunne and a group of friends made this run-and-gun film on their phones. From the first frame, you know you're in for a bunch of bizarre and possibly unhinged rides. Over 21 remarkably breezy minutes, Dunne delivers a firsthand account of what it's like to attend the event of some of these Americans' lifetimes.

Simply titled Trump Rally, Dunne's film doesn't purport to be anything other than observational, but as he interviews dozens of the billionaire's supporters, it becomes difficult not to judge them. Like the man they idolize, these people tend toward simplistic slogans when asked questions; but when pressed or pressured, they lash out like bratty children.

As the venue fills up to capacity and some fans are left in the hallways outside, they resort to name-calling, shoving, and playing the cancer or disability card. Some start to cry. One supporter even tells a police officer holding back the unhappy crowds, "I bet you Trump would change all of this," somehow still oblivious to the fact that the inconvenience was, in fact, Trump's doing. "Maybe he will," the cop replies, which seems like a decent response—if Trump becomes president, anything could happen, including the repeal of maximum occupancy laws.