All images courtesy of HBO

Two guys walk into a party in a grungy underground space in New York. As a painfully awkward DJ spins trendy cuts by Porches and Mr. Twin Sister, they begin to discuss their main goal of the evening: getting laid. Several unsuccessful attempts later, one finally heeds the advice of a persistent acquaintance and pops a mysterious pill in the hopes of giving his game some chemical assistance, only to discover that it's not the substance he thought it was. This could describe your buddies' Friday night, but in this case, the two guys are rats, the party's underneath some subway tracks, and the pill just so happens to be rat poison.

This sort of deft interplay between human and animal characteristics is the lifeblood of HBO's Animals, an animated half-hour comedy series that premieres on February 5th. Set entirely in NYC, the show's only speaking roles belong to the various non-human species that populate the metropolis. Dogs shame each other for using the word "bitch," pigeons note the subtle flavor of buffalo mozzarella, a bedbug justifies his recent decision to pierce his ear—er, antenna—but Animals also use the perspectives of characters to explore the existential questions that plague us all.

Each episode casts creators Mike Luciano and Phil Matarese as a new species. Whether rats, pigeons, cats, or dogs, their chemistry thrives and attention to the minutiae of everyday life persists, together forming the good-natured core of Animals. The duo originally hatched the idea while working together at an advertising agency, quickly putting together a web series and going on to win an award at New York Television Festival. From there, they were connected with the Duplass brothers, who helped them construct the entire series before they even began shopping it out to networks, putting together a star-studded cast along the way.

Having Nick Kroll, Adam Scott, Jason Mantzoukas, Rob Corddry, Aziz Ansari, Ike Barinholtz, Ellie Kemper, Zach Woods, Marc Maron, Nathan Fielder, Paul Scheer, Chelsea Peretti, Kurt Vile, A$AP Rocky, and A$AP Ferg listed in the credits certainly helped when it came time for Sundance 2015, where Animals was picked up by HBO for two seasons. "Our show's really hard to convey through a trailer," Luciano said. "Famous people doing funny voices is obviously a good hook though." If that's the case, come for the cast, and stay for the crushingly honest and observant stories. Over the phone, VICE spoke with the co-creators as they prepared for the show's debut.

VICE: So it's been just over a year since you debuted this at Sundance. How long ago did the original idea come to you guys?
Mike Luciano: 2012 or so. Phil and I met at an ad agency/production company-type of place. Phil was a copywriter and I was a video editor, and we were goofing around between projects in the office. It had these big, panoramic windows, and there were these two pigeons on the roof across from it, and we just started voicing these pigeons, which made us laugh, and then we decided to put animation to that. That was the first short we did, after about a month of knowing each other.

A lot of the writing on the show feels off-the-cuff and improvised. Do you feel the same?
Phil Matarese: Well Mike and I write all of these scripts, and they end up being 12 to 15 page outlines that are the basic details of what the story's going to be. A lot of it is Mike and I fucking around and just things we find funny, the types of jokes and stories that we want to tell, that really excite us. So we'll write these plot lines, then meet up with the Duplass brothers and act it out and see if it's doable to improve.

Luciano: We end up with these loose outline scripts, and we'll try to write characters with casts in mind, but sometimes it's not going to work out, so we just cast from the gut. We've realized that when we get in the room with the actors, it's usually the less writing, the better. Setting up their motivations and then giving them free reign winds up being the best result more times than not.

Matarese: The less work Mike and I do, the better this show gets. The most exciting thing is when we cast someone who might be a bit of a curveball, and they come in and give it something brand new that we weren't even expecting or even something we could have written ourselves.

Like Aziz Ansari playing a purebred, supremacist dog with a swastika tattoo?
Matarese: Well we've loved Aziz for a long time. I remember Googling him when YouTube just started.

Luciano: It was not by design for that character though, it was just a scheduling thing that worked out, and he was down to do it. We had this weird character that was sort of a question mark, and I remember thinking, Would Aziz do this? It ended up being the perfect thing, because he's got that sweetness to him.

Matarese: Yeah, I think that character really needed something like that to bring it down.

I'm also curious how musicians like Kurt Vile, A$AP Rocky, and A$AP Ferg ended up in the cast. Do they have any experience with voice acting?
Matarese: Mike and I have really eclectic tastes and we're both really into music. I'm obsessed with rap, but Kurt Vile was something we really bonded over when we were first doing this. His last two albums were like a soundtrack to the show. I don't want to spoil anything, but for an episode we had the idea to do a Scooby Doo type thing, where he meets the Monkees or the Harlem Globetrotters.

Luciano: I think a really big aim of our show is to let people in who wouldn't necessarily get this chance in other cases. Every time we brought someone like this in, it's super loose and real and funny.

The show feels much more rooted in human experience than I was expecting. Did you get more of your ideas from observing people or animals?
Matarese: We wanted to tell evergreen stories, but we do have the added benefit of having a different little world to influence the story. With two house cats, there are only so many stories you can tell inside of an apartment.

With a few , we worked from the animal backwards—really New York-based stuff. You know, like referencing the tiny turtles they sell on Canal Street. That's a New York-specific thing and it's so fucking weird that you just want to zoom in on and think, What do those turtles think is going on? What's the world like around them?

Yeah, the city can be inhospitable and weird for humans, who created it, so it's even more amplified for the animals that end up living there.
Luciano: Early on, that became the whole idea of the show, to cast New York City as the least habitable, natural place for anything to live in. It's entirely man-made. Just the idea of animals living in it, and that being their natural home is absurd.

You also seemed to have fun playing around with species' actual traits. Obviously rats only care about reproduction, swans are exclusive—those make sense. But you know, why are the bedbugs having midlife crises, the fish having a tense dinner, rather than other species? It often seems arbitrary.
Matarese: That's what's fun about our world. We really don't go into these things and read an entire book about bedbugs or study their characteristics. To make for a better, easier TV show, we just shoot from the hip and go with the general things we know—or assume to know—about these animals.

We're not going to nail a joke getting an exact fish body part right. Although I will say that Mitch Hurwitz knew that a pigeon's asshole was called a cloaca.

Luciano: We thought he made up the word off the cuff, but then we looked it up. That line of what's human about them and what is specifically their species is a line that we don't even really talk about. We know when we're writing it what makes sense for it and what doesn't, at least in our minds.

After seeing the rats acting like dumb humans at a party in the first episode, I was surprised by how existential the show ends up getting.
Matarese: We always want it to come from a place of sweetness and a general outlook on life. It's the pigeons questioning gender, or we have a flies episode that's just a big reflection on life itself. It's a fun way to approach these big questions and stories. Mike and I both really like film and it's a good way to exercise the more dramatic sides of our personalities. It's a lot of fun allowing the show to be sad and weird and dark.

Luciano: And it's fun to hit at those bigger themes from the place of these animals who are innately naive with everything. It's just a more subtle way to get at that stuff. In the first episode, Phil is learning what dying is—a very simple, baseline thing.

Catch the series premiere of HBO's Animals at 11:30PM on Friday, February 5.

Follow Patrick on Twitter.

Photo of San Franciscans protesting the Super Bowl. Image courtesy of Andy Blue.

The Super Bowl is being played this year in Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, California, but the excess and glitz that always surrounds the NFL championship game is located some miles north, in San Francisco. That's where you can find "Super Bowl City"—a section of town that has been transformed, with the help of taxpayer money, into a free-to-the-public NFL-themed attraction.

For some San Franciscans, the city's full-throated embrace of the big game and the festivities that come with it highlight everything that's wrong with the town's priorities. San Francisco's problems, according to many activists and critics, include glaring income inequality, police-perpetuated violence, a tech industry tone-deaf to the needs of the city it operates in, housing costs so high not even the middle class can afford a place to live, and a government that seems more concerned with courting big business and throwing parties than with alleviating the pain many San Franciscans face on a daily basis.

How, say critics of Super Bowl City, can San Francisco grapple with these issues while at the same time hosting an event that includes such things as a $12,000 dinner for billionaire NFL owners paid for by taxpayers? And this frustration has been manifested in a series of protests that serve as a counterpoint to the shiny, capitalistic excess of Super Bowl week.

For more on the conflict over the Super Bowl in San Francisco, read the VICE Sports series An Imperfect Host.

On Wednesday night, hundreds took to the streets near Super Bowl City and set up a tent camp to highlight the disparity between what tourists see when they come to San Francisco and the life of actual San Franciscans.

"You have mass displacement, you have homeless people being pushed from one neighborhood from another—it's just not humane," Miguel Carrera, the housing justice organizer for the Coalition on Homelessness in San Francisco, told me over the phone. "And the mayor is spending millions to throw a party."

Santa Clara is being reimbursed for the costs it incurs from the Super Bowl, but San Francisco officials did not sign a contract with the NFL that would guarantee its own reimbursement, and will likely be on the hook for $4 million in expenses.

That $4 million might not be much when compared to the entire city budget of some $9 billion, but activists say it's indicative of the corporate-friendly attitude San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee has embraced. He's become semi-notorious in the city for giving tax breaks and real estate deals to tech companies totaling $34 million according to city numbers. (Some say the city's estimates are low—by giving breaks on payroll taxes to Twitter, for example, one union estimated that the company did not have to pay the city $100 million.) Lee has also come under fire for insensitive remarks that sound even more damning when taken slightly out of context—over the summer, when he was asked about the homeless people sleeping on the future site of Super Bowl City, he said, "They are going to have to leave."

(The city has cleared the homeless off the street, relocating some to shelters; Lee also promised that 500 new apartments for the homeless would be built before the Super Bowl but it's not clear how many were actually completed. City officials did not respond to request for comment for this story.)

Photo courtesy of Peter Menchini

Cassie Siegel, a 31-year-old with two kids who has been homeless since 2009, told VICE she and her friends have been harassed by the police more often than usual in the run up to the Super Bowl.

"Yesterday the police just drove up onto the sidewalk and started yelling at us to scatter," Siegel said. "We were in a public park but they acted like they were doing a SWAT raid."

Siegel said police harassment is always an issue in San Francisco, but the Super Bowl has exacerbated it.

"It's even worse now, and all for a Super Bowl," she said. "And it's not even in our city."

It's no secret that San Francisco is facing a homelessness crisis, but many working- and middle-class people are also feeling lost amid the city's changes.

"There's the displacement, there's the police shootings, there's the loss of so any things that make San Francisco feel like it does," Andy Blue, a longtime housing activist said. "We're watching the transformation of a the city, and meanwhile the mayor and the people in power aren't addressing our issues at all and yet they're rolling out the red carpet for corporate parties."

The median price for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco is $3,500, and while that's down from a peak of $3,670, there's evidence gentrification in the Bay Area is spreading: The cost of a one-bedroom in neighboring Oakland rose by 19 percent in just a year, to $2,190.

Rising costs of living have contributed to a lack of diversity: The city's black population has dwindled from 13.4 percent in the 1970s to less than 6 percent today.

Gentrification is of course widespread these days, from New York to Houston to Los Angeles to Portland, but San Francisco activists say the city's economic woes have been compounded by a mayoral administration that seems unconcerned with appeasing its constituents. That tension was further inflamed two months ago when Mario Woods, a 26-year-old black man, was shot by several police officers over and over again supposedly for carrying a knife in what activists described as a "death by firing squad." While Mayor Lee has promised an investigation into the shooting, activists say it highlighted the growing gap between the image the city is presenting of itself and the anger brewing under the surface.

"Eyes around the world are on San Francisco because of the Super Bowl," said Stuart Schuffman, a local activist who goes by Broke-Ass Stuart and who ran for mayor against Lee last year. "And we're more concerned with hiding our problems than fixing them.

