So, it's Valentine's Day. Remember? The day you pretend not to care about if you're forever alone, or want to play it cool with your girlfriend? It's not as though everyone's been writing and talking about it since Thursday.

No one seems to know exactly how we ended up celebrating love and sentimentality on February 14 every year—spare your friends the "invented by Hallmark" chat, please—but a general consensus revolves around the brutally violent ancient Roman feast of Lupercalia, the two martyred men named Valentine (also Roman!), honored by the Catholic Church and the French Normans' Galatin's Day.

Whatever. Either way, we've ended up with a not-quite holiday that boosts flower sales, gives couples an excuse to try not to fall asleep before having sex and thrusts an inferiority complex upon anyone single by early February. Love is great, obviously, and makes us feel a combination of effervescent and unhinged but is wielded like a battering ram at this time of the year.

Not anymore. The people at blog New Hive have set up a chatroom primed for a congregation of "lonely cyber-souls" to talk to one another and generally not succumb to the stereotypical anti-Valentine's defensiveness. The chat is to start on Sunday evening at 8PM EST.

New Hive is the sort of digital art website that hosts pieces like this one-man video version of an error 404 message, and tweets things like: "MASS-REPLICATED IMAGERY GOT ME FADED." In any case, the chatroom's technically already open, and will allow users to broadcast live webcam video feeds into the chat, or stick to text if feeling shy. I logged in at about 2PM GMT from London, to see what it was like. Two people popped in briefly, as guest-11418 and guest-11415, then logged out as soon as I tried to get some chat going by typing "We're early." So much for that. I'm sticking to "my boyfriend was at the football" as my excuse.

If you'll still be awake by 1AM in the UK, this ought to be the place for connecting with a bunch of strangers who aren't morosely scrolling through Instagram and wondering why they weren't hand-delivered a heart-shaped stack of pancakes in bed.

Illustration by Jacky Sheridan.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Depending on who you ask, Valentine's Day is either an absolute crock of shit, a slight inconvenience, or a chance to show your beloved what they really mean to you. For me, it's a combination of all three. Undoubtedly the worst part of V-Day for basic dating types, however, is the acquisition of a table at a restaurant. This is even worse for non-dating types, because not only are you dealing with the cold shiver of abject loneliness, you also can't get anything to fucking eat. It's like the whole world is rejecting you all at once.

Spare a goddamn thought for the waiters and waitresses getting by proxy nausea from a thousand puppy eyes and footsie games scuffing up their restaurants. Sure, they might make a few more tips off some particularly amorous customers, but for the most part they're either cringing the grease out of their hair at dates gone wrong or boaking at the pheromones hissing off a date gone well. We spoke to some of Britain's top servers to hear some of the disgusting, depressing things we do to each other in public on this special, loving day. D'aww!

THE AWKWARD DOUBLE DATE

A couple had come to the restaurant pretty much every week for dinner together but they broke up. Both booked Valentine's Day dinners with the new people they were shagging but obviously hadn't thought about the fact that it was both their favorite restaurant and they clearly would have similar ideas. They turned up like one hour after each other and had booked tables opposite. Both hadn't told their new partners they were only recently single and then they basically had a massive row about 'how dare the other one bring their new partner to 'their' restaurant.' It was very awkward for their dates and the restaurant, as it's very small. The ex-girlfriend started going on about how he met him on Plenty of Fish and how she moved in with him after two months, but then he started staying out late. The Plenty of Fish thing was funny because I think another customer said something along the lines of, "Everyone knows Plenty of Fish is just for sex for ugly people." Which was kind of true for that couple, to be honest.
- Kara

THE VERY HUNGRY CUSTOMER

One of the waiters, who was 16 at the time, got a blow job from a 42-year-old woman. She took him to the basement stock room, didn't kiss him, just sucked him off, went back upstairs and sat down and finished her meal with a group of girlfriends. It's very Samantha from Sex and the City, isn't it?
- Philip

THE POO IN THE WOOWOO

I worked at a grim Wetherspoons on Valentine's Day while I was a student. For some reason, a fair few couples took up the Valentine's Day deal (three-course meal with a drink) and decided to spend their evening there. A student couple sat at a table in the corner. I didn't know him, but I knew of her from different friendship circles. She was one of those sporty ones that goes to university to do sport and tells everyone about how great the sport is. I knew she had a bit of form for doing some pretty rare stuff because she organized all the initiations for her club, or whatever it was.

Anyway, her fella comes to the bar and orders a pitcher of WooWoo, a kind of schnapps, vodka, and cranberry drink. They finished up and left in a hurry. After a few minutes I notice a foul stench coming from their corner. I was surprised to find, among other random things including a drinks menu, that one of them had dropped giant shit in the jug.
- Nick

Illustration by Jacky Sheridan

THE MASHED SPUD-FUCKERS

There was a couple who were having sex and doing coke in the toilet (we only have one) so there was a big queue. I had to ask them to leave, which they shamefully did. The next person went in to use toilet and then another customer came and got me and asked me to clean the toilet, so I was thinking there was loads of coke and, I dunno, cum or whatever around the loo. But the couple had thrown loads of potatoes down the toilet and blocked it. I ran to the manager and said, "There's loads of potatoes in the toilet, can someone make sure no one is downstairs in the stock room taking stuff?" And the manager just said, "Oh, not the fucking potatoes again—who keeps doing that? That's twice this week." I don't know if the shaggers did it or someone before them, but the idea of shagging bent over a toilet full of potatoes is so funny.
- Lisa

THE 6PM SUCKLE

For a good six-month-stint a couple of years ago, I worked at a wannabe 'trendy' craft beer bar in the provincial Scottish city where I went to uni. 

As a small mercy, I'd taken the Valentine's Day shift, because most of the other people I worked with had partners. 

I was cutting limes and stuff, preparing for the night, but at this point it's only 6 PM and it's dead, dead quiet. There's an innocuous-looking couple at the bar. He's a typical sporty-looking bloke with a lads' holiday Facebook cover photo and she's his equally dull, nice-looking girlfriend. So they've had some pulled pork and a couple of overpriced cocktails, and you can imagine they're going home to some dull sex.

 I'm standing there cutting fruit but suddenly I hear a deep, meaty-sounding sucking to the left of me. It's the unmistakable sound of lips on tit and his lips are very tightly, very sloppily clasped around her tit. It was 6PM on fucking Valentine's Day in an empty pub. To this day, I won't forget their mutual look of slightly outraged incomprehension as I chucked them out.
- Francisco

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Image courtesy of James Hyman of the Hyman Archive

Late last year, Playboy caused a fuss when the venerable nudie mag announced that it wouldn't have naked ladies in it anymore. Well, there are still naked ladies, as the New York Times has pointed out, but they're the sort of naked ladies who might live in GQ or Esquire, their most provocative bits hidden behind some equivalent of a fig leaf. The strategy is pretty obvious: People who want to look at naked women have more than enough ways to do that on the internet; as Gloria Steinem told Time: "It's as if the NRA said we're no longer selling handguns because now assault weapons are so available."

Still, the first full-nudity-free issue of Playboy, which is coming out in March, marks a big shift in the brand. Founder Hugh Hefner's 24-year-old son even publicly broke with the company because he's so appalled by its decision not to publish photos of vaginas anymore. But the people in charge of the magazine are betting that millennials in general will approve of the move. The Playboy website went SFW last August and as a result, executives told the Times, quadrupled its traffic. The hope seems to be that by removing the whiff of baby boomer seediness from its pages, young people will read and subscribe to it.

But what about the people who are already obsessed with Playboy, the collectors who have watched the magazine go from sultry pinups to bleached-blonde implants to the nebulous combination of celebrities and feigned taboo-breaking? How do they feel about this change? To find out, we spoke with three Playboy collectors of varying fanaticism to get their perspectives on the magazine's past, present, and future, and whether eliminating the explicit will help Playboy build back what once made it so appealing.

Image courtesy of the Hyman Archive

James Hyman
45 Years Old, from London
Guinness World Record Holder for Largest Collection of Magazines
866 Playboys Collected

VICE: Why do you collect magazines?
James Hyman: One of the initial reasons for collecting is that I was a scriptwriter for MTV in the late 80s, early 90s. I had to write things for the VJs, or video jockeys, to talk about, and the best thing you had before the internet was magazines. Let's say a was in heavy rotation and you needed to keep writing about Prince or Madonna or whatever—where better to get more information than a Rolling Stone interview? Magazines were full of rich information that was not easily available.

So when did you start collecting Playboy, formally?
I saw it in a newsagent and thought it was another interesting magazine that had pop culture, and my thing was always collecting pop culture. So you look at a Playboy and it had a naked woman on the cover, but that woman would always be a pop culture staple, like Bo Derek, Kim Basinger, Janet Jackson, whoever. I was collecting the news ones, but then after going to crazy shops in London I discovered the dangerous pursuit of back issues. They would have Playboys going from the 50s through the 80s. I thought, Right, I've got to fill my collection of magazines, and that's what I did.

What do you like about vintage Playboys?
I think they really capture a time. The writing was always fantastic; you had amazing interviews in them. John Lennon's last interview was in Playboy. Malcolm X, Martin Luther King were in Playboy... James Bond was serialized in it! People say it as a cliché, but I would read Playboy for the articles.

Do you think going away from full nudity is a good move for Playboy?
Whether it's desperation or not, I don't think it's a great move because you expect nudity in Playboy. Now, maybe parameters need to be clear because I understand Playboy Brazil and Germany are keeping the nudity. Without the nudity you could argue it's like French fries without ketchup. There's a magazine here, Horse and Hound , you're not just going to call it Hound magazine. People expect it.

Is your collection up to date? Are you a subscriber?
Yeah, I'm still collecting it, so I get it every month. I'll keep [my subscription] going after the re-launch, sure.

Will you still read it, or is it just being archived for your collection?
I don't read every magazine I get. I don't read tons and tons of magazines like I used to, but I still read the articles in Playboy. I read Playboy hoping there's going to be something of interest in there. Maybe there'll be, I don't know, an in-depth interview with Quentin Tarantino or something interesting. But yeah, weirdly, I do still read it.

Learn more about the Hyman archive by going to its website or following it on Twitter.

Danny Bowes
37 Years Old, from New York City
Hundreds of Playboys Collected

VICE: When did you start collecting?
Danny Bowes: I started in the spring of 1992 when I was 13.My dad gave me a copy that had an interview with Michael Jordan. [The interview] was sort of a turning point in his relationship with the media. My dad had sensed the significance of it at the time and he gave me the magazine because he figured I was old enough where I wouldn't be like, "Oh my god, there are boobies in the magazine!" But of course, I read the interview, and then was like, "Well, I do believe there are boobies in this magazine." So my interest was piqued.

How did you collection grow from there?
Later that year I turned 14. As a birthday present, I think it was my mom who had seen the magazine lying around and thought, Eh, I'll get him a subscription . So basically for my entire teenage years and the whole time I was in college, I was a subscriber to Playboy, and I think only one month in all that time is missing from my collection.

So why did you keep back issues?
I'm not big on throwing stuff out in general, but in each of them there was always something worth keeping. Like an interview from one issue was interesting, or one of the short stories from another issue was good. There was something of interest every month—most of the time not for the pictures, but, admittedly, I flipped through a few times.

Did your dad collect too?
He bought it a lot and had it around the house, but he didn't have a formal, organized collection. And it was just better in the 70s. The 90s were a really weird time to collect Playboy because it was on this weird trajectory into plasticity that I felt kind of uncomfortable with as an aesthetic. It was promoting this very weird and I didn't feel very philosophically healthy about it at that point.

How would you describe that aesthetic in the 90s?
It was all very exaggerated and artificial. All of a sudden, all the models had very unnatural enhancements and looked like they were shot this way by somebody with a slightly unhealthy view of femininity. And I never really got that sense in the early years, when it was just good-looking naked women.

How do you feel about Playboy eliminating full nudity?
I feel that it's time at this cultural moment. The value of the magazine was never entirely about the nudity; it was always a major part of it, you know, founded to be that. But the way that things have evolved, with print giving way to digital, it's the time to make that transition if you're going to make it at all. And there's enough merit in the magazine over the years to make it possible. The new editorial direction they've taken in the last couple of years has been a lot more progressive. I stopped my subscription in the 90s, but now I sort of wish I was still a subscriber. During Hefner's Viagra years, it was sort of like, Jesus Christ. But now it's a home for a lot of good, progressive writing.

A 1960s Playboy image via Lysette's Etsy account

Lysette Simmons
30 Years Old, from Los Angeles

VICE: Will you tell me about your Playboy collection?
Lysette Simmons: Well, it's dope. I really love it and I don't even know how many I have—at least a hundred, maybe 200. I only collect the first 30 years. I've only recently realized why I like this era—Art Paul was the art director for those specific years. There are some covers that are just... art. I don't actually have the holy grail of them, which is the first issue in October, 1953—you can't find that one for less than two grand.

So why did you start collecting?
It's kind of odd, I guess. I had a few that my grandma gave me when she was cleaning out all of the magazines that my grandparents had subscriptions to. And then my dad died in 2012 and I just needed to destroy things. And I don't know why I picked on Playboy, but I started making paper snowflakes out of the pages of the issues I had. They were very beautiful. I liked that if I folded this woman up and couldn't see any part of her body and did all the cutouts and unfolded it, such a beautiful thing would be the result.

Do you cut up every magazine you get today, or do you preserve some?
I have started to not cut them up as much, and actually purposely out legendary issues that I know of. I just got one I'm really excited about the other day in the mail—August, 1955. [The cover] is just a drawing of a mermaid and a rabbit scuba diving, nothing unsavory going on.

Do you have thoughts on Playboy's new direction without nudity?
Good for them. Not having to take your clothes off to get somewhere in LA? That's great. One more reason not to take your clothes off to get somewhere.

It looks like the models might still be getting naked, but not everything is going to be shown.
I'm fine with that. I haven't read any articles about the decision to do that, but if I were running Playboy, my thinking would be to try and legitimize the magazine again.

Have you found that collecting Playboy is rare among women?
I haven't met any other women who collect Playboy. And when I first told people I was collecting them so I could cut them up, they were horrified because at the time I had no idea what they were worth. I was just grieving for my dead father by desperately cutting up snowflakes. I thought if I could make one every night, if I could make something beautiful every day, I could keep going. I thought, Well, I need more Playboys if I want to live, so...

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Image via Wikimedia Commons

It probably won't shock you to learn that Valentine's Day in America's prisons tends to be pretty depressing. I remember from own two-plus decades inside sending cards out to my girlfriend (and future wife), my mother, and anyone else I was lucky enough to correspond with. But usually the best I could do in the way of gifts was some kind of homemade ceramic crafted by a fellow inmate.

I once resorted to commissioning a painting of my wife and I based the image on a photo of us hanging out in my prison's visiting room.

These days, companies like JPay help inmates not only send out emails, buy music and receive attachments, but even blast out e-cards just in time for Valentines Day. As of 2012, Jpay was catering to 1.5 million inmates throughout 35 states, and since I've been out, I've used it to correspond with friends in the Ohio, Michigan and South Carolina state prison systems. I reached out to a few of them for some perspective on how Valentine's Day is evolving within the confines of America's prison-industrial complex thanks to private-sector innovation.

"The E-card thing is cool," a prisoner we'll call Sha emails me from the Mansfield Correctional Institution in Ohio. "I like it, especially coming from the fed system where we only have emails. Just about every email I send out now I includes an e-card attachment. The Valentine ones been on there all this week. It's easy to do. cards because cards are still real personal to me and I know people still value cards as well."

Sha says there's a huge selection to choose from with services like JPay, and embraces it as a luxury of mass incarceration in the 21st century. But some inmates aren't so fond of the service, likening it to a scam—albeit one they can't always resist.

"I don't got no Valentine—I'm in prison," my friend Rick says on the phone from Oaks Correctional Facility in Manistee, Michigan. "It's a cool way of communicating, but 20 cents for every e-card—there's a charge for everything."

That may not seem like much, but many prisoners only make $15 dollars a month, leaving Rick with a bad taste in his mouth.

"You can scroll through these pictures and it costs 20 cents each," he tells me. "JPay is one of the biggest rackets going. I use it, but it's just a photo. Not really a card. I used it to send out a birthday card. It's something that's quick and fast and convenient and you feel like you're semi-attached to the real world by using email."

(JPay declined to comment on the specifics of Rick's beefs.)

I got the same feeling when I first started using email around 2010 at FCI Loretto, a low-security federal prison in western Pennsylvania. It was like instant back and forth communication, and I'm sure a lot of dudes will be using JPay to send Valentines Day e-cards to their significant others and loved ones. But most inmates I spoke to still prefer physical cards to the digital iteration.

"There's nothing personal like a homemade card," Rick argues. "The majority of the cards we send are homemade, and we use old fashioned snail mail." I got plenty of cards made when I was in, paying about six to 12 bucks per. These things can get really elaborate, and there's actually a decent selection, with various card hustlers pitching their wares on the compound.

My personal favorite Valentine's Day move was always to call my mom and get her to order my wife roses. Showing that you can deliver a physical gift even when you can't be present is everything for an inmate.

"I sent my ex-wife roses straight to her front door," an inmate named Willie tells me from FCI Terre Haute, a medium-security federal prison in Indiana. "To be honest, I timed it so her old man would be home when they arrived. He might as well find out now that we're getting back together when I come home."

Any sign of interest from the outside world is welcomed by inmates, but the key is often finding that friend on the outside who will lend you a hand. A guy called "Big Fridge" in the Ohio state system, which offers JPay, asked me for help this year with his mom, sister, and two girlfriends.

I took care of it for him. The heart-shaped boxes of chocolate didn't cost much, but they made my buddy—who's been down two decades—look like he could still make things happen for his loved ones, and that's probably the greatest gift of all.

Follow Seth Ferranti on Twitter.

At 28, I've finally started to feel like a grown-up. When I was in my early 20s, I dated sleazy photographers or DJs who never introduced me to their friends. At 28, though, I'm partnered with another 28-year-old, and we're even buying a dining room table so we no longer have to sleep in spaghetti sauce.

Based on statistics, it's getting harder and harder for people to find their soul mates. The percentage of married households in the US is lower than it's ever been and people are waiting longer to tie the knot. It's becoming more and more common to meet divorcees below the age of 30, too. I wanted to know what it's really like to attempt to find true love or spend Valentine's Day with the same bag of bones for decades, so I called up some veterans dating experts: three grandmas.

These women have literally created lives, yes, but they've also lived vibrant ones. Joanne, a 66-year-old from Brooklyn, warns of the importance of encouraging people to come out of the closet, and says online dating is just as shitty at 66 as it is at 26.

Bella, who asked to use a pseudonym, is 77 today, but she left her husband after 25 years of marriage at age 45 to travel. Since her divorce, she's found difficulty finding a man who can keep up with her passion for seeing the world, though she recommended that others don't give up on their dreams for a relationship.

Honey is a happily married cancer survivor. Before we got off the phone, the 71-year-old warned me: "Be very nice to your girlfriends, because they're going to outlive your boyfriends." Point taken.

Anyway, I'm spending Valentine's Day on a beach in the Caribbean with my boyfriend. If you're solo masturbating and eating some nachos to fill the romantic void this weekend, or simply need some encouragement about finding your perfect mate, take a break and read what these grannies have to say.

For a different take on relationships, watch our doc on America's lucrative divorce industry:

Joanne
66 Years Old
Brooklyn, New York

VICE: Are you currently dating?
Joanne: Right now I don't have a love life. I've had two husbands. My daughter says I'm a man hater, which I'm not! When I separated from my husband eight years ago, my daughters put me online to meet someone new. I was reluctant, but did use the dating site to meet a man who seemed nice. He came to my house, but had I known what he looked like in reality, I would have not opened the door. He had this turquoise car and was like, "I'm going to take you out to coffee. Is there a Dunkin Donuts anywhere?"

I will never date a man who has less than me. I have a new car, I have two homes, I'm not rich by any means, but I don't want someone who wants me to support them. I find these women who are older than myself, with younger guys, or men their own age, and they're supporting men. They all say the same thing: they don't want to be alone. I'd rather be alone.

What was your first love like?
My first husband, my daughters' father, was this macho, Italian man. I'm Italian, but that's not my type.I married him on the rebound after breaking off my first engagement, which was with my first love.

Why did the engagement end?
We had a wonderful relationship. My girlfriends liked him, he used to say to them, "I want a platonic relationship ." We had to look up the word "platonic." At the time, I didn't understand, you know? I was madly in love, he was madly in love, and we got engaged anyway.

A month before the wedding, we were looking for an apartment, and my parents said, "Why don't you buy a house? There are houses for sale, we'll give you money and he can get a GI mortgage," because he was in the Navy. I found out that he couldn't get one because he had a dishonorable discharge.

Why was that?
I didn't know why at the time, but I should have known. He said, "You have to come some place with me, Joanna. I need to introduce you to this woman I speak to." So he takes me to the city to meet a psychiatrist I didn't even know he had. And she told me he's gay! Now this was in 1970, and everybody was in the closet. And of course, I didn't marry him.

What did he say?
He was devastated. He begged, he pleaded, he said he loved me. He said yes, he did have a relationship with someone in the Navy; he did have a boyfriend before me. I should have known—he worked on Wall Street but was a hairdresser on the weekends.

What happened to him? He was your first love, after all.
I don't know. It feels like he disappeared from the Earth. One of my girlfriends saw him with a boyfriend at a beauty parlor once. He was very paranoid about dying, and I'm sure the spread of AIDS intensified those fears. I remember he had a white shirt and a pair of jeans and he said, "If anything happens to me, Joanne, I want to be buried in this." Maybe he committed suicide, maybe he had AIDS, but no one ever heard from him after we split up.

If you could have given yourself any love advice when you were in your early 20s, what would it have been?
I didn't look for the right things. I never thought about what my husband made as far as a living. It was just getting married and getting out of the house because my folks were kind of strict. All my girlfriends were married or engaged, I was supposed to be married with them. So I married my husband quick, or else I was going to be an old maid.

I would never feel like that again. My father was always putting me down, telling me I was stupid. I think if I didn't have that negativity toward myself, thinking I wasn't good enough, I don't think I would have married my first husband. I love my children. I feel what is meant to be is meant to be. But I would have lived my life totally differently if I thought more of myself and thought more about myself. I would have picked the man; he wouldn't have picked me.

Bella
77 Years Old
Charlottesville, Virginia

VICE: Tell me about yourself.
Bella: I'm divorced. I married when I was 20 in 1961 and stayed married for 25 years. We had three children. We got married because I was pregnant.

Do you think you would have gotten married if you weren't pregnant?
Maybe not. Well, I was not happy in my home life [at my parents'] so it was a door for me to escape.

Have friendships been an important part of your life?
They're very important, especially since I recently dislocated my shoulder! If it hadn't been for friends, I wouldn't have had enough food in the refrigerator. I do like living on my own and being dependent on myself. That's very satisfying to me. I have two cats.

Do you stay in touch with your ex-husband?
Yes, I do. We're in touch because of our children. He's on his third marriage right now. When I see him, I often wonder what interested me, but I think escape was the motivation. He's a good man; he's a good honest man.

Why did you leave your marriage?
I had goals that I wanted to pursue. The industry I was working in allowed me to travel, which became my biggest goal. At the time, my children were of the age where they certainly didn't want me interfering in their life other than simply being there. And since I had gotten married very young, I wanted to do the exploring that I wasn't able to do when I was young. I needed to have a sense of freedom, which I really never had. Between ages 45 and 69, I had a lot of that! It was great. Plus, I met a guy that I started dating that I really liked. A lot of good things fell into place.

What happened with the guy?
I lived with him for eight and a half years, [first in Cleveland]. Then we were both transferred to Florida for our jobs, so I moved with him to Florida. I was at the point where I wanted to get married again, but he couldn't make up his mind if he wanted to do that, so I had to leave. This was 1998.

Have you dated since?
Oh yes, but nothing serious.

Did you have any foreign flings while traveling abroad?
Yes, I did! Again, nothing serious.

How is it dating different when you're older?
There's no naivety. When I was living in Chicago, I decided to join one of these dating programs where it's " just for lunch." I was really surprised how a lot of the men really weren't into travel. They were content in a simple lifestyle, so it didn't turn out to be that interesting to me.

How does dating in 2016 seem different to you?
It seems like all of those programs like Match.com asked, "Are you interested in more than one date?" That was interesting to me, because if you went on one date and it wasn't what you wanted, then you could go on to another date. You didn't have to want more than one!

Honey
71 Years Old
US Virgin Islands

VICE: Hey, will you introduce yourself?
Honey: Everybody calls me Honey instead of Grandma. My first grandchild heard my husband calling me "honey" all the time. He said, "Honey, can you get me a glass of wine?" and my little Jack, who was two at the time, said, "Honey, can you get me a glass of milk?" and it stuck. I've been married eight years, and together we have five children and six grandchildren. Three of the kids are mine, and two of the kids are his. We're all mixed up.

How did you meet?
We met at a party in 1980. We're both cancer survivors. I'm a 25-year breast cancer survivor, and he's a 12-year prostate cancer survivor. That's probably what brought us together.

What advice do you have for searching for the right partner?
You better like them. Never mind being madly in love with the person; you better like them. I have a sign in my kitchen that says, "Kissing don't last, cooking do." But old or young, you meet someone, you're attracted to them, and you hope they are as nice as they appear to be when you first meet. You ought to spend some time really making sure that that's true. If you jump into something, there's no going back. Just because it's the time to get married doesn't mean that the person you are dating is the right one to marry.

So how do you know?
Well, that's the mystery. Maybe when you care more about them than you care about yourself, or when you can comfortably imagine yourself taking care of them when they're not as as they are now. You have to know that the person is going to have your back—and you're going to have their back—no matter what.

It's scary.
Love is the scariest thing on the face of the Earth. But it's also the most wonderful. It's why we get sucked into it over and over. But eventually hopefully you meet the right one and it all works out. It really helps if that person is your best friend. If you'd rather spend time with this person more than any other person, then that's a good sign.

Do you believe in finding "the love of your life"?
Yes, I do. I absolutely do. That's what I call my second husband, "the love of my life." Love is just as scary when you're old as it is when you're young.

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A mural inside the United Grand Lodge of England. All photos author's own.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

In 2017, British Freemasonry will celebrate its 300th birthday. The exact origins of the infamous secret society are still unknown. While the first Grand Lodge opened in 1717, evidence suggests that Freemasonry began much earlier. The most romantic history, press officer Mike Baker tells me, points to the Knights Templar. More realistically, it may have been the product of the medieval guild system combined with elements of Rosicrucianism. We're at the United Grand Lodge of England (UGLE) in London's Covent Garden, the imposing stone building decorated with esoteric symbols. The Masons' reputation for mysticism has made them a beacon for conspiracy theorists, ranging from purported links with 9/11 to the Illuminati and New World Order. Now, in the lead up to their tercentenary, the Masons are trying to manage this centuries-old PR problem. The question is, what happens when the world's oldest secret society tries to open its doors?