Schuffman pointed to last year's election results as proof than San Franciscans are ready for change: Though Lee ran the only campaign backed by significant money and establishment politicians, he only won 55 percent of the vote. Schuffman got nearly 10 percent, and another unlikely candidate, an artist named Francisco Herrera, got 15 percent.

Photo of San Franciscans protesting the Super Bowl. Image courtesy of Peter Menchini

There won't be another mayoral election for another few years, but activists say they can at least use the Super Bowl as a way to draw attention to the fact so many of its residents are ready for something new.

"It's an opportunity for San Franciscans to tell the world we want to be a working families city again," Herrera said. "We want people to know we will not be Dubai, we will not be Manhattan, we will not be what the mayor wants to create."

But after the cameras brought by the big game retreat, will San Francisco's activists be able to keep attention on their causes?

"Usually protests are just regular activists and college students, but this time has been different," said Etecia Brown, a native San Franciscan and activist. "It's beautiful to see these new faces. The Super Bowl has a galvanizing moment."

Follow Peter on Twitter

Quarterback Cam Newton celebrates during the NFC Championship, where his Carolina Panthers beat the Arizona Cardinals. The Panthers are the heavy favorites over the Denver Broncos in the Super Bowl. Photo via Getty Images/Streeter Lecka

A week before the Super Bowl, Eddie was sitting in a TV room in the federal prison where we're both inmates* watching SportsCenter with Monday's USA Today sports page in his hand. Eddie may be a prisoner, but he's also a bookie, and he was doing what bookies everywhere were doing in the lead-up to the biggest betting event of the year: worrying about the betting line.

"Carolina's still giving Denver three points," Eddie said. "I need that to go up at least a point and a half or I might get crushed. Everyone's taking the Panthers."

Just like on the street, sports betting is big business in prisons, and it follows the same format—Eddie had given the inmates who wanted to bet on the game the most recent Vegas line, and everyone was taking the Carolina Panthers both inside bars and out. (A week after our conversation, so much money had been bet against the Denver Broncos the line had moved to favor the Panthers by five and a half points.)

There aren't statistics on the subject, of course, since inmates are technically prohibited from gambling, but some bookies in my facility claim to make upward of $30,000 a year. Eddie claims he's made about $7,000 since last April, when he decided to start a betting pool, also known as a "ticket," at the beginning of the baseball season. Since then, he's expanded to bigger betting events, such as the Super Bowl.

"I was tired of giving the bookies all of my money," Eddie explains. "So I said, 'fuck it,' and started my own ticket."

The name of Eddie's ticket is "Bet & Sweat," and the inmate said he has runners, or people who collect bets (and later debts), in every block on the prison's nine-block compound. Each runner makes 10 percent of each losing bet that they bring in, and Eddies gives his betting clients a free $2 play every night to entice more action.

Some prisons might use cans of tuna or mackerel for money, but you're just as often to find stamps being exchanged. In this prison, the powers that decide such things determined that each 49-cent stamp used on the black market is worth 40 cents in the prison; a $1 stamp is worth 80 cents. To keep the underground economy afloat, inmates purchase stamps at full price from the commissary, so a "book" of ten stamps is worth about $4. During Super Bowl weekend, a bookie could easily make several grand. The Panthers are considered such a sure thing that Eddie decided to require gamblers to bet on three other games this weekend, mostly basketball, in order to play his ticket.

One of his runners is called Man-Man, a convicted drug dealer serving 16 years and a diehard Panthers fan. He said that he's yet to bring in a single ticket that has someone betting on Denver.

"I've had about 30 dudes in last five days bet the Panthers on their tickets," Man-Man said. "I told Eddie not to mix the Super Bowl games with basketball, but he didn't listen. Now he's got at least eight dudes who laid a book on four bets, and they all hit three games. They're just waiting on the Panthers to hit, too, and Eddie's out 80 books"—or $320.

In the days leading up to the Super Bowl, there was plenty of talk about the game and who was betting what on it. An inmate named Little C was seriously thinking about dropping 25 books, or $100, on the Broncos. The guys who run Pay-to-Play, a competing ticket, were talking about giving the Broncos four points instead of three, and paying the winners 3-to-1 meaning you bet $100 to win $300, an enticement to get people to bet on the underdog.

"Yo, my gut be tellin' me to do it, you know?" said Little C. "But if Peyton shows up and the Broncos do what they do, man, it might be all bad for the black man... And how I'm gonna look goin' for a white man in this Super Bowl?"

Old Man Denis is a lifer in his late 70s who's been running a betting pool called Win Big in every penitentiary he's been held in since 1995. He's got fond memories of the last time the Panthers were in the Super Bowl, in 2004.

"Best Super Bowl game is the history of the NFL," he said. "They went a quarter and a half without scoring a single point, then in the last five or six minutes of the game they put up nearly 30 points between them. I thought I was in big trouble."

"The Panthers saved my ass," the inmate remembered. "The game went way over , I would have lost nearly $10,000. As it turned out, I pulled in a little over $1,000 that night."

This year, Eddie has his own plan for how to recoup his losses if the Panthers cover the spread and he ends up having to pay. "If the line doesn't change, or everyone sticks with the Panthers, I'll just lay some of my bets off on the other tickets," Eddie said. "I refuse to get massacred... I'll leave that up to Peyton."

*Note: The author of the piece asked that his name and location not be revealed because he's writing about activities banned by prison authorities and is worried about the repercussions he could face as a result. The last names of the inmates quoted in this article have also been redacted.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Most people have told a lie to get laid, but not many of us have done so backed by the state. Since a 2011 Guardian investigation uncovered the stories of a group of British women allegedly manipulated into intimate relationships with undercover cops, we've started to learn just how far the Metropolitan police's now-defunct Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) was willing to go for information on "groups involved in politically motivated crime"—largely anti-racists, environmentalists, and animal rights activists.

In 2008 the Met had binned the covert SDS, created in 1968 and responsible for spying on murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence's family in the 1990s and burrowing into protest groups using close relationships with female activists. Then, in November 2015, a Met assistant commissioner formally apologised for the sexual relationships—though prosecutors in 2014 had decided not to charge four officers known to have dated women under false pretenses.

Now a public inquiry is accounting for what exactly made the SDS shady enough to shut down entirely. Eight of the women who found themselves in relationships with men who'd lied to them from the moment they met have come forward, mostly anonymously or under pseudonyms, to share their stories. Enter Kefi Chadwick, a writer who's adapted the women's experiences into Any Means Necessary, a play that opened at Nottingham Playhouse on Friday. We spoke to her about fictionalizing undercover cop Mark Kennedy's impact on the women he dated in Nottingham and telling a story still shrouded in half-truths and cover-ups.

Never trust the acoustic-guitar-at-a-party guy; Kate Sissons and Samuel Oatley, rehearsing the play. Photo: Robert Day.

VICE: This is one of those stories that feels destined for adaptation. How did you get the women to speak to you about something so personal?
Kefi Chadwick: I contacted them through their barrister, and three of the eight women met with me, before two of them ended up being involved in the play over a good couple of years. It was very important to me that they, at the very least, were happy for me to do it and ideally were prepared to be involved. It took a long time to reach them because obviously they're anonymous—they don't want anyone to know who they are. From doing interviews and spending time with them, we've become good friends.

How did you begin to tell the story, when it feels as though there's so much we don't know about it? The Met still won't release the names of any other officers involved, for their safety, for example.
I didn't want to do it without the women's cooperation. One of the reasons why the women were interesting in talking to me was that I wanted to do a fictional version of the events that took specifically place in Nottingham. I wanted to tell a 30-year story, so in the end I chose to have a framing device: a hearing in 2011, where you have the women's stories being told and the Met trying to destroy them. Then you have a central story, set in Nottingham from 2004 to 2008. The job of a playwright is to imagine, so I had so much real material that building on that to create this vivid world for the play was much easier. I had all this reality to base it on.

How did it feel, to use material this raw? Didn't you feel as though you were prying, or getting too close to the women?
I mean, to use people's lives... what I've tried to do is shift and fictionalize everything. It's interesting, because the women were worried about being exposed by the writing, but once they'd read the first draft they went, 'Ah, yes. I see now that this isn't identically my story, but it is my emotional truth.' I think that's what people engage with, and what makes the play powerful.

Nick Karimi and Sissons, rehearsing. Photo: Robert Day.

There were so many strands to this scandal. The latent sexism, for starters, of straight women activists being targeted and exploited by their intimate relationships with undercover policemen.
Absolutely. There was a lot I wanted to get in, and I feel as though it's all pretty much there. But it's about not having to give everything the same amount of airtime. There are the references to the Lawrence family, and the other women; the different campaigns, and the involvement protest movements in Scotland.

What about tone? This could easily have turned into something really over-wrought, bashing the audience over the head with one perspective. How did you try to balance that out?
It was really important to me to make a good piece of theater. I think a lot of political drama is very valid but can be very worthy. If you're already on the side of its point of view, people won't go and see a show. I didn't want to write something that was really didactic or that hit you over the head. I wanted to write a piece with characters you connected with and went on a journey with—all the things that a really strong drama does, but with this emotional, political context at its core. You have to think: do I want to preach to the converted, or do I want people to come and see it, who might not be very politically engaged but will go away thinking, 'this is wrong, and I want to do something about it'? That's what I wanted to make.

But what sort of place for this pseudo-activism is there in theater?
I've written the play so it can be adapted, should there be developments later on in the Pitchford inquiry. Of course, when I first started researching this three years ago or so, it wasn't so much known then. But more information just keeps coming and coming, and I think that's just going to continue, as more officers are exposed, as more relationships are discovered and as there's more corruption with police desperately trying to hide what they did. I think that's going to be really interesting.

'Any Means Necessary' runs at Nottingham Playhouse through Saturday, February 20.

Follow Tshepo on Twitter.

The terrorist group Boko Haram is responsible for thousands of deaths in Nigeria. Now, the government is determined to drive these militants from the country. But is the hunt for insurgents causing as much harm as it's preventing?

Former Navy SEAL and new VICE correspondent Kaj Larsen traveled to Nigeria to see what this cat-and-mouse game means for the people caught in the middle of the fight. This is his Debrief from Season 4 Episode 1 of VICE on HBO.

Watch VICE Fridays at 11 PM, only on HBO.

Check out Luke on his website and on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE Germany

Wherever there are rules, those rules will be broken. That's why not following the cleaning rota you set up with your housemates often leads to screaming matches, or a casual case of entrenched bitterness. When we decided to move in together a few years ago, we purposefully chose the path of least resistance. It spares us the bad vibes, but still has some drawbacks. After a while, it suddenly becomes hard to say who is responsible for the mountain of dishes towering above the sink, or when a pot turns into a science experiment and mysteriously disappears onto the balcony for a few days (or weeks).

The most exciting things in our flat usually take place in the kitchen, while cooking, eating, cleaning (or, more accurately, not cleaning). Since most of our conversations, unsurprisingly for long-time photography students, revolved around the subject of photography, it was only a matter of time before we started to explore the microcosmos in our kitchen, with cameras in hand.

Since then, we've consistently documented the fuzz and slime that blooms when we forget to chuck things out. To be clear, even though so much food is thrown away each year in Germany where we live, we didn't let our soup go moldy for the sake of it. All these photos were taken of lost treasures found deep within our fridge. Somehow, photography became the perfect form of therapy for some of the visual trauma we caused ourselves over the years.

You can find Nikita's work here, and Max's here.