Part of the Masons' makeover is challenging the most persistent myths. "We actually prohibit politics and religion in what we do," Mike tells me. They're even hesitant about making public statements, "because of our history and because we would not want to seem politically motivated. You know, the conspiracy theories around, with Bilderberg and things like that." So why join if there's no opportunity to meddle in politics? It's all about the values, Mike says. The Masons make charitable donations as part of their community involvement. Right now they're in the middle of funding London's second air ambulance. "The next time you have a serious accident and the air ambulance flies down and, underneath it, you'll see a square and compasses—just think how that happens to be."

One of UGLE's more surprising requirements is that members must believe in a Supreme Being. "As long as it's a creative force," Mike quickly adds, meaning no Satanists. It's true that other orders of Freemasonry, like the Grand Orient in France, will admit atheists. But UGLE has been steadfast in refusing to imitate the French. "It adds a degree of credibility to promising to be good basically," says Mike. "The overall obligations we have, which are purely and simply about being a good person and upholding our values. So that's why the Supreme Being is important to us."

Another mural

While they might not be a religion, allegorical plays and symbolism are key to how the Masons operate. The Grand Lodge is filled with evidence of that mysticism. The main room is decorated by a fantastic checked carpet, ceiling murals, and a mindboggling golden organ. There are also several majestic thrones. During ceremonies, Mike explains, the Worshipful Master sits in the east where the sun rises and the Senior Warden in the west, where it sets. Like so many Masonic rituals, it symbolizes the progress of man from darkness to enlightenment.

Thrones turn out to be a theme in the Grand Lodge, with three enormous specimens in the Grand Officer's Robing Room. The walls are decorated with portraits of Royal family members who were Grand Masters before being crowned. The reason the thrones are so large, explains Mike, "is that Prince Regent, who became George IV, was quite a big chap. Somewhere in the region approaching 30 stone I believe, so he needed a big chair." Stools are provided during investiture to keep the royal feet from dangling.

What about the famous Masonic handshake, I ask him. Is it real? "Yeah," he says. "They're nothing really odd... All they are is a form of qualification for you to pass from one stage to the next. So after your initiation you're given another token of recognition or handshake, which allows you to pass into the next level... And really it's rather boring." Talking to the press officer, it's clear that part of their strategy is downplaying anything too weird.

A stained glass window at the United Grand Lodge of England

More contentious than the handshake is the issue of female Freemasons. The male-only sentiment is built into their rituals, with Masons bearing their breast to prove their masculinity. In England there are women's lodges which are recognized by UGLE as "regular" in everything but gender. "Regular," Mike explains, "is a word that means that they do things the way that we would expect." UGLE doesn't acknowledge the small number of mixed lodges. It's "a heritage thing" Mike says, and not one that their members are eager to change.

In that respect, the Masons resemble so many other old boys' clubs that are being dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. But that reluctance to change is becoming a demographic problem for the Masons. The overwhelming number of Freemasons are, unsurprisingly, men. They're also ageing quickly. Right now, there are five times as many members over 80 as there are aged 21-30. The mean age is late-50s. So the Masons are reaching out to younger men. This has meant going online, being role models in the community, and possibly modernising the more archaic texts.

Part of the problem for the Masons is that their distinctiveness is both a blessing and a curse. They're a deist non-religion marked by a disjointed mixture of conservatism and high theatre. Surely some of the attraction for any potential member is that weirdness. After all, what's the point of joining a secret society that wants to be open, transparent, and normal? But with that comes more of the same reputational hammering the Masons want to avoid. I ask Mike if there's ever the temptation to just open everything up? Almost all of their material, he tells me, is available online anyway. However, for UGLE's members, looking would spoil the surprise. Right now they're trying "to demystify it but without removing the element of fascination—that's the difficult thing." If the Masons want to celebrate their fourth centenary, they'll need to square that difficult circle.

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Cocaine. Photo via Flickr user Valerie Everett.

Happy Family Day, you magnificent bastards!

For those of you out of the loop, Family Day is a cherished statutory holiday invented to break up the New Year's-to-Good Friday grind. It's a welcome respite from the Seasonal Affective Disorder you inevitably pick up by living through a Canadian winter. It's not celebrated in Quebec, New Brunswick, or Newfoundland and Labrador (because they hate families) and in Manitoba it's called Louis Riel Day (because they hate Canada). PEI and Nova Scotia also call it something different too but who cares.

But while most provinces have only been taking off the third Monday in February since 2007, Alberta has been marking Family Day since 1990. As it turns out, Edmonton is ground zero for Canadian Family Values.

And we owe it all to the premier's son getting busted in a drug sting.

Don Getty drinking out of the grey cup in the 1950s. Image via Wikimedia.

Pity poor Don Getty, Alberta's forgotten premier. When the ex-CFL superstar took over from Peter Lougheed as leader of Alberta's Progressive Conservatives in 1985, the province was in hard shape (oil hit nine bucks a barrel in 1986). Worse, everything the government touched turned to shit. Half the businesses they subsidized through the recession went under anyway, leaving the province to eat the damage.

If things were rough politically, they weren't any smoother at home. On August 18, 1988, his 31-year-old son Dale was arrested in an Edmonton motel room on trafficking and drug possession charges after trying to sell an ounce of cocaine to an undercover Mountie. Getty Sr. was in Saskatoon for a premiers' conference at the time, resulting in an awkward scrum about Senate reform that was also about his son's failed attempt at dealing coke to cops.

Someone at the Medicine Hat News had a sense of humour.

Six months later, the 1989 Throne Speech announced that the government would bring in a new February holiday so families could spend more time together, and Family Day was born. At the time, it was the word around the province that the holiday was born out of the premier's own guilt about neglecting his family.

For his part, Getty has emphatically maintained over the years that the new holiday "had absolutely nothing to do with the problems Dale had and that he has handled and conquered, and I'm so proud of him."

Don Getty never did catch a break. The economy didn't really improve, and when he called an early election in 1989, one of the only seats the Tories lost was his. He eventually won a seat in a by-election, but the knives in the Tory backrooms came out shortly thereafter. He retired from politics at the end of 1992.

Since Don Getty is otherwise remembered for being forgettable (and for leaving the province with so much debt that Ralph Klein could come in and burn Alberta to the ground), Family Day is probably his greatest legacy.

"I'm extremely proud of how Albertans have responded to it," Getty told the Calgary Herald in 2009. "They're coming to the conclusion it's the most enjoyed and focused holiday other than Christmas that they have."

That might be a bit of an exaggeration. Many people can't (or won't) take the day off, especially if they're in the service or retail industry. And those who do are as likely to spend it running weekday errands or working from home as they are to cuddle around a fireplace and read from the family Bible.

(As a childless couple in our mid-to-late 20s, there's a very good chance my fiancée and I will either do a bunch of chores or get day-drunk and watch Netflix.)

Life is pretty frenetic these days. Most people are now chained to their jobs 24/7 thanks to the joys of omnipresent high-speed internet, and a lot of kids are more overscheduled than their parents. All things considered, setting aside a dedicated day to being with your loved ones during the most depressing stretch of the year was a pretty boss move.

So this Monday, whether you're building treasured memories with your loved ones or getting paid time-and-a-half at work, take a minute to toast Don Getty, the Father of fuckin' Family Day. Thanks to his eldest son's extraordinarily bad attempt at becoming a drug dealer in the late 1980s, most of us get a three-day weekend.

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Tony Tulathimutte. Photo by Lydia White/courtesy of William Morrow

Tony Tulathimutte is a virtuoso of words, and not just the big ones that have you Googling definitions on your smartphone. He's a copy editor's nightmare, as is shown by the lists of slang terms and neologisms from his debut novel Private Citizens that he's been posting, including words such as "Masturbate-a-Thon," "ladycanon," and "listicles (n.)."

Which is to say, he doesn't shy away from the preoccupations of internet-grown, fauxthentic millennials. Despite winning an O. Henry Award and graduating from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the 32-year-old's writing edifies and entertains in language that's highbrow yet unwholesome—gourmet junk food, like the cereal-milk-flavored soft-serve at Momofuku Milk Bar. This comes through especially in Private Citizens, which is about four estranged friends in San Francisco circa 2007. Though the book tackles some notorious Bay Area subcultures like Silicon Valley, progressive nonprofits, and Stanford (where Tulathimutte attended), it also gets into weirder niches like dumpster-diving communes, motivational cults, Craigslist escorts, and social-media optics when you're disabled.

I recently spoke to Tulathimutte (who is an occasional VICE contributor) over Skype to discuss his time in Silicon Valley, hot-take culture, and the inevitable comparisons young Asian-American novelists get to Tao Lin. Tulathimutte was dressed for the office in a collared shirt, though he'd spent the entire day inside his Bushwick apartment and was—as our interview began—drinking cans of Brooklyn lager between hits from a vape.

VICE: Why don't we start out with your self-written Goodreads review: "A fine book by an anxious man."
Tony Tulathimutte: Yeah, five stars. It was a gag, but here's the thing: I'm basically from the internet. I spend a ton of time commenting and reading comments and being generally aware of the world through what people are doing there, which gives you a weird mix of awareness and isolation.

You wrote an essay for the New Yorker about the rise of personal branding. To a specific audience—maybe other writers and MFA students—you seem a master at it.
You want to know something hilarious? Half the people who shared that article thought I was writing in favor of personal branding. If I'm good at it, I don't seem to have much control over how people see me. When you're online, you may participate here and there, but you're always playing the spectator. When you write something like a novel that's attached to your name as a signal of achievement, you can wind up the subject of a menagerie of online comment. For me, that's been a real head-fuck. I know how nasty I can get when I'm dealing with whatever random topic is in front of me. Because it's fun to be nasty. It's fun to gossip and overreact. It's easy to dismiss any of the stuff that's always flooding at you. It's usually more entertaining to other people and beneficial to you to have a hot take. To be known as a dispenser of hot takes.

I've been mistaken for Tao Lin on OKCupid. I was also mistaken for Paul Yoon at an award ceremony where he won the Young Lions Award. — Tony Tulathimutte

When I think of your online presence, I'm vaguely reminded of Tao Lin.
I'm appalled. But he's a useful example here. In the 2000s he was notoriously aggressive and shameless about his branding. Like, he'd relentlessly pitch Gawker to write about him because he was a cool, hip, relevant person. But he'd pepper it with self-aware quotation marks to show he wasn't too serious about it, but he was still doing it. He did it in an irony-delimited way that made it a considered aesthetic position rather than crass self-marketing. The classic dissociative hipster move. The higher-level joke is that the fiction he was promoting was all about stripping away identifying markers like personality and affect and even names.

Tao Lin's one of very few well-known Asian-American writers, so I've anticipated for a long time that I'd be compared to him. You know, I've been mistaken for him on OKCupid.

What?
I'm not even kidding. I got a message from someone that said, "Really loved your book, Eeeee Eee Eeee."

Maybe she was trolling you?
Maybe. I was also mistaken for Paul Yoon at an award ceremony where he won the Young Lions Award. He was in a suit and had slicked-back hair, and I was just wearing a bag or something. So, to bring up Tao Lin in light of the irreparable hit he's taken to his deliberately crafted personal brand is interesting now, when there are so few cultural referents we can attach to an Asian identity that you become grotesquely fixated on defining yourself in relation to them.

I get that sense, too. Like, if you have to be tokenized, you want to be the token, not a token.
This problem of sizing yourself up against other people in your demographic node is way bigger if there are only a few well-known people in it. The reason why you and I grew up being compared to Bruce Lee is because he was the only game in town, except for a few other demeaning roles. It gets a little easier if you open the floodgates.

Something I like about Private Citizens is how much attention you paid to how your protagonists look. Will being Asian, Linda being attractive, Cory being overweight—just to name some of their outward attributes. Were you thinking consciously about this as you wrote?
First of all, unless you're writing a Tao Lin-esque novel where you're purposefully discarding significant markers of identity, then you're usually just obliged to talk about how people look. It informs what you know and how you feel about them, and how they feel about themselves. With Cory, it's physical, internalized self-disgust. Will is uncomfortable at being looked at because he's hypersensitive about racism. But he's dating Vanya, this super-hot paraplegic woman who wants to be seen, for the ostensibly noble purpose of repping people with disabilities. So the idea of image is all over the place, especially in Will's storyline.

And from a real-life, personal-branding standpoint, by cultivating an interesting Instagram, Facebook feed, and being really careful about whom you take photos of.
Right. What's the quickest way to boost your image? Post a photo of yourself with a celebrity. Or a sex tape, even better. I used to teach that Daniel J. Boorstin book, The Image. It's one of the early alarmist books about media images replacing the written word. Of course there's some truth to this, and the most obvious victim would be literature, which relies not only on an interest in words but facility and patience with them.

VICE Meets Norwegian literary sensation Karl Ove Knausgaard:

Do you often think about how you look?
When I was a freshman and just starting to write. I asked my friend Alice what it was like to be female. Instead of trying to answer this massively stupid question, she just said, "For starters, we think about how we look a lot." It opened up this face-scalding Pandora's box of identity issues for me. I'm emotionally stunted in all these ways and racial self-awareness is one of them. It never really occurred to me at that point that the way I saw myself basically as a Whitmanesque transparent eyeball was way different than how others saw me.

All of your characters are deeply failing somehow. They're broke, undisciplined, emotionally stunted, self-medicating... which seems to get at millennials in general.
That's the line about millennials, right? That they're these diapered adolescents who have to live with their parents and are lazy, self-absorbed. I can't think of a single generation who thought the next generation wasn't inferior.

Personally, I have nothing to say about millennials. I'm not trying to represent them. I'm just trying to write about some aspects of my life. If some people see themselves in that, I'm lucky, but I also expect that lots of people won't relate at all, which is fine.

How does pragmatism and idealism play into both having attended Stanford and having had a pre-novelist career in Silicon Valley?
It depends on what you call pragmatism. My training's in cognitive sciences.

It seems enviably useful to me, I don't know why.
Well, it enables you to score jobs in Silicon Valley. Whether you do anything useful there is another question. You can go and make six figures designing the UI for an app that tells you when your friends are farting. Is it practical? It's definitely lucrative. I marginally enhanced the usability of login forms for some websites. I was unhappy and I made a shitload of money. I wouldn't call it practical.

The Ice Bucket Challenge wasn't relevant because everyone sincerely cared about ALS, it was relevant because everyone was doing it and it provided a convenient platform for people to perform their own brand. —Tony Tulathimutte

It's smart you unpacked that. When I was saying pragmatic, I was automatically thinking about the financial dimension. The fact that I immediately went there and you called me out on it seems to strike a chord with current preoccupations or the ways in which the values are placed.
When you live in a small Bushwick apartment with two roommates at the age of 32, you're going to constantly question the value of what you're doing. I mean, it beats doing work I don't find useful or meaningful making a lot of money for myself and even more for other people.

But it's important to also frame this in privilege. My parents paid my tuition. I live pretty efficiently and I've saved up enough that I can literally afford to be cavalier about money. You cannot advise everybody to say fuck it and chase the dream. Realistically, you know there are limited opportunities to go around. Even people pursuing what they want full-time often end up failing. I don't know what the solution to this unfairness is. Probably dismantle capitalism.

Sure.
What do you think is the thesis of this interview?

I was thinking we would go with whole millennial angle, but you've convinced me otherwise.
It actually points to a larger problem of how things are accorded significance online, on the basis of relevance. The idea that what's relevant is what's important. I mean, if we're being honest, besides fandoms or politics, the stuff we care about most usually doesn't resemble what everyone else cares about. I think most people believe this intuitively, but still behave as if Latin poetry is unimportant and Snapchat is important just because everyone's talking about it. It's circular, that what we should talk about is what people are talking about. That's one of Boorstin's big points, that relevance is self-perpetuating, so celebrities are people who are famous for being famous, and so on. The Ice Bucket Challenge wasn't relevant because everyone sincerely cared about ALS, it was relevant because everyone was doing it and it provided a convenient platform for people to perform their own brand.

But there's this unspoken pressure to keep current. That's how the internet makes money, off the economy of relevance, and creating and strengthening trends is a big part of that. So there's an incentive to, you know, make fetch happen. No major publishing organization is innocent of this, even VICE, which I write for and obviously like. The publishers that are growing right now are those that understand the nature of trends and have good social-media game, and the people who do best within them can turn a ham sandwich into an 800-word thinkpiece.

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Private Citizens by Tony Tulathimutte is available in bookstores and online from William Morrow.

'Greetings from Auschwitz.' Photo: K Krajewski, via Krakow's Foundation for the Visual Arts.

This article originally appeared on VICE Poland

Now that you can call or email anyone, at any time, the effort of sending holiday postcards—buying and writing a note to your loved ones—feels somehow beautiful to me.

Not too long ago, after my interest in postcards piqued, I learned about the ones from Auschwitz, first sent in 1946—a year after the Jewish prisoners were rescued. I'd visited the Nazi extermination camp once, but never noticed any gift shops there. Even if there were postcards to buy, I wouldn't have known how to communicate from a genocidal death camp—what do you write? "All things considered, I'm doing fine"? Would you send a postcard from a place built to literally wipe out an entire generation? Well, there are even more questionable things you could send from a concentration camp, I suppose.

How long it takes to turn a concentration camp into a tourist attraction was the first thing on my mind when I read Paweł Szypulski's book Greetings from Auschwitz. Szypulski, a Polish artist and curator, pulled together a collection of postcards that were sent by tourists who visited the horrifying site. On the postcards, readers find messages ranging from mundane reports on the weather to politically-incorrect jokes: a "shipment of warm greetings from Auschwitz" accompanies an image of a death block, for example.

I sat down with Szypulski, to talk about human nature in the face of death and trauma, as well as his fascinating text.

VICE: How did you manage to find the postcards and how long did it take to collect them?
Paweł Szypulski: I started this project eight years ago. When I first found out about the existence of these postcards, I was looking for a way to get to them—intuitively I started with antique shops and flea markets. Pretty quickly, that turned out to be an extremely time-consuming, or even barely possible, method. I ended up buying all the postcards on an auction site. Basically every two weeks I set myself the task of typing "Oświęcim"—Polish for Auschwitz—into the postcards section of that auction site, searching through and only buying the postcards marked as "circulated"—those that had been written on, postmarked and sent. I was interested in the ones with greetings, because they had a story to them.

How did you choose what went into the book? What was your pattern you use any type of pattern in making a selection for the book?
I mostly wanted it to be a showcase of my collection's variety, of everything I managed to find. After creating an archive of postcards, I then had to figure out how to order them. The sequence of the postcards in the book is a story itself; when readers are going through Greetings from Auschwitz's pages, they are taking part in a "journey" through the Auschwitz death camp; from the gates, through the barracks and barbed wires to the gas chambers and crematorium. The same journey we repeat in Birkenau.

Are these postcards from all over Poland?
Indeed, what's interesting they were also sent from different places. Some cards were bought in the town of Oświęcim, but a few were from some museum's branch. It seems those postcards were available in other places besides the death camp. I remember as child I was on a holiday in the Polish Kashubian region in some sort of open-air museum, and I noticed they were selling postcards—with an image of sun setting through a barbed wire—from Stutthof concentration camp.

Photo: K Krajewski

Have you ever contacted any of the senders and addressees from the death camp postcards?
I haven't and I never intended to. I wasn't looking for them because this project is not about specific senders or addressees—it is about all of us, people who live in a post-Auschwitz Holocaust world. The first thing I did when I started this project was cover up the names of the addressees. Not because it's illegal to breach their privacy, but because I didn't want to associate Greetings from Auschwitz with specific people. This project is not judgmental. It's not about pointing fingers with moral superiority over people who send the postcards from Auschwitz, or some kind of reproach.

Don't you think that the fact that the death camp postcards exist is somewhat offensive to the survivors, who lost their loved ones in the Holocaust, possibly whole families?
It was the first thing that hit me—the enormous impropriety of the postcards. I could not understand them. How can you not only send one, but to even produce it? That was what got me into this project. Nowadays though, I have more complex attitude toward it. I'm finding more questions with time.

The first postcard from Auschwitz was made in the actual death camp in 1943, when people were being murdered on a mass scale. What was the story there?
Wilhelm Brasse, a Polish man with Austrian roots, made the first one. He was sent to Auschwitz for refusing to join the Wermacht armed forces, and got lucky, as they needed someone to take photographs and he'd been a professional photographer—this saved his life. He was appointed to what they called the "museum," an artistic "kommando" or unit that used prisoners for taking photographs, reproducing pictures and forging money—all of which required artistic skills.

Brasse took a huge number of photographic portraits of the prisoners—the double front and profile pictures that we all associate with Auschwitz. He also documented some of the medical experiments that took place in the death camp. With all the horrifying images he had to take, he also took one that was completely different from the rest: a picture of a flower in a vase or glass. He picked the flower in front of one of the death blocks, where his friend Eugeniusz Dembek—also from artistic unit—planted it. In all horror, this flower was something pretty, and something they needed to not lose their minds.

One of the German supervisors found this photo by Brasse, and decided to make copies of it and sell it in the camp's canteen. The picture turned out to be so successful that Brasse was asked to do a version in color, that sold out in hundreds of copies. So, the very first postcard from Auschwitz was of a vase with a flower in it. Unfortunately no copies were preserved, and we only know the story and a description.

I know that in 1943, prisoners of the camp were made to send postcards to their families. Can you elaborate on that?
This was an act of propaganda, organized to show that people at Auschwitz were doing fine, and had proper living conditions. We have to stress though, that these postcards had blank backs. They were called "uncovers": undivided back postcards with more room for writing than an average postcard. Uncovers were censored before they were posted to the families of Auschwitz prisoners, and often people who received them didn't believe what was written on them.

How would you explain this commercialization of death?
The question is: could it be any different? We, as people who've lived "after" the genocide, don't really how to properly commemorate it. Auschwitz quickly turned into a museum, which was also down to the effort of the survivors, but it took other death camps like Bełżec or Chełmno years to be commemorated in a similar way. A good example of our memory failure is the Umschlagplatz in Warsaw. People were transported from it to the extermination camps—today most of it's a luxury flat complex, and there was a petrol station on it for years, too. It turns out that the only alternative for a lot of our empty gestures is no action at all, but I can't tell if that's a good thing.

Photo: K Krajewski

The oldest postcard in the book was sent in 1946, when Auschwitz wasn't yet a museum. When you go through the messages on the postcards in the book it's hard to tell if there was any sense of place within notes about the weather, or awkwardly worded attempts at humor. Is this an expression of ignorance? Or is trivializing the Holocaust a way to deal with the trauma?
I think partially all of it. You said that the postcards were sent right after the war; today we take selfies in concentration camps. Sometimes it's just plain ignorance, but I think it's a self-defense mechanism, to transform a place of trauma into something that resembles a ski resort. It helps with turning a blind eye to a place where horrifying things beyond most people's imaginations happened. Have you ever been to Auschwitz?

Yes, once, to Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II.
Do you remember what you thought of it?

At first, I felt like my body was being crushed. Then I remember two emotions: incredible sorrow when I saw the pile of hair that had been cut; and anger, when in one of the barracks I noticed that some tourists had carved something into the wall—a juvenile, primary school-style confession like "Katie loves Johnny."
That's unbelievable that someone did that. I guess it's a sign that, even after such a calamity, life goes on. I think that the postcards and selfies are telling the same story about this place, where death happened, and where grass finally grows. New people come to visit it, and they are sightseeing it, like it's a holiday resort—like nothing ever happened. This confounds the idea that learning about Auschwitz should teach us something.

Exactly. American philosopher George Santayana said: "Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it," and not so long ago in Wrocław a group of people burned a dummy of a Jew. A similar thing happened when it was announced that Poland was going to accept refugees, and those against the decision were posting images of Auschwitz captioned "welcome" on social media. Does this prove we've come full circle?
The last few decades since WWII show that humanity can't break away from such atrocities that quickly. The only certain "never again" is that Germans won't be ever again killing Jews in Warsaw in 1942 like they did. Since the Holocaust, there has been genocide in Rwanda and Srebrenica, not far from Poland.

Do you consider yourself an artist or a researcher?
I don't consider myself an artist. If I had to describe myself somehow, I feel more I'm an author of the project, and this book is, to me, a form of visual essay, an intellectual statement.

How would you describe your goal for creating this project?
The goal is definitely not a criticism because I did not want to make people stop sending or making these postcards. I made this book because I'm interested in people who are "alongside" the traumatic historical events. In English there is a perfect word for it: "bystander." I want to know, what people do when they are close to something so horrible. We all are—not literally—bystanders, because we live with the knowledge of the Holocaust, that it happened here, in Poland. We can become the bystanders in a literal way any moment, while other wrong things are happening. We know that there is no "right" way to react in the face of terror, which I actually find out myself...

What do you mean by that?
I was in Paris during the recent terrorist attacks, having dinner with my Swiss publishers at their flat about 300 meters from one of the attacks. I knew that somewhere near us something utterly horrific was happening, and I was sitting at the table with coffee and biscuits, awash in pleasantries. In moments like those you realise that you have no idea how to act or what to do with yourself, to be fair to the victims.

Your book ends with an unaddressed postcard that was never sent. When I saw it, I was speechless and in shock: it depicts a pile of dead bodies, waiting to be burned. Could you explain this postcard?
This image from the Holocaust is one of the most commented-on. Some reports say it was made from the inside of the gas chamber. This image was taken by Sonderkommando, a unit of prisoners responsible for burning the bodies, and is one of four pictures that they secretly took.

I remember when I found out about the existence of this postcard. Even though I'd been collecting Auschwitz postcards for a couple of years, I was still shocked. There were 32,000 copies made of it—and I own a few of them—but I never stumbled on one that had been sent. I want to believe that not every postcard can be sent. But, on the other hand, I am aware that in the US, people used to send each other lynching postcards, so maybe I'm slightly naïve.

Photo: K Krajewski

Can you still buy postcards at Auschwitz?
Of course you can. If you are going to visit it these days, there will be no problem in finding postcards there. I don't know about the prices, but they are cheap—like in any other tourist attraction.

Thanks for your time, Paweł.

Before the puddle, there was only the grey misery of January. After the puddle, there was shell shock and scorn. But for one brief moment—for one brief, six-to-eight hour window—the Drummond Puddle defined the month it occurred in: the Drummond Puddle was the light shining in all of our lives. As the rain came down and the wind whipped into us from the sea, we all stopped, at our desks and on our commutes, faces turned to the screen in delirious white-blue bliss, watching a load of Geordies frolic around in a shallow puddle. For one perfect moment, the Drummond Puddle was everything. For one perfect moment, the Drummond Puddle was all of us.