Watching Keegan-Michael Key, 44, and Jordan Peele, 36, act feels a little like watching a pair of stage magicians at work. You know it's not real—and you can almost see the seams—but even after the trick is slowed down and explained, it still works on you. It's still magic.

Since their show, Key and Peele, premiered on Comedy Central four years ago, the duo has enjoyed critical adoration and the kind of popular, public adulation that produces genuine celebrity. They've got the Zadie Smith New Yorker profile and hundreds of millions of video views on YouTube. President Obama is a fan; your mom might be, too.

Though Key and Peele ended last September, the pair has been hard at work on various other projects, including a Fox show about a bullied cop, a feature film or two, voiceover work, and a stop-motion movie. Today, though, they plan to take on their toughest challenge yet: Improvising their way through four and a half hours of Super Bowl 50 coverage, in character as two dimwit commentators, without using the names of the players, teams, or the event itself because of NFL contract regulations. Oh, and it's also going to be streamed live.

It seemed like an impossible task, so, of course I got in touch with them to find out more. During the conversation, we talked improv, celebratory pelvic thrusts, and Madden. The comedy duo is stoked to make some magic this weekend—even though, as Peele said, "Any intelligence this weekend will be purely accidental, I promise you." Key took a more sanguine view: "We do really well when we're together," he told me. Either way, we've seen this trick before. I'm excited to see if it still works.

VICE: I watched last year's Super Bowl Special, and I thought it was hilarious and amazing. Can you give me an idea of what you're planning for this year, in brief?
Jordan Peele: So basically, these characters that we're unleashing are very much in the tradition of a type of scene that we just love to do as Key and Peele. They're really an opportunity for us to get together, improvise as these characters, and find the comedy as we go along. Whereas last year, we had a very strategically planned special, a satire on football, this year we decided to do something a little more reminiscent of sketches that we've done on Key and Peele, like " Terries," or the valets. We call them "peas-in-a-pod" scenes.

Peas in a pod.
These characters are very eccentric, very positive guys who had the bright idea that they could do sports commentary on Sunday, and that that would be OK. And basically right before their big live feed, they find out that there are a ton of restrictions on what they can and can't say.

There's a sense also that it almost harkens back to television in the 50s. It's completely live, warts and all, and we're just gonna improvise through this live experience, which we're really, really excited about.

Do you have any historical commentator influences?
Keegan-Michael Key: Two people who I really like a lot are Cris Collinsworth and Jon Gruden, who you know, are commentating now. Cris Collinsworth, it's just his voice sounds like you're cooking bacon in a pan, and there's this crackling going on. There's something so interesting about his voice that I really enjoy. Jon Gruden, the influence is more his attitude than it is trying to sound like him or impersonate him. He's like this guys who's like , "I'm a guy who knows... pretty much everything that's goin' on in the game of football..."

Peele: As for the characters we're gonna be playing on Sunday, they're unlike any actual commentators—

Key: They don't really know how to commentate.

Peele: They're used to commentating on each other's football video-game skills, and they pride themselves on being the guys who are gonna give you the "real talk"––the type of commentary you're not gonna be able to hear in any official capacity. So that's their gimmick that they're coming in with, and then of course they realize, that they can't do that. Or else they would be sued.

"There's no tricks or smoke and mirrors here. We're improvising the set. For four and a half hours, we're improvising." —Keegan-Michael Key

Can you tell me, why football? What is it about sportscasting and color commentary that that is interesting to you guys, that draws you in?
Key: For me, I like watching commentators grow. There are some guys who start their career, and they're not very good at it. And then you see them grow into it. But other than that, it's watching this dynamic between players. I love seeing players—I'll watch videos on YouTube of players who talk about, "Well, when I won my Super Bowl... blah blah blah." And another player, who never won the Super Bowl, you know? When you see the dynamic between those guys, that's just as entertaining to me as a game. You get to watch the shared history they had in their previous employment, which you don't get to see anyplace else.

Do you think you guys have grown as commentators since you've been doing it?
Peele: You think we could be commentators?

Well, what I'm asking is, you guys have been playing commentators on TV for a while. I was wondering if you feel like you've grown into those roles in the same kind of way.
Peele: You know, I think we could do a pretty good job.

Key: I do, too.

Peele: Keegan knows much more about the sport and the patterns and the history of the game. I've learned everything I know about these sports through video games, so . But yeah! I think we could.

Key: Oh, I think we could give it a real run for its money.

Peele: I think we, Keegan and I, would be better than Lee and Morris, who are the characters we're playing on Sunday. They're not... they're not going to be very good.

So Jordan, you said you learned everything you know about sports from video games? Can you tell me a little bit more about that?
Peele: Well, I really started becoming a football fan in the last five years, and a lot of it was because of Madden. At one point Keegan invited me to his fantasy league. He says, "All right, you want to jump into this fantasy league, that's gonna be the best education you can have." And I was actually, surprisingly, prepared, just because I knew all the stats that are in the game, for all the players. So I just had this almost encyclopedic knowledge of all the, uh, intangibles, and the throwing accuracy...

Who are your favorite football players right now? You each get one.
Key: On the offensive side of the ball, I'm a wide receiver guy, and I'm from Detroit. So the answer's supposed to be Calvin Johnson. But I'll tell you who it is: Antonio Brown, from the Pittsburgh Steelers, who I think is just a real hell of an all-around athlete. I always look at an athlete and think, Would he be able to play on the other side of the ball? Would he be able to excel on the other side of the ball? And so I'm always a big fan of really good athletes. And I just find Antonio Brown so exciting to watch. His speed, his acceleration, the way he cuts, the way he runs. He can return balls.

Peele: I would say Ron Miller. Mostly because he's a great guy, and he gave us a shout-out, and got penalized for doing the pelvic thrust after a sack.

I want to talk about your language a little bit. I feel like your sketches are very smart, and there's a lot of wordplay that I think people miss. Do you guys plan to fold that kind of intelligence into the event this weekend, when you're doing this casting live?
Peele: Any intelligence this weekend will be purely accidental, I promise you.

OK.
Peele: Yeah, but just to follow up, it's gonna be one of the most free, fun, ridiculous, silly pieces of comedy we'll have ever gotten to do, so we're very excited.

Key: When we tell you it's improvised, Bijan, there's no tricks or smoke and mirrors here. We're improvising the set. For four and a half hours, we're improvising. So, please tune in, cause we don't know what's gonna happen.

Are you nervous about just doing it from the seat of your pants? Flying by night?
Key: This is a dream come true that we didn't even know we had. The thing is, I think we excel when we're together. And like Jordan said before, some of our favorite sketches, the things we've enjoyed the most in life, have been when you kind of lock off the camera. We have a mild idea of where we're gonna go, and then we just start talking. And that's exactly what's gonna happen on Sunday, and we have found a lot of success with that in the past. We have sketches that have cost a lot of money, and have taken a lot of time, and are very precise, and there's this choreography, and those have been amazing.

But then there have been equally amazing sketches that have been fun to perform and execute, that have been really off-the-cuff, and flying by the seat of our pants. And there's an extra kind of, amount of energy and fun to those.

Peele: If there's anything I'm nervous about, it's that whenever we do this kind of thing, we're desperately trying to make each other laugh, and there's no breaks. So we'll undoubtedly have to crack up during this thing, and I think our strategy is just going to be: stay in character and let the character laugh. But that's gonna be the biggest challenge.

Bijan Stephen is an associate editor at the New Republic. Follow him on Twitter.

Key and Peele's Real Talk live commentary will air for the duration of the entire Super Bowl on squarespace.com/realtalk.

These photos of Jerami Goodwin originally appeared in Rare Weaves' "The Only Living Boy in New York" lookbook. Photos by Fred Askew. Styling by Justin Dean.

Hartley Goldstein Jr.'s love affair with clothes comes from his mother. The 35-year-old native New Yorker remembers accompanying her to buy vintage fabrics, which got his teenage mind thinking about materials and clothes in a way he hadn't before. Although he pursued a career in the music industry early on, he found his true calling in fashion.

For the past two years, Goldstein has been making one-of-a-kind, vintage-inspired patchwork garments under his label, Rare Weaves. Named after the obscure and exorbitantly-priced materials he uses to make his wabi-sabi oxford shirts, kimono-inspired coats, and patchwork trousers, it combines the appeal of a vintage hunt with the discerning eye of an art collector.

One thing's for sure, Rare Weaves is more art project than typical fashion label. Its business model is closer to couture than ready-to-wear, with almost all of the pieces being one-offs thanks to the limited nature of the fabric. Because of that, he's been primarily selling Rare Weaves like a gallerist, scheduling appointments out of his SoHo apartment, and aligning his clients with pieces that speak to them, versus letting them peruse the racks.

Rare Weaves has developed a cult following on Instagram, and Goldstein's clients range from menswear personality Nick Wooster to legendary street style photographer Tommy Ton.

"I never imagined it as more than a secret club for me and my friends," admits Goldstein, who recently launched Rare Weaves' first foray into traditional retail: an installation at Carson Street. The SoHo menswear store is the perfect retail spot for Rare Weaves, given its focus on contemporary tailored menswear and its eclectic customers.

While $2,000 patchwork band collar shirts and $7,000 coats made from handsomely aged Japanese fabrics mostly dwell in the aspirational rather than accessible realm of fashion, Goldstein's earnest approach and true passion for clothes is evident in his products. And his vision can be seen in Rare Weaves' first editorial, styled by Justin Dean, shot by photographer Fred Askew, and modeled by artist Jerami Goodwin—known more for his "STAINO" tag.

The first time I traveled to Vegas for the so called "Oscars of Porn" was back in 2008 when a couple of friends of mine were nominated for AVN Awards for an Exorcist porn parody called The XXXorcist and I went along for the ride. A year later I had just been laid off of my last real job and I decided to go back this time as actual credentialed media—from then on, porn was my beat.

Eight years after my first AVN Awards I returned to Vegas and my friend Joanna Angel, who lost her nomination for The XXXorcist back then, was hosting the whole show. Joanna and an ex-girlfriend of mine were both inducted into the AVN Hall of Fame, so AVN feels as much as a family reunion as it does an assignment.

The AVN experience is a lot more than just an award show. It's four days of total madness that includes the Adult Entertainment Expo, the actual awards show, and more parties than you could imagine with non-stop weirdness going on in the rooms, casinos, and bars of the Hard Rock Hotel.

If you imagine the entire porn industry stuck in a hotel together, then pour booze and cocaine on that, throw a bunch of rich vegas douchebag money on top of everything, you get exactly what you would expect: a four-day orgy of sex followed by emotional breakdowns and 75 percent of the industry sick in bed for the next week.

See you all next year.

All photographs by Nate "Igor" Smith. You can follow more of his work here, and grab his new zine of other goodies here.

It's easy to forget, but in the days leading up to the Iowa Caucuses, Ted Cruz, the man who would win them, looked like a candidate on the verge of drowning. The final pre-caucus Des Moines Register poll showed him trailing, once again, to Donald Trump. Other Republicans had turned their fire on Cruz, accusing the Texas senator of being a phony conservative and a generally unbearable human to be around. Trump, who used to call Cruz a "friend," had started referring to him as "the Canadian anchor baby." Nationally, the Texas Senator's approval rating had fallen by 16 points among Republicans.

Oh, and there was the matter of the deceptively official-looking mailers marked "VOTING VIOLATION," that scored voters and their neighbors in an attempt to shame Iowans into turning out for Monday's caucus. Cruz admitted his campaign was behind them, and seemed defiantly proud: "I apologize to nobody for using every tool we can to encourage Iowa voters to come out and vote," he told reporters in Sioux City two days before the caucuses.

As frustrating as it is for his many, many detractors, Cruz was right to be confident. He won Iowa with 27 percent of the vote to Trump's 24 percent, turning the real estate mogul self-proclaimed winner into a loser. How he did so is no secret: He earned the trust of Iowa's evangelical voters, who flooded the caucuses in record numbers, ultimately comprising about 64 percent of the GOP electorate, according to entrance polls. Cruz took the biggest chunk of that voting bloc, winning 34 percent of self-identified "born-again Christians," as well as four in ten voters who identified themselves as "very conservative."

Cruz had been pitching these devout Christians ever since he started making trips to Iowa two years ago, and in the days just before the caucuses he intensified his efforts, stopping in middle school auditoriums, rural Baptist churches, small-town plastics factories —anywhere with room for people to sit, Cruz would stand and deliver his message: I'm one of you, a true conservative.

The Saturday before the caucuses I watched about 100 supporters crammed into the lone eating establishment in the tiny of Hamlin for a Cruz "retail event," listening raptly as Iowa's Bob Vander Plaats, a social conservative kingmaker who has called gay marriage a "Satanic plot," told a story about meeting with an advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who upon hearing that the faith leader was from Iowa, instructed him and his state to "choose well." Choosing well, Vander Plaats explained, via a reference to Exodus, meant choosing Ted Cruz.

"I believe this is a man who fears God," he affirmed. "He knows who he is and who he serves.

Cruz followed with his standard stump speech, an explicitly religious piece of rhetoric mixing free-market conservatism and talk radio soundbites with end times eschatology and calls for the country to return to its "Judeo-Christian roots." The speech ended as it always does, by asking the audience to pray for God to "Awaken the body of Christ that we might pull back from the abyss," and quoting from Chronicles: "If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land."

Cruz addresses reporters in Sioux City, Iowa on January 30, 2016. Photo by author

The lineup was the same a couple of hours later and a little further north, at a community center in Ida Grove, a town known for its assortment of cartoonish castle buildings. It was the same on Sunday as well, as Cruz made his way through the remainder of Iowa's 99 counties. Sometimes Congressman Steve King—a popular Iowa Republican who thinks the Supreme Court's gay marriage ruling means people can marry lawnmowers and who has volunteered to help Cruz build a Mexican border wall—subbed in for Vander Plaats, wielding a spoon to demonstrate that Cruz would be "spoon-feeding a little bit of Leviticus to the leftists," whatever that might mean.

As political commentators have pointed out, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, the winners of the past two Republican Iowa Caucuses, had similar support from the Christian Right, only to falter when the race moved on to states with more moderate, and less devout, electorates. And they've predicted Cruz will face a similar outcome, noting that he hasn't changed his stump speech since arriving in New Hampshire, a state that lacks a sizable bloc of evangelical voters.

What these arguments fail to take into account, though, is that Cruz is very, very good at this. Scarily, almost suspiciously, good. His sweeping, apocalyptic oratory, down to the hand motions he seems to have committed to muscle memory, leave little doubt in the minds of evangelical voters that Cruz is one of their own. Then there's the Cruz campaign's expansive, data-driven efforts to mobilize the GOP's base. And those shady mailers Trump is still complaining about hint at a Nixon-like ruthlessness not typically seen in Biblically-based presidential campaigns.

Other evangelical favorites running against Cruz have understandably taken issue with these tactics. Carson, in particular, has been scathing in his criticism of Cruz, accusing his rival's campaign of trying to sabotage his chances in Iowa by tweeting that the former pediatric neurosurgeon was dropping out of the race. Huckabee, who won the Iowa Caucus in 2008 but pulled out of this year's race before the results were in Monday, spent the final days of his campaign accusing Cruz of misleading voters about his faith. And on Thursday, Santorum, the 2012 Iowa caucus winner, threw his support behind Rubio, apparently for no other reason than the fact that the Florida Senator isn't Ted Cruz.

Still, the rest of the Christian right seems to be standing solidly behind Cruz. This is somewhat unusual: For years, conservative evangelicals have struggled to unite over presidential candidates, ultimately settling for true believers who lacked the political experience and campaign organization to actually make an impact in a national race. At the same time, the Christian right has watched its culture war victories—gay marriage bans, abortion restrictions, the Tea Party wave of 2010—dissipate, overturned on legal technicalities, or squandered by poor leadership. In 2016, these voters aren't looking for another naively affable Bible-thumper—they want someone who can win.

In Cruz, it seems, they have found their man. Leaders of the Religious right have lined up to back his campaign, joined by an assortment of conservative infotainment celebrities. In the final days of the Iowa campaign, Cruz was flanked by members of this posse, lining them up to give their full-throated support to his candidacy at rallies and town halls across the state.

Glenn Beck hands off Don Quixote to his daughter during a campaign stop for Ted Cruz in Iowa City, Iowa, on January 31. Photo by Joshua Lott/Getty Image

At a rally following his press conference in Sioux City Monday night, a parade of Cruz's endorsers took the stage, putting the weight of their ideological zealotry behind his White House bid. There was Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, and Heidi Cruz, the candidate's wife, casually decked out in stay-at-home jeans and determined to show her husband's softer side. A slideshow showcased Cruz's endorsements from Iowa conservatives: pro-life leaders, Ron Paul fans, Christian homeschool activists.

A little later, Phil Robertson, the embattled patriarch of Duck Dynasty who endorsed Cruz last month as "one of us," took the stage, inviting the crowd to blow their complementary duck calls in unison to entice Donald Trump into a one-on-one debate with Cruz, and then regaling with a speech that moved from duck hunting, to abortion, to what happens to "burned-out hippies" ("they become Bernie Sanders!"). Not to be upstaged, Glenn Beck followed with a 25-minute sermon that was mostly about George Washington, and a little bit about Ted Cruz, and ended with a show-and-tell of what Beck claimed was Washington's copy of Don Quixote—a book about a man who refuses to engage with reality.

"I'm here to tell you that we do not make it unless we get serious right now, we don't make it," Beck concluded. "But I'm here to tell you that I am filled with hope because I've seen you. I've looked you in the eyes all across the state... You know what time it is. You know it's over if we don't do the right thing."

To the average liberal listener, none of this would make any sense. But to voters in Sioux City, and in Ames, and in red states across the US, the message was perfectly clear: The country is at the edge of a gaping abyss, teeming with secularism and Obamacare and ISIS and politically correct liberals, and Cruz is the guy who can lead righteous Americans to the other side. The only question is, are there enough of them to lift Cruz up to the next level?

Follow Grace Wyler on Twitter.

A sign held by a protester outside Sain Anselm College in New Hampshire the night of the GOP debate. Photos by Jason Bergman.

Just before Saturday's Republican debate started at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire, crowds began to swarm outside the venue.

Dozens of supporters showed up seemingly out of nowhere—on buses, in cars, or on foot—clutching their respective candidates' signs for a debate they probably weren't getting into. There was also the usual sideshow attractions you find at any campaign stop, like perpetual candidate Vermin Supreme, his signature boot atop his head, handing out pamphlets. Somewhere, someone was playing a saxophone in the freezing cold.

But by far, the biggest crowd outside of the debate was a group that none of the GOP candidates inside were likely thinking about: fast-food workers. And they were pissed.

Earlier that afternoon, hundreds of employees of Burger King, Wendy's, and other restaurants in the Manchester area went on strike for the first time, marching down the streets in an effort to demand a $15 minimum wage. The rally culminated inside a barricaded area outside of Saint Anselm College later that night, where, at that point, nearly a thousand protesters had joined the ranks. Several Republican supporters tried to chant over them, but were soon drowned out.

The fast-food workers are part of a nationwide movement known as "Fight for $15," which supports a $15 minimum wage, a proposal that's been the subject of all kinds of debate among activists, economists, and politicians in the last year. Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles are among the towns that have adopted $15 minimum wage proposals across the country, and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders supports the cause—as you'd expect, it's an issue that divides the parties. Liberals and leftists generally back a higher minimum wage, while the GOP tends not to support any minimum wage increase.

But the fast food workers outside Saint Anselm weren't there to back any politician in particular—their slogan on Saturday night, "Come Get My Vote," was designed to show the candidates that there were votes to be had if one of them would speak up for Fight for $15. (In New Hampshire, independents can cast ballots in either primary.)

Kendall Fells

"These voters do not support, and don't care about any party," Kendall Fells, the organizing director of the movement, told me on Saturday outside the debate. "It's just this one issue."

According to the group's press release, 45 percent of New Hampshire workers earn less than $15 an hour. Nationwide, the number is closer to 42 percent; African-Americans and Latinos make up a bigger chunk of that low-wage demographic.

Fells, who once worked at McDonald's and Taco Bell for two and a half years in Kansas City, said that besides the low pay, there were other ways fast food workers got abused. "I didn't know then that cleaning tables before my shift started was wage theft," he recalled. "And that putting butter on my burns so I could get back to work quick was illegal."

It's safe to say that the protesters' message did not make its way to the debate stage.

Saturday's GOP debate, just like the previous ones, focused on foreign policy, immigration, and various attacks the candidates had launched on one another on the trail. (The media has focused on Marco Rubio's embarrassingly repetition of a memorized speech, a moment that was about meta-narrative, not policy.) Donald Trump again promised vaguely to bring back jobs from China and Mexico, but he didn't seem to be concerned with what those jobs would pay. And when the moderators asked the candidates if they, like most Americans, supported higher taxes on millionaires, all of them said no, with Jeb Bush saying he'd "like to see more millionaires." So there wasn't much talk of economic populism, despite the efforts of FIght for 15.

Outside, Megan Jensen and Stephanie Pollack still hadn't made up their minds when it came to their preferred candidate in Tuesday's primary. "We're still doing our research," Pollack told me. "But we don't see Democratic or Republican. We just care about who supports this."

Jensen, 26, said she supports three children by working at KFC, where she's worked for over a year, while Pollack, 18, has spent four years at McDonald's and four months at Burger King. They both said $7.25—the minimum wage in New Hampshire—was simply not enough to survive in Manchester. "That's why I'm working two jobs," Pollack explained.

"This is something we can't not talk about it," Jensen continued. "And when we were marching, people were honking and hearing us out. They understand this."

When the debate began, the rally died down. Fells was optimistic, telling me "people were talking," even if the candidates inside ignored the group. But, to him, it didn't matter. "It's bigger than the debate," he explained. "For the voters in New Hampshire, economy is the biggest issue, and this is what's happening here, and in our country."

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

Karmik Grant-Byas, who's on trial for allegedly promoting prostitution and engaging in sex trafficking. Manhattan District Attorney/Studio/Manhattan DA's Office

Most lawyers would be mortified if they were ever publicly compared to Saul Goodman, the sleazy attorney from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul who has no qualms supporting a meth operation or cavorting with killers.

Howard Greenberg isn't most lawyers.

Standing outside a Manhattan Supreme Courtroom Friday morning a few minutes after making his closing argument in a sex trafficking case, Greenberg invites comparison to the dysfunctional attorney even as he oozes confidence in his own abilities.

"I'm a poor excuse for a lawyer, and don't you forget it!" he jokes.

Greenberg is well known in New York criminal justice circles for enthusiastically taking on clients who have done terrible things to people, and this case is no exception. He readily admits his client, Karmik Grant-Byas—who is charged with promoting prostitution and four counts of sex trafficking—is a "scumbag" and has done "despicable" things to women.

In his closing argument, Greenberg even encouraged the jury to find his client guilty of the prostitution charge. "Had they charged him with assault, I would ask you to also find him guilty of that," he claimed. Still, Grant-Byas is no sex trafficker, he argued: "I trust Manhattan jurors to know the difference between sex trafficking and prostitution."