January 6, 2016. That was when half a million people discovered what Periscope was. Through this app, streamed live, we watched as hapless weatherbeaten strangers attempted to traverse a difficult puddle across the entrance to a bridge in Jesmond, Newcastle. And then something else happened: as the viewership peaked, boomed viral, and busted to nothing at astonishing light speed, students turned up, people with surfboards and floaties, Domino's pizza delivery boys, journalists. An impromptu party atmosphere broke out as the light faded out of the day. And all of us watching had the same exact reaction: Ah, that's ruined it now. That's ruined that. The innocence of the puddle is corrupt.

There was a curious sense of ownership about the puddle: from the 100-odd people in the Periscope chatroom, to the mute viewers at home, to the man on the lilo—or inflatable pool raft—who splashed around in it for a selfie. We watched as a woman in a mustard jacket stormed through with nothing but seething disregard for the puddle. Jeered at cyclists. Laughed at the girls in box-fresh Nikes. The puddle was the January weather made crystalline, a visual metaphor, a live-feed of people falling over our favorite conversational topic. And it happened in one perfect moment of time: a dreary Wednesday on the first week back in the office after new year. A day or a week either way and nobody would've cared about the Drummond Puddle. But January 6, 2016? There could be no better time.

But what of the people involved in the Drummond Puddle? What of the people at creative agency Drummond Central who set the live-feed up? What of Anthony Kane, a man dubbed the "pink lilo cunt"? What of journalist Tom Ough, a man sent to write a story about a puddle? What of the chatroom collective that built up around the puddle? What of the characters and the memories? What was the exact Domino's pizza order delivered to a puddle? What? Who? How?

Through a series of incredible conversations, reader, I found out.

All illustrations by Dan Evans

AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE DRUMMOND PUDDLE

Starring:

Niall Griffiths
Journalism trainee, Periscope chatroom member #300.

Beth Hazon
Managing Director, Drummond Central.

Kev Lynn
Senior Designer, Drummond Central, who said the immortal line "look at that, he's got his ringpiece out" when someone mooned in the puddle.

Tom Ough
Newcastle Chronicle journalist sent to document and report on the puddle.

Anthony Kane
Radio producer, first man to take a selfie in the puddle.

Angela Hamilton
PR, Newcastle City Council.

Nick Dutch
Head of Digital, Domino's PR.

Nick Sallon
Content Strategy, Periscope.

Chris Kemper
Developer, retriever of the wet floor sign.

Dr. Alex Niven
English Literature professor, Newcastle University; North East documentarian.

Not starring:

The Woman Who Sold a Bottle of Drummond Puddle Water on eBay, who declined our many requests for comment.

Our story begins:

Niall Griffiths, trainee journalist, Periscope chatroom member #300, voice of the people: I was on lunch break and I saw my colleague retweeted it, then I went into the chat room thing and saw about 100 to 200 people in there, but I just stayed on there in the background while I was doing work. I can assure you I was working. I just kept on in the background while that was going on.

Beth Hazon, Managing Director, Drummond Central: Yeah, the puddle is there all the time. But the weather has been very crappy in the North East, so over November and December we had a lot of rain and that puddle has been there a lot of the time. Our creative floor looks over the puddle, so it's something that we would have regular conversations around—watching people navigate their way around it, through it. There is a guy—one of our copywriters, Steve Wilks— who had the idea to live-stream it when he was on the bus. He came in and had a conversation with one of our social media managers—a guy called Richard Rippon—on how we could stream it, because then we could do our work but also watch it at the same time, because we are all split on different floors. So the live-stream started as just a very practical suggestion for our own amusement.

Kev Lynn, Drummond Central Head of Design, unofficial puddle commentator: We've got a double window, so you have to lift the first window to get to the second one, so we put a phone there. But then it wouldn't stick, so we had to Blu-Tack it in many places. It was a bit of a botch job, like, but it managed to stay there all day. That was about it: we didn't realize that we were being recorded at first, and then we did. Then Beth was upstairs saying, "You're being recorded, watch you don't swear!"

Photo via Beth Hazon

Beth Hazon: It was only up for about six hours in total—it went up mid-morning and we were all watching, and then we were totally stoked when it got to like 100 views.

Nick Sallon, Content Strategy at Periscope: Over half a million people watched #DrummondPuddleWatch on Periscope (547,828 live viewers, 24,263 replay viewers). There were around 100,000 tweets relating to the puddle in the 48 hours that followed alone.

Kev Lynn: We were hoping that it would get 200, but then it actually went viral, and we were just running around, clapping our hands.

Niall Griffiths: I showed everyone in my office when I saw the retweet—we have two separate offices, so I showed everyone in both, then we were all on it. I believe only the first 100 can talk in the chat room so they don't allow anyone above that watching to chat, so I was lucky I was in that first 100. They expanded it later—or people dropped out, I don't know—and I did see a friend from back home on it. But I was the only one from work in there.

Anthony Kane, radio producer, famously took a selfie of himself on a lilo in the puddle: We were sitting in the office and it was so addictive, and pretty much the whole sales team had stopped working and were sitting watching it on one Mac. I just thought, I really want to be there, this is so frustrating. I just felt like I had to do something, not with work but just to be there. We needed to be at the puddle. At that time it was only like 5,000 people, so it felt like it was just between us lot, but we were checking our phones as we were driving down and it got to like 20k and we started freaking out that all the people were gonna be watching us when we got there. We didn't wanna make ourselves look like a pleb.

"We needed to be at the puddle."

Tom Ough, Newcastle Chronicle journalist, leading puddle reporter: I became aware of Puddle Watch at some point over lunchtime. I wasn't the first to spot it by any means, but pretty soon everyone had taken a look.

I was working on something else when my editor came over to tell me he had a job for me. It was Puddle Watch. Naturally I was delighted. It was my first week of my placement on the paper and I knew it was time to win my spurs.

Beth Hazon: Me, personally, I like the person in the mustard jacket who went around the side, thought about it for a while, and then went around the lamppost.

Kev Lynn: There was a little old man who stormed through puddle, didn't look at anyone, wasn't bothered he was soaking. He just stormed right through.

Tom Ough: I had a soft spot for the cyclists who would stop for neither man nor puddle and sailed on through.

Niall Griffiths: There was this one guy who saw the puddle in the distance and didn't even break stride—he just went for it. His mate tried to follow suit but didn't do it as well. But yeah, it was graceful and a thing to behold.

Anthony Kane: I don't know whether it was because they'd heard of it or seen it or whatever, but some people were just, like, charging through it. They were so aggressive, like, "THIS ISNT STOPPING ME." And I respect those people because they made me look like an absolute fool.

Niall Griffiths: I do remember there was a wet floor sign placed there at one point and that guy had a great reach—just great form shown there.

Photo via Chris Kemper on Instagram

Chris Kemper, Drummond Central developer, retrieved the wet floor sign from the puddle: The sign is indeed ours, and is currently—and was before its time in the spotlight—chilling with the blue roll in the cleaning cupboard. The person responsible for the sign being there in the first place was Phil Cole , who had the idea to put it there, and who then actually went and did it.

Tom Ough: I enjoyed the tale of the woman with a stroller who marched across as if the puddle weren't there, stroller and all. And there was a quite sweet episode in which a guy got his shoes wet to help a girl across the muddy bank. Somewhere out there is Newcastle's answer to Francis Drake.

Chris Kemper: In terms of good techniques, I always admired those that jumped over it. I got sent out for coffee while it was quiet, so I had to cross the puddle and opted for the push-off-the-wall technique, so that served me well going over. I thought I was going to have a big issue coming back with my hands full of coffee, but I managed to clear it with minimal spillage, so that was good!

Alex Niven, Newcastle University academic, puddle scholar: Yeah, I just walked right into it. As I remember, I walked passed this guy—there's usually a homeless guy reading a sort of crime thriller; I don't know if he's there all the time, but he's usually under the tunnel just out of shot—and saw the puddle, and then, very clumsily with my cerebral academic head on—some might say pretentious—I very clumsily clung to the lamp-post and attempted to jump over the mud on the upper end of the puddle.

Chris Kemper: The best ones were always the ones who thought going via the wall was the easiest option, because they'd end up lowering themselves (and in most cases, their very clean shoes) onto the mud, and having to then work out how to traverse muddy grass.

Alex Niven: I'd got my cheap Sainsbury's boots and they were quite muddy for the rest of the day. But as I say, I'm not too fussy about footwear.

Kev Lynn: The best had to be the two girls who went right, then left, then right, then left again, then they came over—but one had a bright white pair of Nike Cortez on, so her friend who was first through the puddle put her homework down over the muddy part so her friend could walk over without the Cortez being damaged...

Chris Kemper: There was one person who actually tried going the other way, but not only that, put paper down first to walk on that. When she tried the first step, the paper moved instantly, and I was hoping we'd see a fall, but sadly it didn't happen. It just took so long for her to cross via the paper. I was on the edge of my seat watching. I just wanted to see a fall.

Niall Griffiths: There was two girls with surfboards as well, but they weren't as funny.

Kev Lynn: ...but she got wet and filthy anyway. I think that was the moment that got us howling. That was when it went from 300 viewers to 2,000 in a matter of minutes.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Outside a café in Delft, a suburb of the so-called Cape Flats in the Western Cape province of South Africa, a security camera picks up a young man standing by a door, lighting up a cigarette. A hand with a gun in it extends from the frame of the door and lights up the screen with muzzle fire—a noiseless bang. The young man falls to the floor, before another man, holding the gun, exits, and double-taps inexpertly to finish the job. The one on the floor shakes with the force of the shot and is still. The other man runs.

Welcome to the Cape Flats—part of a province where 310 gang-related murders took place in 2013 alone. A relic of South Africa's apartheid legacy, it's staggering on the brink of a gang violence crisis that has few parallels in the modern world. It has its own particular mythos, a blend of celebrity status, urban legends, a monster meth-derivative known locally as "tik," and a violence rate that ranks Cape Town 20th in a recent study of the most violent cities on Earth—higher than many high-profile crime-ridden cities in the US, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico.

Most news reports and analysts estimate that there are about 100,000 gang members operating in the province, spread out over 130 official gangs. With a homicide rate of 50 per 100,000 residents, and 70,000 drug-related incidents recorded between 2010 and 2011, the situation is truly virulent. Names like the Junky Funky Boys, Hard Livings, and Americans are the most common—in conjunction with the internationally notorious and mythical prison "Numbers Gang."

Officers from the City of Cape Town's Metro Police Unit sifting through seized drugs and paraphernalia.

The situation has escalated to the extent that schools are closed down when the violence and tit-for-tat shootings become too widespread. Premier of the Western Cape, Helen Zille, has repeatedly called for the deployment of the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) in the area. The violence permeates every aspect of every resident's life. According to a report in The Guardian last year, a life is lost to gang violence every five days on the Cape Flats, and 25 to 30 firearms are seized every week.

The security camera footage is shown to us by Charl Kitching of the City of Cape Town's Metro Police Unit, half an hour before we embark on a 50-man operation with him and his team into the Flats. It was taken about a week prior, in a period of escalating gang violence related to the release of key players from prison. "They make damn sure that guy is dead. They don't play games," says Kitching. Along with Alderman JP Smith, Mayoral Committee Member for Safety and Security, Kitching and his team undertake this operation as part of the Gangs and Drugs Unit that was launched in 2011 by the Metro Police in response to the crisis on the Flats.

The Cape Flats, as they're known colloquially, are a collection of informal settlements and suburbs that were formed in the 1950s in line with the apartheid government's forced relocation policies and legislation. Historically, the area is also home to South Africa's largest "colored" population; one of the four main designations of race under apartheid that has a mixed race ancestry consisting of European, African, and Asian blood. The Western Cape is the only province that is not majority black African—and also the only province not under majority control of the ruling African National Congress (ANC). Colored persons were granted more political concessions than black persons in the 80s by the Nationalist government, and the two groups generally see themselves as culturally distinct. Racism between colored and black folk is not unheard of. This means that when democracy was negotiated in the years between Mandela's release in 1990 and the first democratic elections in 1994, the ANC was not the coloured voters' default choice.

The Western Cape is thus a key symbol in South Africa's political landscape, giving rise to a power struggle that often leaves communities out in the cold. The response to gang crime is not homogenous—it's intricate, bureaucratic, and plagued by infighting. The ultimate irony here is that the race-politics that created the Flats in the first place are now ensuring that a cooperative, effective solution to end its woes is nowhere in sight.

The Metro Unit, consisting of around 600 members, is accountable to the city, thus the ruling provincial government, the Democratic Alliance (DA). Whereas the SAPS, as the primary law enforcement agency in the country, number around 22,000 and answer only to the national executive: the ANC. The broader political playing field, that of the ever-present struggle between the ANC and the DA, is leaving a horrendous mark on a community that couldn't care less about who takes care of the situation—just that it's taken care of.

The Metro Police are generally intended only to enforce traffic and by-laws. In the Western Cape, they've had to undertake further responsibility in violent crime prevention and form supplementary units such as the Gangs and Drugs team in response (unofficially) to SAPS inefficacy—poor conviction rates, endemic corruption, and shocking administration. Rumors of police complicity are widespread, and in June last year a former officer, Christiaan Prinsloo, was arrested in a highly publicized case for supplying gangs with firearms. The conviction rate for gang-related offenses is estimated to be around 2 percent—35 successful murder convictions out of 950 reported murders in the last three years.