Greenberg's closing statement, which he mostly read from handwritten notes scrawled on loose pieces of paper, drew countless objections from prosecutors—which were all sustained—and numerous interjections and scornful looks from Judge Bonnie Wittner. "John Adams was branded a pimp when he defended British soldiers who fired into a crowd at the Boston Tea Party," Greenberg noted near the beginning of his argument, immediately drawing an objection from the prosecution.

"It's very interesting English history," Wittner interjected, visibly angry. "But it's not relevant to this summation."

Greenberg, whose unkempt mad scientist hairstyle is unmistakable, spent about 20 minutes of his hour-and-a-half closing on a series of sarcastic one-liners. "The supposed victims of sex trafficking always shed a tear for the defendant, yeah right.... The supposed victims of sex trafficking always look healthy as a horse, yeah right.... The supposed victims of sex trafficking can always refuse a job with a John, yeah right.

"Did any of that laundry list paint the picture of somebody who's in sexual slavery?" Greenberg asked jurors. "The hoes committed voluntary sex acts committed by the spirit of free will."

The felony sex trafficking charges, prosecutors countered, are supported by a raft of text messages, phone calls and physical evidence that show Grant-Byas often used threats and violence to coerce four women into turning tricks. "Getting in trouble with the defendant meant a beating," Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Dolle told the jury. "You heard his reaction when broke the rules: 'Bitch, I'm going to fuck you up when I see you.'"

Dolle clicked through a clinical slideshow of monstrous behavior. Photos of forearm burns and a busted lip. Phone recordings of him screaming at the women for not bringing in enough money. (In one recording played for the jury, Grant-Byas said: "Nah, I'm good, I had Tims on. I stomped that bitch ribs.")

But the case is complicated by the fact that Jennifer Encarnacion, one of the women prosecutors claim was the subject of intense physical violence that included being punched in the face and burned with a flatiron, testified as a witness for the defense. Her testimony was widely circulated in New York's tabloids, which quoted her saying that working for Grant-Byas afforded her money and freedom, and that her clients included New York law enforcement officials and a Chicago judge. (Media outlets typically don't name victims of sex crimes, but in a brief interview with VICE immediately after Friday's closing arguments, Encarnacion gave permission to use her name and disputed the prosecution's characterization of her victimhood.)

"I am not a victim. This is what I choose to do," Encarnacion, 22, tells me while standing near an elevator bank in the courthouse by her mother's side. "My mom knows what I do and she's totally OK with it."

As for the evidence of being burned and beaten, she insists, "It's a regular relationship. Everybody goes through stuff. He's not charged with assault—he's charged with sex trafficking. Sex trafficking is forcing people. There was no victims saying that he forced them."

Still, in her closing, Dolle tried to discredit Encarnacion's testimony, telling the jury, "People cannot consent to being abused," and that Grant-Byas ran a prostitution ring "through violence, threats, intimidation, and control." The prosecutor also pointed out that Encarnacion is subsidizing her pimp's legal bill. (For his part, Greenberg acknowledges that three of the alleged victims are financially backing Grant-Byas's defense.)

Check out our documentary about Howard Greenberg, the 'Real' Better Call Saul.

But Encarnacion bristles at the claim that she was somehow not in control of her own body and says that if Grant-Byas is acquitted, she won't hesitate to work for him again. "She was not there—she doesn't know what I went through," she says, referring to the prosecutor. "I stand by him regardless of what these people say, and I always will."

In the final moments of Greenberg's closing, he emphasized his client's guilt on the prostitution charge and called the trial a "monumental waste of resources," a claim that drew an immediate objection.

"Not only have I managed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant is not guilty of sex trafficking," Greenberg said, "I have also along the way managed to prove that every day is a bad hair day for me."

Follow Alex Zimmerman on Twitter.

Bill Clinton on the campaign trail for Hillary. Photo via Flickr user Harris Walker.

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

US News

Bill Clinton Attacks Sanders
Bill Clinton has attacked Bernie Sanders, describing his wife's opponent for the Democratic nomination as hypocritical, "hermetically sealed" and not "careful with the facts." One of Sanders' senior advisors called the attacks "disappointing." — The New York Times

Manning May Retire After Superbowl
After leading the Denver Broncos to a 24-10 Super Bowl victory over the Carolina Panthers, quarterback Peyton Manning now has to decide whether to retire. His mom Olivia said she wants him to quit, while his dad said Manning is "done in Denver." — CBS Sports

Bodies Recovered off California Coast
Two bodies and the wreckage of a small plane have been found in the water off Southern California following a midair collision that killed three people. A plane piloted by 72-year-old Mary Falstrom was seen colliding with a plane carrying men ages 61 and 81. — ABC News

Every Chipotle Shuts for Food Safety Meeting
Chipotle will be shutting down all restaurants today for a four-hour, company-wide meeting on food safety, following a series of food-borne illnesses and a norovirus outbreak affecting several states. The latest quarterly figures show a 44 percent drop in profits. — CNN

International News

Refugee Camps Set Up Inside Syria
Turkish aid workers have set up tents and supplies for thousands of new Syrian refugees kept from entering Turkey at the border. Around 35,000 people fled a Syrian government offensive in the Aleppo area last week, but Turkey has closed the border to them. — BBCNews

Survivors Found After Taiwan Quake
Two people have been rescued from a ruined building two days after a magnitude 6.4 earthquake hit Taiwan City. One woman was found shielded under the body of her dead husband. The mayor has warned the death toll was likely to exceed 100. — AP

UN Condemns North Korea's Rocket Launch
The UN Security Council has strongly condemned North Korea's launch of a long-range rocket, and pledged new sanctions against the country. Pyongyang said it wanted to place a satellite in orbit, but the UN body said the real purpose was testing ballistic missile technology. — VICE News

Suicide Bomber Hits Afghan Bus
At least three people have been killed and 14 wounded after a suicide bomber attacked a bus filled with Afghan army personnel in northern Afghanistan. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the bombing, and all of the reported casualties were army employees. —Reuters

Beyonce. Photo via Wikimedia.

Everything Else

Beyonce Steals Halftime Show
With a posse of female dancers dressed like 70s Black Panthers, Beyonce easily stole the Super Bowl halftime show from Coldplay, then announced a 37-date world tour. Her new Formation video features overturned cop cars in New Orleans. — Rolling Stone

Kevin Hart's Ad Wins Poll
A Hyundai ad featuring Kevin Hart as an over-possessive dad topped the Ad Meter of most popular commercials during the Super Bowl. Advertisers lavished a record $5 million for 30 seconds of air time. — USA Today

Leopard Invades Indian School
A leopard that entered a school in the Indian city of Bangalore injured six people trying to capture it. The male leopard was eventually tranquilized and released after a 14 hour struggle. — Buzzfeed

New Evidence in Serial Case
An attorney for Adnan Syed—the convicted murderer made famous by the hit podcast Serial—says she has "powerfully credible" new evidence. Witness Asia Chapman has testified about Syed's whereabouts at the time of the murder. – VICE News

Done with reading today? Watch our video 'VICE Talks Film with 'Carol' Director Todd Haynes'

Jeb Bush at a town hall meeting in Salem, New Hampshire. All photos by Jason Bergman

It's 11 AM on Saturday morning in Bedford, New Hampshire, and Jeb Bush's staff has a problem: A police officer is saying that that McKelvie Intermediate School has reached its maximum occupancy.

Hundreds of people—many wearing Bush '88 hats and W pins, the merch of a dynasty—have squeezed into the school's auditorium to see the latest Bush to seek the presidency speak. Other supporters are stuck outside, cheering the former Florida governor's "Safer, Stronger, Freer America" bus as it rolled in. While Bush takes selfies with the stragglers, Tom Ridge appears onstage inside.

Ridge is an old-guard Bushite: He worked alongside, and campaigned for, George H.W. when he was a congressman, and was Dubya's first Homeland Security chief. He's a military man—an infantry sergeant in Vietnam—and projects the kind of seriousness you don't get from, say, a talk radio host. "I would go to sleep safe tonight," he sternly tells the town hall crowd, "knowing that Jeb is president tomorrow."

A few minutes later, he pauses to introduce the third Bush to run for the White House: "George... er, I mean Jeb... Bush!"

These aren't great times to be a Bush running for president. The New Hampshire primary looms on Tuesday, and he's still only around 10 percent in most polls. Before the campaign started Jeb was the frontrunner thanks to an influx of cash from donors, but after a series of negative news stories, ugly debate performances, and a disastrous defeat in Iowa, he turned into a punchline. The nadir, probably, was when he was filmed telling a crowd to "please clap" after an applause line. It might have been a joke, but it's not a great joke for a struggling candidate to make. If he finishes fourth or fifth on Tuesday, it'll be humiliating, and probably a sign that he should drop out.

But Jeb Bush's race was never just about Jeb. His father and brother both won the White House as "compassionate conservatives," Republicans who espoused right-wing views without being all fire-and-brimstone about it. Today's GOP base seems to want a bit of brimstone, to judge by the ascendant candidacies of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. Similarly, Jeb's credentials as a former governor and the scion of what is essentially an American noble family might once have attracted Republican voters who value that sort of thing—but now the worst thing you can be, other than a Democrat, is a member of the Republican Establishment. If he loses, it will demonstrate pretty conclusively that the old GOP that followed the Bush banner is dead. What the new GOP will look like, at this point, is a much murkier question.

On Saturday afternoon, that sort of talk seemed far, far away. With his wife, Columba, and two sons, George P. and Jeb Jr., looking on, Bush breezed through softball questions from residents. He sounded and seemed much more confident than he has on the debate stages, where he had been repeatedly—well, there's no nice way to put this—bullied by Trump. His responses in Bedford, especially on education and veteran care, were eloquent and boisterous, as he landed every punchline, leading to big applause. This was the candidate he was supposed to be when he announced all those months ago.

Alexander Maal, 23, was one of the rare young Bush supporters in the crowd. He and several other voters I spoke with were sure a Bush resurgence was secretly in the works and that the media would soon catch on to it.

"Trump got the headlines at first, so the media had to sell it," he told me. "But it's about to die down. Any serious voter knows that it has to be someone who will put in their due diligence." Maal added he personally didn't know anyone who supported Trump, and that die-hard Trump voters were a very small subset of the state's population.

Admittedly, to buy the idea of a Bush comeback you have to believe that the New Hampshire polls, like those preceding the Iowa Caucuses, are way off. But this is always the dream of struggling campaigns: the breakthrough moment, the surge of unexpected support, the realignment of donors who want to bet on a winner. It's been going the other way for Bush for so long things have to change, right?

A young Bush supporter in Salem

The Bush campaign recently handed out pamphlets that read "Jeb on the Rise" and pointed to a new poll showing that he had drawn even with his non-Trump rivals in the state. And on Saturday night Bush had a notably strong debate, getting into an exchange with Trump over eminent domain that ended with Trump saying that the audience was full of establishment donors to loud boos. Of course, the headlines weren't about that—they focused on Marco Rubio's bizarre, repetitive, talking-point-heavy performance—but it was a start.

The next morning, Bush strolled into yet another public school for yet another town hall. This time, there were fewer people and less of a press presence; when there was chatter about the debate, it was mostly about Rubio. Still, he went through his usual performance, saying that student debt was so bad we should start talking about "six-year degrees" and handing out moose figurines to showcase how climate change is affecting the environment.

After Jeb jetted off to another town hall, Patrick Durkin, a 59-year-old Jeb field operative, looked on as the seats in the cafeteria, were quickly removed. He had stumped for Bush Sr. and Bush Jr. in the past, and held on to hope for a third round. "I think families like them, who dedicate themselves to political life, know what they're doing," he told me. "These are volatile times, and you need someone smart and steady."

The media, he said, had treated Jeb's candidacy "quite well," but unforeseen X factors (read: Trump) had disrupted the process. "It was a easy shot early on," he said, "To pit them against one another. But now, I think voters will get serious." New Hampshire, he added, "was the Super Bowl of politics."

Over the next 48 hours, Durkin said, he would knock on doors and call voters to make sure they got out for Bush. He didn't want to name his second-choice candidate—"just a governor," Durkin told me. But as he mulled over his Jeb-less options, he expressed the sort of resignation I had heard from other Bush supporters, who like their candidate are slowly adapting to the fact that the election—and the party—may be out of their control.

"God bless the person," he said, "that can get through this incredible labyrinth."

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

The girls are back in town. Image via Warner Brothers

Last week, Netflix confirmed that it is bringing back Gilmore Girls for a seventh season. And lo, the internet, which is always calling for things to come back or be reunited because it has a real issue with time's linear progression, was finally satiated. Once-respectable news outlets were ablaze with excitement and the weekly Gilmore Girls podcast the Gilmore Guys went berserk. In the last week alone, there have been ten BuzzFeed articles about Gilmore Girls, including "This 4 Question Gilmore Girls Quiz Will Determine What Kind Of Coffee Drinker You Are" and "18 Times Paris Geller Proved She's The Funniest."

For whatever reason, Gilmore Girls has become the ultimate fodder for listicles and reaction GIFs. But like Friends, Frasier, The OC, Mean Girls, any Pixar film, and the literal ground that Beyoncé walks on, it has light and shade, progressive moments and some very problematic parts. Sadly this has all been subsumed into a Yassss Queen recall-a-thon where everything becomes one-liners and eye-rolls.

But unlike the other shows that have been collapsed under the internet's thirst for nostalgia, Gilmore Girls remains worth re-watching. It shows women in a way that they've never really been seen before on TV, with a quick-fire pop culture conversation style that is normally the reserve of the nerdy (usually male) characters in a teen movie. Lorelai and her daughter Rory, the two titular Gilmores, reference David Bowie, Sonic Youth, and joke about the Menendez brothers. They talk faster than Six in Blossom (the scripts were so dialogue-heavy they were about 15 pages longer than the average network TV script) and confront class, politics, and feminism in a way that still feels fresh by the standards of modern network TV.

A lot of the Gilmore cheerleading ignores all this. For example, in none of the cheery Rory-is-my-sidebitch online palaver is there anything about Emily Gilmore, Rory's grandma, who seems to register no facial expression other than mild distaste. You could show her 2 Girls 1 Cupand she'd probably just raise an eyebrow and say, "Well, that cup looks rather cheap."

When we're first introduced to Emily, she's a Republican monster, a demon of the DAR, who hires and fires maids on the turn of a salad leaf, ridicules her daughter for her haircuts and liberal life choices, and uses money as an emotional weapon.

A lot of the genius of the show comes because Lorelai Gilmore, Emily's daughter, thinks her mother is a stuck-in-the-mud old grump while she is a bastion of liberal parenting and JC Penney leather jackets. But we, the audience, can see the pair are exactly the same.

Lorelai has picked a life that is as small and confined as her mother's. She's lived in the same town since she was 16, worked the same job, had the same friends. She thinks she broke away from the stuffiness of her parents by moving out of their fancy home and into the picture-perfect fantasy land of Stars Hollow, which is actually just as insular, prissy, and incestuous as the upper-class world Emily inhabits. Emily's biggest flaw is that she expects her daughter to be exactly like her, but Lorelai gave her daughter her own fucking name and demands she spend every waking minute hanging out with her, so what do you expect?

Lorelai is a flawed antihero from a time before flawed antiheroes on TV were cool. She's the perennial teenager, a Petra Pan who has never grown up and wants to be her daughter's best friend. She does dumb things when it comes to men, shies away from honest discussion of problems, and also wears terrible hats—which somehow doesn't have any impact on her love life, but did seem to heavily influence the band Haim. There's a bite to Lorelai—you wouldn't want to cross her—and she has a core of steel. You fall in love with her not because she's super cool, but because when she fucks up, her loneliness and misery is brutally palpable as she tries to hold it all together.

Rory, meanwhile, is a walking parable of class and inheritance in modern America. Having an extra generation between her and Emily means she can see her grandmother's greatness, and she's more willing to embrace her posh heritage. The boyfriend she seems most comfortable with is Logan Huntzburger, who comes from an equally well-established family. She picks Yale over Harvard, with no qualms about the family connection (her grandfather is an alumnus)—indeed, that's part of the appeal. But she also loves the movies she watches with her mother, she's laid-back and warm, and never leans into the money at her disposal. But in the end, she finds the pull of her background becomes inescapable, and she finishes the show with the life her grandmother would have wanted for Lorelai.

Like any show from over three years ago, there's a lot about Gilmore Girls that seems politically out of step, and it's even more pointed on a show where the main characters are proud liberals who watch The Daily Show every night.

There's the junk food. It's a common TV trope that a woman's relationship to food is an indicator of her personality. While an uptight character will be pedantic and fussy over meals, chowing down burgers six days a week and only using your oven to store shoes or warm your jeans means a woman is cool, funny, and easygoing. It's lazy writing and it's also pretty batshit when you consider the message it sends—the ideal woman is one who eats crap all the time yet is still skinny. Which means when Emily Gilmore asks always-up-for-Chinese-takeout-and-let's-also-get-a-pizza-for-dessert Queen Rory if she's bulimic, I lean in extra close to the TV to see her reaction. But they skip over it like it's just another snappy gag that doesn't really matter to the story.

Gilmore Girls is also horrendously white. I mean, there is Michel, basically a snotty French cartoon cat who is obsessed with Celine Dion, and Lane, Rory's best friend, maybe one of the best teenage girls ever, but her mother Mrs. Kim is a highly devout Korean Seven Day Adventist whose two dimensions consist of hardcore antiquery and a brutal hatred of her daughter's freedom. Oh, and she's all about the tofu. It doesn't seem like creator Amy Sherman-Palladino was into complex and sympathetic representations of different nationalities and cultures.

To be fair, all the shows from this era—The OC, Dawson's Creek, Gossip Girl—are littered with white privilege and dodgy characters. The best evidence I have that this is a show that deserves far more respect than any other glossy sunshine teen drama offering of the 2000s is the episode when all three Gilmore girls, and Emily's husband Richard (played by the indubitably marvelous Edward Herman), finally make their peace with each other. The last five minutes of "Friday Night's Alright for Fighting" consist of a scene that smoothly wends its way between the family crying, screaming at each other, laughing hysterically, appreciating the delectable dinner, and finally collapsing with exhaustion. It's the most perfect representation of real family life that I've ever seen.

I can't believe this show only ever won an Emmy for makeup.

Follow Elizabeth on Twitter.

Ronald Reagan was president, Pierre Elliott Trudeau was prime minister, and the world was eagerly awaiting the release of Return of the Jedi when Charity Keesic slid into the world. It was June 23, 1982, precisely two days after the birth of Prince William—a fact carefully noted in her baby book alongside other snapshots (Trudeau, Reagan, Star Wars) of life as it was. As the world feted the arrival of the new prince, Murray and Leona Keesic welcomed Charity at the Moose Factory hospital in northern Ontario. She was their first child: a sweet-natured little girl, seven pounds and six ounces, with dark, fuzzy hair and chubby cheeks.

Charity was born in Moose Factory but would later live in Winnipeg and Pickle Lake before ultimately returning to the place of her birth. She became a big sister twice over: first to Joshua and then to Vincent. She was happy, close with her parents, and protective and encouraging of her younger brothers. She had friends and was also a bit of a daredevil: for her, the highlight of one family road trip to southern Ontario was riding roller coasters.

As she grew up, Charity would return to her baby book at irregular intervals to adorn it. The oldest example is her signature in stilted, careful handwriting, followed by a note: "I did this when I was 9 years old." At 15, Charity added a second signature in more elaborate, practiced cursive. She added a third and final signature at age 17, in 1999, the year her son was born.

That year, Charity dropped out of school to care for her baby boy. She planned to return when he was old enough for daycare. But in August 2001, months after her son's second birthday and shortly after her 19th birthday, Charity was found raped and murdered—beaten to death—on the shore of the Moose River.

Charity with her father as a baby. Photo courtesy of Charity's family

The identity of Charity's killer is protected by the courts because he was just 16 at the time. (His youth probably also accounts for the length of his sentence—only seven years, according to Leona.) But Leona knows him: he's the son of a once-close family friend.

For a while after Charity's death, Leona kept in touch with the boy's mother. She says her friends have a theory of why she kept the lines of communication open so long. "You were in shock," they tell her.

But one day, Leona just stopped, cutting off all communication. And her shock has given way to a hunger for justice. She wants a harsher sentence for Charity's killer. "We have a grandson that has no mom. We have two sons that have no sister. My husband and I lost a daughter. And what does he get? Just seven years in jail, that's it," Leona says. "That's not enough."

Murray and Leona Keesic with their newborn daughter, Charity. Photo courtesy of Charity's family

It's been over a decade since Charity's 16-year-old killer was arrested, convicted, and imprisoned. Despite his short sentence, to Leona's knowledge, he is still incarcerated, although she does not know why. The Youth Criminal Justice Act prevents the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General from speaking about the case, according to a spokesman, whether it is the length of the killer's sentence or whether he is still incarcerated and why.

But during that time, the number of Indigenous people imprisoned alongside him has increased.

Howard Sapers is Canada's Correctional Investigator. In his 2013/2014 annual report, he noted that roughly 80 percent of Indigenous offenders are not released until their statutory release date, meaning they're spending more time behind bars and less time being supervised within their communities.

He also wrote that the number of Indigenous people incarcerated in federal prisons jumped by 47.4 percent since 2005. During the same interval, the overall prison population increased only 17.5 percent.

Sapers has been blunt in his assessment of why Aboriginal people make up a disportionate amount of prison inmates, calling it a result of "systemic discrimination."

Simply putting someone in jail, says Dawn Lavell-Harvard, president of the Native Women's Association of Canada (NWAC), "really does very little to change the behaviour, because the behaviours are there as a result of that legacy of trauma, of residential schools, of whatever past experiences they've had."

Leona Keesic looks through old photo albums of her daughter Charity in Ears Falls, Ontario. Photo by the author

Leona understands this legacy well. She herself is a survivor of Canada's residential school system. She survived a system that was designed to assimilate her—and more than 150,000 other First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children—into Canadian society by removing them from their families and communities, isolating them from their language, culture, and traditions, and placing them in schools where many of them were abused emotionally, physically, and/or sexually. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has deemed this system a form of "cultural genocide."

All three of Leona's children knew she went to residential school, she says, but she didn't feel prepared to talk about it, and they never questioned her about it, so that was that.

But it's important, she says now, that people know what happened. It's important that Native studies courses be created or expanded to provide detailed information about the old residential schools, and about what some have labeled its modern-day equivalent: the child welfare system.

Leona thinks about this when she thinks about the 16-year-old boy who killed Charity, and about the other boys and men who kill.

"This guy kills somebody. His parents didn't do right raising him and his parents live in this community. Maybe this community didn't help them. And then you go back because they're from this reserve, and they don't get enough funding from the government, you know?"