Metro now resemble a highway patrol on protein powder. The department has grown by 53 percent in the past nine years. Officially, they can make arrests, conduct search and seizures, and carry more firepower than is usual for any council-controlled cop. As JP Smith puts it, the SAPS have forced them to "reinvent the wheel," with R46 million set aside by the city last year just to combat gangs.

"The public have no trust in the police stations. There is no confidence in SAPS—they are completely discredited to the public," he says. "The National Prosecuting Authority is now talking to directly us, which is unheard of. They're taking cases directly from us."

Smith feels very strongly about the politics of it all: "There's purposeful malicious undermining on a political level, and you see that in the starvation of resources."

The gangs become social institutions, an aspirational cult for the disillusioned and the poor. At night, with the Gangs Unit, the city-subsidized council housing resembles a Soviet-style communist area. The apartments are lined up in neat rows, blocks extending skywards with narrow, poorly lit alleys cracking them open. Everything is tarmac, cement, faded, glum.

The Gangs Unit undertake this large-scale operation on a bi-weekly basis. As we slink through blocks with Afrikaans names like Geduld (patience), residents peer at us from up high. The Unit plays an almost matronly role—tough love. People loitering about are told to get indoors: "Wat maak jy nog so laat buite?" ("What are you doing out so late?") and the entire process is one of search and seizure based on intelligence gathered throughout the week. Some residents take issue with Metro on these seemingly random searches—others are welcoming and friendly.

The officers all tell us that this is the quietest night they've had in months. Generally they can expect lines of frustrated residents throwing rocks, bricks and sometimes even Molotovs at them. Many of the Unit are coloured people from the Flats themselves. They know the areas, and they know the people.

A call comes in of an inter-block shooting. The stench of cordite is still heavy in the air when we get there. The gangsters literally shoot from one apartment block to another across a street. Apparently the residents help them stash guns and blend in with the others as soon as the boere (pigs) show up. In many cases, the Unit tells us, the residents tell them to go find other gangsters; that these ones are theirs and that the OTHER gangsters are the bad ones. The tension and the mistrust, despite the efforts of the Metro to work on a more personal level than the SAPS, is clear to see.

"It would help if SAPS were properly deployed. The fact that you have a 2 percent conviction rate for gang violence tells you the whole story," says Smith in the van. "It's completely political. It's also why they don't want specialised units. Because the guys who have one foot in the gang environment don't want their businesses to be scratched."

Premier Zille has often drawn the same conclusion. Speaking in 2014 regarding the banning of the famed specialized units in 2003, she said: "That leaves only one conclusion: they were shut down by the then commissioner, Jackie Selebi, because he became friends with some 'big fish' who did not want their activities effectively investigated."

Selebi, a former president of Interpol, had previously admitted being friendly with high-profile gangsters. He was convicted in 2010 on charges of corruption but was released on medical parole two years later and died early in 2015.

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The SAPS, however, have had their own successes. Launched in 2010, Operation Combat is an anti-gang strategy spearheaded by Major General Jeremy Veary. In addition to the promulgation of the Prevention of Organized Crime Act, the strategy has seen the successful conviction of 16 high-ranking Fancy Boys and six 28's from Bishop Lavis and Valhalla Park—purportedly as a result of two years of high-intensity intelligence gathering and effort. The overall conviction rate remains low, however. Smith alleges that Veary and his team are unwilling to work with them.

"We are very willing to cooperate and have reached out to them continually. I have made three appointments to . I've even gone through a political colleague of his to set up a meeting," claims Smith. "Three meetings, all of which were cancelled within minutes. It was an open 'diss' to us. We've tried—there isn't willingness."

The ANC and its comrades have also fired back in the public sphere, accusing Smith and Zille of being rudderless and lacking in leadership: "Smith is copying foreign gimmicks at huge cost to the city, with no original idea to solve the problem," wrote Tony Ehrenreich, a trade-unionist and ANC member. "His so-called Crime interrupters have been of no use in this crisis, as the most high profile area is falling apart, while he blames everyone else."

Compounded by the political divisions between provincial and national authorities, the crisis seems no closer to being resolved, particularly due to the recent White Paper draft bill on the "streamlining" of SAPS and Metro Police announced in August of 2015. It was described by Western Cape provincial authorities as "proof of the fact that this remains primarily a political move and that the desire to seize control of the Metro Police services around South Africa was born from and is driven by a party political agenda and not the broad public interest."

Sure enough, a week after our ride-along with Metro in November of 2015, the Mail & Guardian's acclaimed investigative journalism unit revealed that current president Jacob Zuma had met with gang lords in the run-up to the 2011 local elections. Political support was promised by the gangsters in exchange for business opportunities, with the gang lords allegedly addressing Zuma in "friendly" tones. The report was dismissed as fake by the ANC, despite its corroboration by two independent witnesses.

The fact that gang lords can make these kinds of promises and meet with the president is indicative of the sway they hold in the community. Metro Police can only do so much with the resources available, all while their superiors battle it out on a political playground wholly removed from the realities of life on the flats. The officers we accompanied refused to be named for fear of gang retaliation, but they all share a kind of beleaguered inevitability. The night's report ends with a preparatory brief on the next day's mission: the monitoring of the funeral of the kid who'd been shot in Delft.

A senior official caps the night with a smoke. We ask him why he does it, when the communication between community and cop has deteriorated so badly, when the job seems so thankless and the prospects so bleak, so enmeshed in South African stereotypes. How do you police a community that often doesn't want to be policed by you?

He replies: "Eish, man. Somebody's got to start cleaning up this country."

Follow Karl and Shaun on Twitter.

Kanye West perfoms on SNL Dana Edelson/NBC

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

His extravagance makes Liberace look like Frank Gallagher, but over the weekend, Kanye West tweeted that he was $53 million dollars in personal debt and asked tech billionaires such as Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg to help fund his future projects rather than "open up one school in Africa like you really helped the country."

You can imagine Kanye has a few big bills to pay at the moment. Last week's huge Madison Square Garden fashion show, beamed live to cinemas around the world, was just the latest in a string of very expensive projects. When he proposed to Kim Kardashian, he rented out the entire AT&T baseball stadium in San Francisco and got the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to perform. His last big US tour, for Yeezus, included a 60-foot-wide circular LED screen, a custom soundsystem, and a 50-foot-high mountain that could change into a volcano.

Just days before tweeting about his debt, Kanye had offered to give Puma their "measly" million dollars back after they signed Kylie Jenner as a model, something Adidas-sponsored Kanye saw as "dividing the family."

Perhaps because he regularly compares himself to an omnipotent deity, people don't tend to think too much about how Kanye pays for all this. Still, it seems confusing that one of the biggest music artists in the world would have fallen so far into the red. We spoke to music industry expert Chris Cooke, MD and Business Editor of music-industry website Complete Music Update, to find out if someone as big as Kanye could be broke.

VICE: Hi Chris. So $53 million seems like an awful lot of debt for something other than a nation state.
Chris Cooke: It does. I mean we can't know if that's true, but I tend to assume that around two thirds of what Kanye says is bollocks. He has his fair share of businesses, both in music and fashion, and so he could be running up debts there. But that does seem like a lot of money still, and Twitter is a very odd place to admit it if it were true.

I do worry about his expenditure though. How much does it cost to rent out all of Madison Square Garden for a fashion show and beam it around the world? How much does it cost to create a bespoke soundsystem for your tour, especially if you don't play that many dates and keep postponing shows?
Yep, absolutely. For example, as a record company, you make most of your money on the first two albums an artist puts out, in part because when you're a big artist putting out records, it becomes incredibly expensive. You want the best studios, the best producers, and the most outlandish tours, and that all effects the profitability of the record. One Direction live shows, for example, are basically just them jumping up and down. That's an incredibly profitable way to tour. Whereas Kanye sees himself as more than just a performer—he has artistic vision and so he puts on a big show—but that will affect the profitability of touring. If you're not willing to just tour it for 18 months solidly so it becomes more cost-efficient over time, then you're not going to make big profits.

So how do you think Kanye makes most of his money?
If you're a big star then your single biggest revenue stream is often trademark licensing, which is basically licensing out your name and your brand to other companies in sponsorship deals and products. That will always outperform record sales, partly because you keep most of the money from those deals rather than the record label taking a share. Kanye remains a very bankable artist. He has decent sales. He's streaming this album for seven days exclusively through Tidal, and presumably he's being paid quite well for that.

What do you think is going on here then, if Kanye's not as in debt as he say he is? Did he just get a shocker of a credit card bill and freak out?
Well the callout to the tech world is interesting. In the hip-hop world, it seems as if the people he aspires to be are more like Dre and Jay Z, who arguably have achieved more as entrepreneurs as they have as artists, certainly in terms of their wealth. It's interesting his rant is aimed not at the entertainment business or his record label but at the tech industry. It's kind of saying: You bought Dre's business, why won't you go into business with me?

Right, and maybe as a designer for Adidas, you're not making the same kind of money that you would be if you owned a big stake in Vitamin Water like 50 Cent, or sold your headphone company to Apple like Dre?
Dre made a lot of money with Beats but 50 Cent was pleading poverty last year, albeit as part of a messy lawsuit, so these business aren't always successful.

Do you think that Kim Kardashian, who does countless brand partnerships, as well as perfumes and apps, is making more money than her husband is from music?
Oh yeah, if you're getting to the level where you're doing those kinds of deals then you're making more money from that than anything else. For Beyonce, perfume is one of her biggest revenue streams. That's why One Direction and Justin Bieber have perfume deals, because they're incredibly lucrative. It's almost all profit.

So should Mark Zuckerberg return Kanye's call?
I'm not sure about that, but he could certainly afford it. And I'm sure if he does, Kanye will be the first to tell us about it.

In 17 numbered tweets, no doubt. Thanks Mark.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

I'm in a cold rehearsal room in central London with a man I've never met. On his orders, I close my eyes, open my mind, and, with the aid of some vague guidance, am transported to my mom's living room, eight years ago.

The bangs and warbling from neighboring rehearsal rooms disappear and I feel the heat from the open fire in my old family home. I am totally at peace.The man sitting opposite me, coaxing me into this state, is hypnotherapist coach Ed Winslet, chaperone for my first ever "hypno-singing" session—a course that promises to improve your singing voice through the use of hypnosis.

Hypnotherapy is a booming business. It used to be that hypnosis was a mystical, exoteric exercise that only really appeared in vaudeville or traveling circuses. However, hypnosis as hypnotherapy began to emerge in Victorian times, and by the late 20th century had become a widely-accepted treatment for a number of maladies, spawning healthcare programs, bestselling books, and celebrity endorsements. If practitioners are to be believed, you can quit smoking, lose weight, time travel to past lives, have mind-blowing orgasms, get smarter, cure your phobias, get rich, enlarge your boobs, and heal all sorts of physical ailments, purely with the power of your mind.

There are, of course, some things to consider before handing your brain over to a stranger. On the NHS website, the safety guidelines regarding hypnotherapy state that it can be offered by "non-professionals with little training," because, in the UK, you don't legally have to join any organization or receive any specific training to call yourself a hypnotherapist. This means that, without research, people with, say, a serious mental health issue could end up seeking help from somebody who earned their hypnosis stripes at a bachelor party.

Dr. Emma Short, a chartered psychologist and senior lecturer at Bedford University, explains the potential dangers of getting yourself into that kind of situation: "Some of the more extreme phenomena that can emerge in a client during hypnosis are recovered traumatic memory and violent abreaction, which require a very skilled response and access to appropriate referral routes should there be a serious concern for the safety of the individual," she says. "Without careful clinical assessment before proceeding and preparation before treatment, hypnotherapy should not be used, as there are certainly some circumstances where hypnotherapy would be extremely unhelpful."

Similarly, Professor John Gruzelier, a professorial research fellow at Goldsmiths University, wrote of the potential dangers in his essay "The Unwanted Effects of Hypnosis," in which he links hypnosis to chronic psychopathology, seizure, stupor, and spontaneous dissociative episodes.

I put this to Californian hypnotherapist Kerry Gaynor, whose quit-smoking method (The Kerry Gaynor Method) has been endorsed by all your favorite celebrities. "That's nonsense," he says. "It's a non-threatening experience. In fact, it's a natural state—it poses no danger to anybody. It's a very useful tool for achieving goals."

British's TV hypnotherapist, Paul McKenna was taken to court in 1998 for allegedly giving somebody schizophrenia following a session. He was eventually cleared of all charges. Since then, his books—such as the optimistically-titled I Can Make You Thin, I Can Make You Rich, and I Can Make You Happy—have become international best-sellers. In one of the episodes of his I Can Change Your Life TV series, Paul cures a man who has suffered from hysterical blindness (a neurological disorder common around the time of WWI) for eight years following a head injury, making him see again. But can hypnotherapy really be that miraculous?

"I have been working with clients prior to surgery, and I've got them coming out of surgery having no post-operative pain," says Kerry Gaynor. "I don't think medical science can explain that. It's the kind of thing I'd never have believed was possible, but now I'm out here doing it!"

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Before going to the hypno-singing session I got in touch with a few former hypnotherapy patients to gauge how effective it had been for them.

"I left feeling relaxed, but no more than you'd get from a meditation session or a flotation tank or whatever. I was back to normal soon after," said 25-year-old Joe, who had attended sessions for his anxiety problems. "I'm sure it works on some people, but then again so do placebos. I think for it to have an effect you need someone who's more open to the experience."

Ronnie, 29, told me that despite it feeling "quite erotic" and leaving him "buzzing with self confidence" it didn't cure his anxiety. "It certainly didn't work for me. I've found cognitive behavior therapy much more useful," he said.