People need to learn the history, Leona says, the connections and the impacts.

Sylvia Maracle, the longtime executive director of the Ontario Federation of Indigenous Friendship Centres and Mohawk from the Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory, puts it simply: "Children learn what they live."

"We didn't learn affection," she says, "We didn't learn a good touch, we learned not to talk about things right, to stuff them down, to not feel them. For me, those are all learned kinds of violence."

It's a point the first report from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hammers home: there is an intergenerational legacy of residential schools.

"It should not be surprising that those who experienced and witnessed very serious violence against Aboriginal children in the schools frequently became accustomed to violence in later life," it reads.

And then it continues: "Governments in Canada spend billions of dollars each year in responding to the systems of the intergenerational trauma of residential schools. Most of this money is spent on crisis interventions related to child welfare, family violence, ill health, and crime... Only a real commitment to reconciliation will reverse the trend and lay the foundation for a truly just and equitable nation."

Charity as a young girl. Photo courtesy of Charity's family

Leona left Moose Factory in 2003.

"I always thought that since we were living on a reserve that it was the safest place to raise a family," Leona would later write. Although the RCMP's reports on the epidemic don't mention murders or disappearances on reserve versus off reserve, NWAC's 2010 fact sheet notes that while resources are very much needed on reserves and in rural communities, most of the cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women occur in urban areas.

For two years after Charity's death, Leona and Murray remained in Moose Factory, raising their boys and their grandson. But in such a small community, the repercussions of a violent act are inescapable.

Moose Factory is home to fewer than 3,000 people, located on an island near the mouth of James Bay. Members of the Moose Cree First Nation comprise the majority of Moose Factory's population.

Leona felt "lost and lonely" amid the shocked support of her friends and neighbours, who when she went out would pepper her with questions like, "How are you feeling?"

Leona came to feel removed from her own life, as if she was living in a bad dream. So in 2003, she moved her family west to Red Lake, Ontario, where Murray had family.

In Red Lake, people didn't recognize Leona as the woman whose daughter had been murdered. She could walk down the road or sit for a cup of coffee without anyone politely inquiring as to how she was coping with her loss.

Red Lake is also a larger town—it has more than 4,000 residents—and larger towns usually enjoy better support options. In Red Lake, Leona found and joined an Aboriginal Healing and Wellness program, where she met with other mothers who had lost children. There, she says, her healing really began. Leona also obtained counseling through her employer, and learned to handle stress and panic attacks.

She's only been back to Moose Factory for funerals.

On the road to Ears Falls, Ontario, where Leona now lives. Photo by the author

It is not only the victims of violence that need healing, but also the perpetrators. As Sylvia Maracle observes, work is being done to help Indigenous men become reoriented, to unlearn the harmful behaviours—some of which, she believes, stem from Indigenous people adopting "limited notion of gender, instead of a continuum of gender expression."

The forthcoming national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women can open up national conversations into the multitude of other issues: poverty, racism, the child welfare system, and more. At the same time, Maracle says, work separate from politics continues to have an impact. It just needs more support.

The Ontario Federation of Indigenous Friendship Centres has a program called Kizhaay Anishinaabe Niin—an Ojibway phrase that translates to "I Am A Kind Man." It puts the onus on Indigenous men to make change, by educating them about traditional teachings in order to help them and to encourage them to challenge abuse when they encounter it.

"Men are hungry for this," Maracle says of the program, which is expanding to Alberta and British Columbia. "They really want to do it."

But unlearning takes time. As does undoing centuries of oppression, says Lavell-Harvard of NWAC. More than three centuries have passed since The Hudson's Bay Company established its second North American outpost in Moose Factory, making it Ontario's oldest English-speaking settlement, altering life for the Indigenous people who were there before the Europeans came, and are still there today.

"You can't undo generations of oppression and abuse in six months or even three or four years," Lavell-Harvard says. "It's going to probably go through several successive government terms because we're talking hundreds of years of oppression and abuse and poverty."

Leona with her daughter Charity. Photo courtesy of Charity's family

In 2008, Leona and Murray separated, but a year later the whole family moved to Thunder Bay. There, she connected with families of, and advocates for, missing and murdered Indigenous women across the country. There, too, she became aware of the gendered violence that Indigenous women in Canada face on a daily basis: more likely to be sexually abused as a child; more likely to be a victim of domestic violence; less likely to report being the victim of a crime (domestic abuse in particular); more likely to be assaulted or sexually assaulted before being killed.

In 2012, Murray was robbed and beaten. He died as a result of his injuries. Leona, her sons, and her grandson have since moved to Ear Falls with her partner, a town less than an hour south of Red Lake. Leona wants the best for all three boys. She wants them to be educated. She wants them to do "something positive."

"That's all I want for them," she says. But after everything the family has been through, she won't force them out of her home to help them achieve it, no matter how old they get. "I just don't have the heart to," she says.

Aside from the counseling Leona still receives, the family members have only each other to lean on. In remote and rural areas, support can be hard to come by.

Lavell-Harvard says that people need to remember these service gaps when they make comments about rural victims of violence such as, "Well, why didn't she just go to the shelter?" This is why she thinks it's vital for the national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women to be geographically inclusive.

"People don't realize just how isolated some of our rural and some of our really remote communities are," she says. Or that a big part of helping those communities living with trauma "is making sure that the justice system is about justice... and unfortunately it's not, it's just about punishment."

Maracle adds: "I think we can have conversations with respect to how do we as a society look at , how do we educate better, how to be more sensitive, how the system's changed. I think there are lots of discussions that can occur that will lead us, like we're dropping a pebble in a pond and those ripples are going out."

That's Leona, dropping her pebble. Since starting to heal, she's found her voice. She goes to events, gives speeches, and posts articles and media about Indigenous women online in the hopes of raising awareness among her more rural friends. She has been challenged by ambivalent or outright hostile governments, by communities lacking proper support, and by a public that often vacillates between indifference and racism. But she is determined now to struggle, to keep the discussion going, to send those ripples out.

Follow Jane Gerster on Twitter.

Twin brothers Evan and Jordan Caldwell, pictured above, died on Saturday in Calgary Olympic Park. Photo via Facebook

Two are dead and six are injured after a group of teens attempted to use their own toboggan at a bobsled and luge course in Calgary this weekend.

Police say that the the teens had entered Calgary Olympic Park after hours early Saturday morning, and attempted to use their own toboggan on the course before crashing into a gate that separated the bobsled from the luge paths.

The crash left twin brothers dead—17-year-olds Jordan and Evan Caldwell—and six other boys injured. Some of the injuries have been described as serious and police said the crash survivors were "severely traumatized" by the accident.

Denis Boivin, an expert on insurance law at the University of Ottawa, told VICE that property owners have a responsibility to fortify their property against trespassers, but notes that responsibility only goes so far until trespassers have to accept the risk that is associated with ignoring safety warnings.

"What happened was incredibly tragic, but at the end of the day, if someone does enter by cutting a hole in a fence or picking a lock... if there was ever to be a lawsuit, the argument would that would be made is that person accepted the risk or was negligent and contributed to the injury," he said.

Boivin notes that other examples of illegal trespassing such as rooftop photography are open to the same sort of scrutiny.

Similarly, when asked whether the teens being minors would have an affect on any future proceedings, Professor at University of Alberta Barbara Billingsley told VICE that one of the key issues a lawsuit would look at is whether the teens were considered capable of assessing the course as a danger.

"It depends on a lot of factors, the age of the child, the ability of the child to appreciate danger. The occupies have to reasonably assume that someone would be coming onto the property as a trespasser," she said, noting that the Occupiers Liability Act of Alberta does not ask property owners to protect their property from adults who are trespassing, only children.

"Essentially, it'd be a test of whether a reasonable 17-year-old could see that danger."

According to CBC, locals say that sneaking into the bobsled course was a Calgary tradition and that it was not unusual for teens to race down the course without permission from the park's company, WinSport.

Barry Heck, CEO of WinSport, told the CBC that he had heard of incidents of people sneaking into the park, but was not personally aware of anybody crashing on the track before. Heck added that the park has full security measures and will be conducting its own review, separate from the police investigation.

On Sunday, Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi called the incident a "tragic event," but came to the defense of WinSport's safety record.

"WinSport has been running this facility for many, many years with enormous safety and sometimes there's a point where there's no more you can do."

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter.

Team Simple Tools. All photography courtesy of the author, pictured third from the left

It's the evening of Friday, January 29, and I've found myself entirely out of my comfort zone. I'm meant to be playing video games, not making them. And yet, here I am: at the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol, England, taking part in the Global Game Jam. If you offered a penny for my thoughts right now, I'd give you just the one: We don't have a shot in hell.

"We," because I'm not alone here. Former games journalist turned Auroch Digital producer Peter Willington is beside me, likewise Pocket Gamer writer Danny Russell. This is all Peter's fault. He's been trying to encourage journalist friends to take part in the GGJ, the largest international event of its kind, taking place in real-life locations across the entire world. "It'll be great," he enthused in the Facebook post that piqued my attention. "It'll be really interesting to try a game jam without any of the usual skills." Those "usual skills" being, in this case, the skills required to make video games.

Sometimes Peter says "interesting," when what he really means is "disastrous."

A quick game jam 101, for those new to the concept. This is an event—it need not be big, but it certainly can be, in the case of GJJ and the previously-covered-on-VICE Ludum Dare—where teams come together to prototype a project and then, hopefully, produce a finished, or at least working, game within a short period of time. Some of these games can go on to make it big. Acid Nerve's Titan Souls was created during a jam, before being polished up and given a proper release through publisher Devolver Digital in 2015. Participating in game jams inspired Markus "Notch" Persson to get creative with his designs, and then Minecraft happened. These gatherings can lead to amazing things.

Danny and I became part of "Simple Tools." Peter aside, it's a team with few practical skills beyond whatever artist Tom Waterhouse, who probably didn't know what he was getting roped into, and Tim Skew, our programmer, could bring. Tim didn't realize that by agreeing to let me stay on his sofa he was also agreeing to help me make a game, something few of us had done before.

To reiterate an earlier point with curt precision: We're fucked.

I'd been buoyed by fake confidence, but sitting around the half of a conference table we managed to snag in the moments after the theme, "ritual," was announced to the assembled throng, I'm starting to have some doubts about my ability to produce anything in just 48 hours. For reference, this article took me something like 52 hours to put together, and didn't require a companion tablet app.

Our coder is stuck at work still, an hour away, and we're facing one massive problem: How do you even start making a game? What if our coder can't make whatever idea we settle on work? Hell, what if our idea sucks?

We drink too many cans of Coke. We eat too many cookies. Brain food. That sugar's used to write down a few ideas, which we immediately discard as being too obvious. But the panicked feeling in my gut is subsiding a little. We do have a few things in our favor.

Firstly, Tom is an immensely talented artist. Secondly, Peter's knowledge from "the other side" helps us determine what's possible within two days. We settle on a card game with digital elements. This should let us iterate fast and check our design before we get our coder to do anything. After all, we only get one chance to do this right.

After flirting with the school social system and escaping from a zoo, we decide that our "ritual" of choice is going to be about being the best student in school.

Sharing our workspace for the weekend is Team Discovery Channel, and it quickly becomes apparent that not only do they possess a lot more technical skills than us, but they also seem to be making a game about fucking a bird. The atmosphere between the two teams goes from frosty to we're-best-friends-let's-tell-each-other-everything-about-our-lives over the course of the Friday evening alone.

Saturday is the hardest day's work I've ever done in my life. Saturday is like the first hour back in the office after a long vacation, only for 12 hours straight. By mid-afternoon I've forgotten what fresh air feels like, and I'm tired of looking at cards.