However, 25-year-old Rose went to a hypnotherapist following a "down-turn" in her mental health as a teenager. She was put on a lot of medication and sent to several therapies, but nothing worked, "I went to see this hypno guy three times. He told me that at no point would I be in a trance and I would be self-aware throughout the process," Rose explained. "Instead, it was about relaxation. He made me analyze myself from an angle I'd never considered before. He objectified my disorder, which meant I could take a hold of it and really look at it. Hypnotherapy didn't cure me, but it made me understand myself a lot more. With logic reinstated I could communicate better with doctors and I was diagnosed with extreme food intolerances, which were causing my mental health problems."

The author in a trance

Being "open" to the treatment is something hypnotherapists often insist upon, and it seems to be crucial to its effectiveness. I approach my hypno-singing session with a totally open mind and a genuine desire to come out singing like Prince. Each time I'm out of the trance I follow the notes up the piano with my voice, and to my delight I reach higher notes and with more ease.

"Like traditional hypnotherapy, the experience is different from person to person," my hypno-singing coach Ed explains to me. "You are tapping into a higher level of your imagination and creativity."

That seems to be a key factor with hypnotherapy: everyone has different experiences. Apart from Kerry Gaynor—who insists his results with smokers were repeatable and that he'd happily prove them under scientific conditions—hypnotherapy hasn't had the same results on any of the people I speak to.

Read on Broadly: Why Are Women Trying to Hypnotize Themselves During Childbirth?

The lack of qualification needed to become a hypnotherapist adds to the confusion that shrouds the practice. Because of this, Dr. Emma Short says, "There are still wide variations in the degree of skill, experience, and, just as importantly, accountability among hypnotherapists."

Understandably, this deters some people. Despite providing it as a treatment, the NHS website claims that the evidence supporting hypnotherapy "isn't strong enough to make any recommendations for clinical practice." However, regardless of its mysterious nature, it does have real-life positive effects on many, even if it's just the power of psychosomatic placebo. "Hypnotherapy can be extremely helpful to some people. We don't know why it works or how exactly it affects the brain," says Dr. Short, "but it does create the opportunity for people to focus clearly on their goals for change."

As my hypno-singing session approaches its end, my singing voice is better than it has ever been. Range-wise I can hit a high A note, which I never could before. I also have a newfound ease and can hold notes for longer. Granted, it could be down to the vocal coaching that Ed gave me in between my hypnosis trances, but I've had vocal coaching lessons before and have never seen such a change.

I have a natural skepticism of hypnotherapy, but I can't really contest the improvement in my singing voice, my heightened awareness of tonality, and the thousands of positive testimonies online for hundreds of hypnotherapists. The effectiveness of hypnotherapy seems to be a combination of confidence building, clear focus on personal goals for change, and the ability to work with, and unlock, the unknown powers of the human brain. With this in mind, perhaps the most incredible about hypnotherapy isn't the actual hypnotherapy at all; it's us.

Follow Jak on Twitter.

If you say kangaroo enough times, it stops being a furry animal with a pouch and becomes a sound. The ang disconnects from the gar and the shapes your mouth makes are foreign territory. It starts to feel impossible that you've ever said kangaroo in your life before this point. Semantic satiation is the study of repetition—the psychological phenomenon in which the echoing of a word causes it to lose all meaning. There are plenty of curious studies that prove the power of the word or the loss of that power. Language is weird and slippery, but its capability never to be underestimated.

I can't remember the first time someone said it in front of me. But it happens a lot and always in the same tone: "I'm having a total panic attack about it" or "X and Y happened and I went mental, I had an actual panic attack." To take that at face value, it's quite an odd thing to claim a medical episode when you're describing a mild to moderately stressful everyday incident. Why would you say you're experiencing overwhelming and disabling anxiety, feeling like you're being choked to death or having a heart attack, wanting to collapse under the desk, when you're not? If I overhear this in public, I scowl and want to say, "Really? Did you really find yourself paralyzed in a cubicle wondering whether this will be the time you're going to die, puke, or shit yourself—maybe all three?"

If I see it online, where it often manifests, I want to quote the tweet and show the mutation of language for what it is. This is just one example relevant to me and my own mental health, but it's undeniably part of a wider discourse we've carried over into 2016. You'll be familiar with it. It's "I'm so OCD," "he's completely bipolar," "so depressed right now."

Why has this slipped into speech in the first place? It's part of our growing of language of catastrophe. Whether it's the media, ads, or public service announcements, everyone is demanding our attention, and in order to grasp it, the sell becomes exaggerated. In Britain, we've absorbed America's insistence on hyperbole. We totally love or hate something and nothing in between. In case someone doesn't know you're being sincere, repeat "genuinely," "seriously," or "literally," and that'll work. The stakes rise on social media between average young person to person: we'll go kill ourselves, hate our lives, fuck "everything." Of course, brands and businesses regurgitate our drama and Mondays are a cause for faux-depression memes that insist we're all in this together, so we stay in and watch their shows and deserve to eat our dark feelings with their junk. We're a generation of oversharers, and why else are emotions there but to be shared?

There's nothing inherently wrong in it. But when people say they're having a panic attack when they're just stressed, or "OCD" because they like cleaning, it points to either a total disconnect between language and meaning or a troubling symptom of self-diagnosis culture. Or, more worryingly, both. Naturally, anyone should be able to describe their own feelings and moods on their own terms. But at what cost and to whom?

Dr. Zsofia Demjen is a linguist who studies the intersections of language, mind, and and health. She explained why this trend matters. "Using bipolar or schizo or essentially technical words to describe mundane or everyday experiences means the original technical meaning of the term becomes diluted and it becomes more strongly associated with these simpler or more fleeting experiences. It normalizes illness. The potential problem is that 'I'm depressed' now means 'I'm sad.' Then how does someone who actually has depression describe their illness or how they feel? How can they differentiate the much more complex, much more intense thing they have from this thing everyone always claims ownership of?"

David Hartery, 25, has bipolar disorder and it pisses him off when bipolar is wrongly used. "It's always to do with changeability or indecision, or even if they are talking about mood swings, it's always making light of it. Bipolar's quite a hard thing to live with so I think it's annoying and spreads a false idea of what bipolar is, which is harmful." Doug Thompson, who has OCD, finds this adoption of language similarly reductive. "Saying something or someone has OCD is on a level with 'you're being silly' for me. I guess I associate it with being childish. And I'm sat silently thinking, You don't know whenever anyone uses it to effectively say they're just a neat freak."

Ableist language like this matters because when people apply an illness to themselves, they don't have to deal with it daily.

There's something to be said for how it makes sufferers feel; they're going through something stigmatized and often debilitating, while people are essentially being collectively flippant about it. Emily Reynolds is working on a book about mental health. Even she struggles when people misuse the term. "I know people don't mean to do it and it's thoughtlessness rather than spite, but it just wounds me a little bit every time and makes me feel I can't trust that person," she explained. "I'm happy to call out family or friends, but sometimes, at work, for example, you just can't. people throw around 'I feel so manic' or 'he's so bipolar,' I just feel awkward about my diagnosis. Even with my level of willingness to talk about it, I feel small and awkward."

The issue goes deeper than individual feelings. "If we come to understand mental illness as something everybody has on a weekly basis, it facilitates the attitude of 'just snap out of it,'" says Dr. Demjen. "That in turn actually facilitates stigma because then if someone does have OCD say in the clinical sense—see, even I'm having to specify clinical here because already we have this dilution in language—their symptoms end up not being taken as seriously as they should be."

Dr. Demjen talks about something else called negative evaluation, which happens when we refer to other people being bipolar or OCD. "When people say that, they don't mean the person is clinically ill, they mean their behavior isn't seen as positive. And again, if you take the idea that words acquire and change meaning, then bipolar or OCD acquires this negative association. Then someone who is diagnosed with one of these illnesses perceives it as a negative evaluation and judgement of themselves rather than a neutral diagnosis. This facilitates the stigma that they feel and also the potential stigma that others might impose on them because they also have the same associations. If someone goes to their employer and tells them, 'I'm depressed,' the employer has those associations as well." It's a vicious cycle.

You'd never use a physical illness like cancer as a negative throwaway term to mean lazy or weak. But because mental illness is invisible to most, it enables this slip of language to happen.

If you exaggerate this concept, it begins to look ridiculous. You'd never use a physical illness like cancer as a negative throwaway term to mean lazy or weak. However, because mental illness is invisible to most, it enables this slip of language to happen. It's so easy to conflate anything with mental health with feelings and emotions because those are also "in your head." Of all these terms, depression has been casually used the longest. To say "depressed" is to quite literally mean sad, gloomy or dejected and so we're used to naturally hearing that in its own context. That's where language fails with its multiple meanings.

Why have these other terms started to get used, though? Dr. Demjen suggests it's in part to do with disorders being more in the public domain now. "It's positive we're talking about mental health in the true sense, the illness itself, as it reduces stigma." That's definitely something you can notice online—increasingly younger people are casually tweeting about a day off work they had to take for mental health, making jokes at the expense of their illness. These are positive developments. However, as she points out, that leads to the terms being more in people's awareness and that contributes to the casual use.

Thankfully language use can change within weeks, days. "Similar trends in the past have been 'gay' being used as a derogatory term, which is frowned upon and there's an awareness that that's no longer OK to do." It wasn't that long ago that the media used "psycho" in headlines to interchangeably refer to anyone criminal or mentally ill. You'd be pushed to find a publication daring to do that now.

Kate Nightingale from Time to Change, the mental health anti-stigma campaign run by Mind and Rethink Mental Illness, says it's down to both individuals and larger communities to consider their words. "Having a mental health problem is hard enough—hearing it trivialized makes it unnecessarily harder. You probably don't mean to stigmatize or hurt someone with a mental health problem—so we'd encourage everyone to think twice about the possible impact of using mental health language in such a casual way." When you speak, say what you mean.

It's not about taking over language and deciding who can say what. It's about having a word to express to people who don't understand, what is affecting us. Many find being diagnosed and given a term for their illness empowering; they can go online and research their illness, the science, the facts, they can hang onto that word when they're having a bad patch. Within the mental health community, the word has immense power. Satiating these words will eventually make them meaningless to everyone.

Follow Hannah Ewens on Twitter.

Illustration by Ella Strickland de Souza.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Bees are dying, sea levels are rising and every green space in Britain is turning into luxury apartments. Thankfully, there are some people out there trying to stem the flow of environmental disaster, including a protein bar company called Exo.

Beef and pork farming, as vegetarians are constantly reminding us, creates huge amounts of greenhouse gasses, and as such are a key factor in global warming. But those animals also create a delicious source of protein, so what can you do?

Well, Exo claim they've found a protein source that has almost no environmental impact, and that source is—crickets. Apparently crickets produce 100 times less carbon dioxide than cows and contain 12 times as much protein as beef. So Exo ground crickets into a "flour" and made cereal bars in flavors like Banana Nut and Blueberry Vanilla... but, again, with crickets. We asked some people to try the treats.

TOM USHER, STARVING WRITER

I went for the banana bread-flavored bar. Said bar is brown, shiny, and smells like a Christmas pudding. It's actually all right—once you get past the psychological fact that it was made from bugs, then really it was no different from any other kind of flapjack-type thing that you get in Holland and Barrett or whatever. Considering I've literally eaten just protein bars for dinner at some points in my life then I'd be fine with eating them again, maybe over a candlelit dinner for one at home tonight.

3/5

SAM WOLFSON, HUNGRY EXECUTIVE EDITOR

You know that episode of The Simpsons where Homer is sponsored by an energy bar company to eat nothing but Powersauce Bars, which turn out to be made mostly from old Chinese newspapers? I feel like the same company might be behind these, judging by the consistency. It's so gristly I was still fishing bits out from my gums two hours later. I had the Banana Bread one but the only discernible flavor was Glastonbury chai tents and stale Soreen. This would not stop me eating beef and if anything has put me off eating bananas or bread.

1/5

JOE ZADEH – PECKISH NOISEY EDITOR

I guess it tastes exactly like anything that Ant and Dec would force Z-list celebrities to eat live on television should taste. Like regret. Like desperation. Like "has it really come to this"? It says on the packet that it's like eating shellfish. Cool. Who would eat cocoa or blueberry-flavored shellfish? Now my mouth is working overtime to get small bits of decapitated cricket out of my teeth. It's a massacre. I don't feel good about crickets dying for this. I was having a decent morning but I don't feel good about myself anymore. This was an awful experience. Thanks mate.

1/5

MITCHELL STEVENS – RAVENOUS SOCIAL EDITOR

I've eaten insects before but I don't want to talk about it, thanks. It wasn't traumatic at all. I thought this would be all right because it's flavored like blueberries which makes me feel safe, but there was actually a bit of an uneasy crunch to it which really brought me back and made feel a bit queasy. Still, what's one more repressed memory, eh? It's pretty tasty as well to be honest. I'd give it a solid four out of five. Only the stickiness let it down a bit.

4/5

ZING TSENG – FAMISHED BROADLY EDITOR

This basically tastes like every other overpriced energy bar I have ever bought in a foolish attempt to be "healthy." However, a tiny warning on its packaging also says that you may be allergic to crickets if you are also allergic to shellfish crustaceans. This immediately makes me think of the giant alien bugs from Starship Troopers, except processed into breakfast bars for foolish millennials. Maybe after we all start doing spin classes on exo-bikes listening to Avicii's 112th chart-topping record in the year 2028, cricket bars will seem normal. I'll settle for eating an actual banana for now, thanks.