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch VICE's film on the mystical universe of 'Magic: The Gathering'

Life-saving donuts are passed from group to group, and one member of Team Discovery Channel creates a tea-making roster with himself in every slot, drowning us in the stuff. I don't actually like tea, but I'm too caught up in British social angst to ever decline a mug of the stuff.

Tim and Tom are set up at either ends of a table separate from us less technically–minded sorts, so they're not disturbed by us play-testing and going over, and over, and over the card designs. We start to refer to their table as the talent table. I look over to see how they're doing, and realize how futile my own efforts are in comparison to theirs.

Tom is putting in an Olympian effort. He sits sketching at a tablet, designing and drawing from 10 AM to 10 PM with barely a break, creating every piece of art for the entire game. Tim meanwhile gets in at 12 but remains in a chair, wearing a three-piece suit, and codes for the next ten hours straight.

Beside us, Team Discovery Channel is experiencing a crisis. One of the programmers, who we'll call "A," has announced he needs to go and do something elsewhere. He's vague on the details and, taking all of his stuff, murmurs that he might be back in a couple of hours, perhaps tomorrow. This creates a unique problem for our sister team, our friends, because "A" is the only member of the crew who actually knows how his code works.

Disaster. An urgent email is sent his way, and ignored. Joe Williamson, the artist for Team Discovery Channel, is about to get a promotion. In just a few short hours he has to become his team's sole programmer, and he has just one evening to get the game ready. That game, since you're obviously curious, has a name by this point. Randy Birds. No, really.

The mood is lighter than you might imagine, but when the place closes up at 10 PM we're excited just to go outside. But in a bid to get our game "feature complete," which is the term for everything working even if it doesn't look pretty, Tim works well into the night, eventually crawling into bed after 4 AM.

Everyone at the Bristol jam has been working above and beyond, and when 10 AM rolls around the next morning, you can clearly see who's been going at it right through the night. This includes the entirety of Team Discovery Channel. They describe what sounds like the worst night of their lives, but they find themselves, on this new Sunday morning, somehow back on track to successfully submit their game before the absolute final deadline of 5 PM.

Sunday is pretty quiet for the designers. I spend most my time writing fiddling with the balance on events and stuffing puns into flavor text. We settle on a name: Gravity Academy. It's named after our primary mechanic, an anti-gravity card that is a complete fuck you to everyone playing it, generally accompanied by a bunch of people whooping like idiots whenever it appears.

On Motherboard: Global Game Jam Is a Decathlon for Game Developers

"A" saunters in shortly after ten o'clock, greeting his team as if he hadn't left them to flounder entirely. Half an hour later he announces he's going to see what the other teams are up to, and vanishes again. It feels a bit like he's broken the trust of the room, but Team Discovery Channel isn't too bothered, saying that he was redundant at this point. They're gracious enough, though, to put his name into their game's credits.

I take a stroll around the venue myself, to see what other teams have been up to. I spy "A," working away in a corner, trying to finish his own game. I hope that his idea was a worthwhile one. By the time I get back, we realize that the deadline for submission is looming, and we're going to have to leave voice acting out of our final game. Or, in other words: The recordings I have on my work Dictaphone, made by Danny in a shower cubical, will have to remain on hold for the Gravity Academy Game of the Year edition.

The problem is, despite our best efforts and no massive problems with the development, tying all of the art and sound together with code takes time. Tim has been hammering away for most of the last 35 hours, but he's not superhuman.

Meanwhile, Randy Birds is coming together nicely. There's a jungle of controller wires snaking out of two laptops—the controllers require USB ports to function, and the laptop running the game doesn't have enough to support the four players. But there's a complete game here now: You have to tap out a three-digit code, corresponding to the pad buttons, before your rivals; and the better you do, the more the female bird will shower you with love hearts. It is, essentially, competitive mating.

Somehow we manage to upload the details required of us at 4:59 PM, seconds before an organizer hustles us off to give a five-minute presentation that decides the fate of our game. And despite the jam's 17-minute opening movie promising that this wasn't about competition, it's definitely a competition. I look around, and I see judges: It's definitely a competition.

Our card game takes 25 minutes to play, and we have five minutes to present it. Despite the best efforts of Peter and Danny, we struggle to get the core concept across. Perhaps that comes though in this piece, too? Never mind—I told you at the start that this probably wouldn't work out perfectly.

After us comes "A." His game is game billed as "A commentary on religion and our relationship with spirituality." Presumably he spent Saturday night communing with his chosen deity and Sunday's split from the group was divine intervention, and he's on a mission from G... No, wait. His game features a rapidly moving baby with an erection, and you're trying to move some scissors to circumcise the poor kid. Miss too many times and the baby's eyes cross and he turns a sickly shade of green. The word "infanticide" is written across the top of the screen.

Now I'm not the most sensitive guy in the world, but even so, this is the first game I've seen by an indie developer that's ever made me uncomfortable. In a jam featuring games about horny birds, a plasticine wedding and ballet—with no dancing, but a bizarre and beautiful art style—a one-note joke about circumcision that might lead to you stabbing a baby to death left me just a tiny bit cold.

In the end, Gravity Academy doesn't place in the top three. Randy Birds, though? It only goes and wins.

That was the best we could have hoped for, really. Everyone that played Gravity Academy loved it and we're going to work more on it, but perhaps the most memorable aspect of my participation in the GGJ was seeing the guys on the table next to us work so tirelessly, and being rewarded for their efforts. So why not give Randy Birds a go? It's not like it's actually going to make you stuff a turkey.

Follow Jake on Twitter.

Yarny, the constantly unwinding star of 'Unravel'

Announced at 2015's E3 by its creative director Martin Sahlin, who was visibly shitting himself, Unravel looked like nothing else revealed at the game's industry's highest-profile expo. That it was being published by EA, and not a considerably smaller company, was fascinating: What did this obviously beautiful, somewhat melancholic, side-scrolling puzzle game have that a thousand other titles like it, genre wise, didn't? Surely just looking fantastic, and making the player feel a little sad, wasn't enough to make EA get involved?

Having now played the game for a significant period of time, I've got to say that, "yep," Unravel's aesthetic appeal probably was the driving force behind its gargantuan publisher getting involved. Because how it plays, while compelling enough to never be boring, doesn't feels completely unique enough to qualify Unravel, built by the small Swedish studio Coldwood Interactive, as a game without precedent, a puzzler that sets the bar for such cerebral adventures at a new height.

You move your character, Yarny, who's made from a single (extendable) thread of yarn, from left to right across a range of terrain, from an overgrown backyard to a seashore, onto a mountainside and across railway lines, through a scrapyard and thick snow, on a quest to basically collect memories. Obstructing your progress through every stage is a series of obstacles, solvable by yanking on things with your own body-forming string, pulling or pushing objects—apples, rocks, floats, old tin cans, a spool of fishing line—or by being clever with knots: Get a piece of yarn taut between two spots and Yarny can spring upwards from it, or you can shove an asset along it, from a lower level to where it's needed. You can pull thread you lose back into your body, and also use it to lasso hooks that sparkle on the screen, indicating a point of attachment. However, if Yarny travels too far without replenishing himself (or herself—my kids have decided Yarny's a girl) using the scraps of yarn scattered throughout the game, he'll simply fall apart. It doesn't let you go that far—instead, Yarny will simply stop, the line snagged, and you're forced backwards to work out where you might have hooked yourself up wrongly, freeing up length enough to reach the next save point.

The yarn mechanic is what gives Unravel its gameplay USP, and it's a vital inclusion, as without it this would very quickly begin to feel like a (gorgeous, admittedly) re-skin of another brain-tester from northern Europe, albeit Denmark, namely Playdead's Limbo. In that game, a critically acclaimed puzzle-platformer with disturbingly dark visuals, you control a small boy, left to right, pushing and pulling parts of the environment to proceed. Said boy will often die, horribly, but generous checkpointing meant that Limbo never felt unbeatable. There's also several collectibles to pick up in each section of the game, breakable eggs that add to your overall completion percentage.

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch VICE's interview with 'Carol' director Todd Haynes

And the same is true of Unravel, to the point of sporadic déjà vu. Yarny can briefly detour from the route of least tanglement to pick up trinkets (there are five in each stage), and several different creatures can savagely disassemble him if the player isn't careful with his or her swinging or quick to respond to danger. The snapping claws of shore-dwelling crabs are an obvious threat to be avoided, likewise the gnashing jaws of an agitated water vole. (I'm going to assume that's what that marauding bastard is, anyway—it looks like a gopher, but they're not native to Sweden.) Some animals lend a helping hand, though, such as a fish that pulls Yarny across a river—getting submerged is as big a no-no as trying to make friends with crustaceans. You'll also take a ride on the wind while holding onto a kite or a plastic bag.

Visually, Unravel is stunning. To the extent where you will absolutely just pause from time to time, gently strolling left to right and back again, drinking in a scene that is so close to photo real that it's like a stretch of northern Scandinavia fell into your TV. You'll rarely have seen rocks and moss, ferns and bark, knackered tire rubber, and rusted metal look quite so touchable in a video game. The water is so wet. This side to the game's presentation gives it a great sense of place—the stones and the streams, the rushing waves and the hardy flora, it all sings of its makers' homeland, an aspect aided by Swedish-language signs but comfortable without such obvious cues. Yarny, too, is terrifically animated and expressive, even without a proper face.

'Unravel,' official story trailer

With no spoken words in the game, its music plays a massive part in the overall ambience, which taps into nostalgia—each stage is entered through a photograph, set within a "menu" screen that is an old woman's house (a little like the mobile game Quell, if that rings any bells)—while layering on the bittersweet feeling that can arise from looking through one's past, seeing the friends and family who were there at the time (and maybe aren't, anymore). Composed by Frida Johansson and Henrik Oja, Unravel's score combines frenetic folk passages triggered by set-pieces, akin to Marcin Przybyłowicz's more dramatic loose-strings-and-palm-skins arrangements for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, with gentler, reflective moments designed to lightly color the process of puzzle solving. While a parallel between a relatively diminutive affair like Unravel and the epic, open-world adventure of The Witcher 3 might seem unlikely, consider that both games are set in northern Europe, and each have an air of magic about them, and it's not such a difficult comparison to appreciate.

February 2016's a strong month for games full of first-impression promise. Firewatch is unique within the "walking simulator" (uh) sub-genre of immersive, interactive-fiction titles; Far Cry Primal is taking the first-person shooter back 10,000 years to a time of spears and saber-tooth cats; and Superhot is bringing both a singular visual style and innovative time-based strategy to the guns-and-ammo field. Unravel is another game where surface-level appeal is a given, but digging deeper into the experience, it isn't something to immediately drop whatever else you're playing right now for. Do get around to it eventually, though, because its design strengths outweigh any seen-it-before familiarity.

What it, and Firewatch too for that matter, should do is attract the attention of people who only very rarely sit down with a video game. It's challenging, but you only occasionally need swift reactions to progress. It's truly beautiful to watch in motion, and if you're in the same room as someone playing through it, its looks alone will make you want a turn. The character on the box is both fascinatingly unlike gaming avatars before it, and immediately an empty vessel for the player's own personality. Yarny's not about to be another Mario, but it's no stretch whatsoever to picture a toy range based on this game's unusual lead. I'd be very surprised if Unravel's hero didn't have merchandising opportunities ahead of him. A star is almost certainly born then, albeit in a game that doesn't completely meet the intimidating expectations that preceded its release.

Unravel is out now for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One (version tested). More information at the game's official website.

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.