2/5

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

On Monday, it was reported that the NHS has pledged to invest in excess of £1 billion extra annually in mental health by 2020-21. According to the Guardian, people facing mental health problems will be able to get community care 24 hours a day as part of what will potentially be the biggest transformation of NHS mental health services for a generation. This news couldn't come soon enough. Over the last few years, the extent of Britain's mental health crisis has been slowly and painfully drip fed to us with stats that've almost desensitized us as a public body. This positive development comes as a response to a damning leaked report into mental health services in the UK held by an independent task force last week.

The report painted a picture of a system in tatters. It revealed that one in four people experience mental health problems over the course of a year while the number of people killing themselves is soaring. Sick children are being sent "almost anywhere in the country for treatment" and three-quarters of those with psychiatric conditions are not being helped. A quarter of people with severe mental health problems need more than is currently on offer and many are at serious risk of self-neglect. Worryingly, there has been a 10 percent increase in the number of people sectioned under the Mental Health Act over just the past year. Undoubtedly, this is a system that routinely fails the entire country.

The report's bottom line: ministers needed to find an extra £1.2 billion a year for mental health services by 2020. This £1 billion pledged by the NHS, then, is not enough. But it's something. Is this cause for celebration? What will this £1 billion really mean for a devastated service?

Currently, £9.2 billion is spent on mental health services—less than a tenth of the overall NHS budget. This has been decreasing dramatically over recent years. Mental health trusts saw a real-terms fall in budgets of more than 8 percent between 2010 and 2015, as reported by the BBC. On Sunday, the BBC revealed that 2015 budgets fell 2 per cent when adjusted for inflation in the financial year. When you take this into consideration, the £1 billion pledged barely makes up for cuts made in the first place.

Paul Farmer, chair of the report and chief executive at MIND, however, is positive that this money, along with the "landmark" report, will ensure "another one million people" receive improved support. Speaking to VICE, he said that MIND is pleased with the pledged amount as it is based on the recommendation in the report. "The fact that the NHS and government are committing to that figure is really important; it's a significant step. What needs to happen now is that it's worked up over a period of time. Some of the people you need to have in place to deliver these services have to be trained so there's a period of time to get to where we need to be. But it does mean that by the time we get to 2021, the NHS will be spending a billion pounds a year extra on mental health, which is big news."

An obvious problem here: those suffering need help now. But it's impossible to fix something overnight. Will the money start getting spent sooner? "Yeah exactly," said Paul. "Some pieces of work will start from the new financial year in April. Our recommendations around children and mental health will start immediately. We know there is £250 million available in this coming year that hasn't been spent to invest in that. Other services need more time so we've got the right standards of people in place in order to deliver them. It's one of those situations where we want the services to be there as quickly as possible."

Paul hopes that the report will mean a focus on transparency for the future so that things can't be allowed to get as drastic again. "What happened previously was that at a national level we're told money is being provided but at a local level people just aren't seeing that money, so there's something going wrong there. Money wasn't flowing down the system... One of the things we're calling for is knowledge about where that money is going and how it's spent on mental health."

Paul is optimistic this money represents a fresh slate. "This is all about a chance of mindset within the NHS. The priority for mental health here is very transparent. I haven't seen a level of commitment to mental health like this before from the NHS or government."

Follow Hanna on Twitter.

Sang Woo Kim (second from right) in a United Colors of Benetton ad

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Last Friday, the long-awaited Zoolander 2 opened in cinemas across the UK. The film is just as ridiculous as the first one and, bar Kirsten Wigg and Penélope Cruz, includes the majority of the original cast—it's just that, this time, they all look 15 years older and know how to work a selfie stick.

As with the original Zoolander, the sequel attempts to satire the fashion industry. However, the film has already been roundly criticized both for just not being that funny and for inviting members of the industry to take part in the film. Zoolander was so successful partly because it was made by outsiders lampooning people who take themselves exceptionally seriously, whereas this time round it relies heavily on cameos from some of the most famous names in fashion, begging the question: can Zoolander 2 work as satire of the fashion industry if the fashion industry is now in on the joke?

A question as big as that can only be answered by someone with firsthand knowledge of the fashion world, so we decided to take male model Sang Woo Kim to see Zoolander 2 in the hope he'd be able to help. Sang, born in Seoul and based in London, has fronted campaigns for DKNY, Dolce and Gabbana, Armani and, most recently, Diesel, so certainly has form when it comes to being professionally good-looking.

The trailer for 'Zoolander 2'

VICE: What were your initial thoughts on the film?
Sang Woo Kim: It's the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen in my life. I thought it was great because this time Ben Stiller has managed to manipulate really famous members of the fashion industry into being a part of the film.

What do you think about the fashion industry's relationship with celebrity in general?
The majority of people in the fashion industry just want to be famous. I think it was a sign of desperate measures for people from the industry to appear in the film, in order to gain some kind of celebrity status. But I also think that a lot of people in the fashion industry who were asked must have rejected the roles. I reckon Cara Delevingne's managers didn't allow her be in the film. Cara is trying to take this whole acting thing really seriously, and good for her.

How are you different from Derek Zoolander?
Although I do my job as a model and things have gone well for me, this isn't what I want to do as a career. But for Derek and Hansel, modeling is their life; they are the two biggest models ever—taking on all the female roles. So, in that sense, the film is really taking the piss, because there isn't a Derek or Hansel in the real modeling world. A guy could never get to that level. Also, the elements of action in the film are completely out of the question.

So is modeling just a stepping-stone for you?
It's difficult when people ask me what I do. I always say I'm a model, but I really should say artist first—but I'm almost embarrassed to say that because I know everyone knows me as a model. That's what is hard, because my passion is art. I haven't really done anything to become a model. I've been very fortunate—I thank my parents for the way I look, and thank god I'm Asian at the right time. Diversity is a trend now and that's why I get picked.

What is the reality of modeling?
For me, the film isn't really the best advertising of what I do. Modeling can be difficult at times. I think the hardest part is when people start seeing you as something you don't see. People see you as just a face, and obviously I don't think that way about myself. All my friends from my old school act very differently towards me. Being a minority race at my school, it was difficult, being the one who looked different, and I was ridiculed for that. I had to do a lot of thinking about my appearance and my insecurities, which other kids didn't necessarily have to think about. It made me grow up a lot quicker, but I'm confident with myself because of that, so when someone tries to question who I am, that's what I find difficult.

Are there issues within the fashion industry that you think the film could have poked at more?
I think the film makes fun of stereotypes rather than actual issues within the fashion industry. If they actually started to pick on the real issues then it would have been more of a sensitive—and a less ridiculous—film. Obviously, diversity is an issue, and it's always going to be an issue. The film didn't pick up on that so much. Personally, as an ethnically Asian model, I've always found myself in a really fortunate position because of the fact that I can speak English and communicate with people and maintain relationships. Whereas all of the other Korean or Chinese models find it really difficult to be able to do anything abroad, apart from runway shows, because of visa problems or language barriers. Although that doesn't give brands an excuse to not pick Asian models.

Sang in a DKNY ad

Does your agency stress the importance of having a strong online following?
The use of social media was a really big part of the film. The agency definitely pushes you as a model to use Instagram because it's something that generates money at the end of the day. With social media, the industry has the attitude that the more you can get your face out there the better. As a model, all publicity is good publicity. For example, when those Kate Moss photographs surfaced, the only consequence was she was offered more major campaign deals. Models can get away with those kinds of things because people don't see you as a person; you're basically an object used to sell.

What's the maddest fashion party you've been to?
The party for Philipp Plein was in Milan and the whole middle circle of the area was a huge bar. They had people in jet packs flying out of a swimming pool. It was the most surreal thing in the world. Then Snoop Dogg performed in his own blue-lit room, singing "Drop It Like It's Hot." That's real-life ridiculous.

Have you ever felt like your life was in danger as a model—that you could potentially be assassinated?
No, you can't do anything that might be unsafe. Sometimes stylists can't even cut people's hair because they need to speak to the agency first.

Sang in an Armani ad

What has being in the fashion industry taught you?
I have learnt a lot about certain experiences that I wouldn't know if I stayed at university. Learning about money, for example. I'm earning quite a lot, so now I know about taxes, and the privileges of paying taxes in some respect. I feel like many of the things you learn throughout your twenties have been condensed for me through modeling into the space of a couple of years. The amount of people you meet and the constant travelling has tuned me into the world around me. I'm very grateful for that.

In the film, Mugatu is put into a fashion prison. Do you think there should be actual fashion police?
I think people should get red cards, like in football. If London Fashion Week starts and you have an awful collection you get a yellow card, and if it's absolutely outrageous designers can get a red card, which means they are banned for a season. I could preside over the jury: "Anna Wintour, you've been issued with a red card, which means you are confined to the second row for two seasons."

Finally, have you ever finished walking a show then looked up into the sky and asked yourself, 'Who am I?'
Yeah! You get alienated in this world—modeling isn't even a job; it really gets into your mind. Loads of times I've had to question what I'm actually doing in this industry. As a model you are constantly being told that you are beautiful, which fools you into thinking you have a good life. I'm always going to parties surrounded by loads of really drunk male models, who are all asking, "What am I doing?"

Thanks very much, Sang.

Follow Amelia on Twitter and Sang on Instagram.

The number of non-completely embarrassing pieces of art about rock music, outside of rock 'n' roll itself, can be counted on a sole two-finger salute. Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, which I haven't read because I hate reading about rock music though smart friends say it's great, and the comic book Love and Rockets. Everything else, every other comic book, film, and novel about rock has been not just dancing about architecture but the cliché "dancing about architecture." Velvet Goldmine, while certainly loved by some, is still better known for its soundtrack. Phantom of the Paradise is beloved by me, but is more about being odd than about rock music, per se. Repo Man, probably the best rock movie, is not about rock at all; rather, it's about transcendence and death. No, unless you've deluded yourself into liking, say, the Doors, you have to admit that rock, adolescent hooey, the most glorious kind of hooey there is, doesn't translate to other mediums. But, god in heaven, the old and getting older don't stop trying.

Vinyl, the new HBO phantasmagoria of hard drugs and gormless sideburns, brought to us by Martin Scorsese and Mick "Marianne Faithfull's Ex-Boyfriend" Jagger, is way better than it should be. I can't speak to the quality of the filming itself. My TV watching is pretty much confined to The Expanse, Rick and Morty, and New Girl in the background while I play Warhammer 40K on my phone. TV critics ranging from Vulture to the Washington Post say the camerawork on Vinyl is very fine, and I'll take their word for it. Apparently it's Scorsese's best film work since The Departed. As someone who enjoys both Ben Affleck's Boston oeuvre and that one song by Dropkick Murphys I'd agree it was a fun flick, so that's reasonably high praise.

As far as Vinyl's success at trying to convey what can't be conveyed through film, which is to say what it's like to lose oneself to music and drugs, I'd say it's a solid B. To enjoy the show, it helps to either have never done drugs or seen a band, or to take the production as a kind of magical realism. I, not to brag, have totally done drugs and seen bands, so I went with the latter.

In the opening scene, "record man" Richie Finestra (somewhat though not quite based on Marty Thau and played well throughout by Bobby Cannavale) is sitting in his car in SoHo, buying coke. Two-hundred-and-eighty dollars seems steep for a quarter ounce in 1973 but, as I was not yet a glimmer in my father's eye at the time, the filmmakers would know better. Richie tears off his rearview mirror to cut lines on, using a detective's business card that must have been made of reinforced cardboard. I guess it was more cinematic than using the webbed skin area between your thumb and pointing finger like a normal person would.

After doing his massive line that makes him react like people in movies that take place in the 70s react upon doing lines (and please don't get me started on the rubbing-it-on-your-gums bullshit), his car is then overrun by cascading rockers running Wild in the Streets to the nearby Mercer Arts Center, and he follows. "Punk" is spray-painted in the hallway and even though this is a few years before Punk Magazine premiered and the term itself was still pretty much just being used by a few writers for Creem Magazine, I'm game. And let's not get into my deeply held belief that not a single fan of NYC music between the years of 1967 and 1983 ran anywhere but from the cops, or maybe to the bathroom when the pills went south. It felt strange that the maker of After Hours has a vision of New York that is so corny, so unhip as having young people operate at a speed faster than drugged swagger.

I mention all this stuff that occurs within the first 15 minutes and hardly matters because if you're like me, these glaring inconsistencies coupled with some perhaps necessary personality-establishing, ham-fisted lines, you may be inclined to stop watching. Don't. It gets better. Either that, or I got worse. That's fine, too; I don't look for art to improve me.

The basic plot is Richie trying to save his record label, first financially and later spiritually. After becoming the controlling owner of a now seriously uncool legacy label, he hopes to cash in on the label being sold to German conglomerate Polygram, which is dependent on he and his partners (Ray Romano as Zak Yankovich, a consistent series highpoint, and Max Casella as Julie Silver) all hiding financial irregularities and signing Led Zeppelin. The actors do a swell job of making these big-picture low stakes seem the life or death propositions they are to the protagonists.

Ray Romano. Photo by Macall B. Polay/courtesy of HBO

There are a few main subplots, including a secretary (Juno Temple)'s attempting to move up to A&R by signing a pre-punk band, whose singer is played by Mick's son James Jagger; Richie's wife Devon (Olivia Wilde as a wonder of love and dissatisfaction); and foul-mouthed comic Andrew "Dice" Clay as Frank "Buck" Rogers, a grotesque and aggrieved-by-Donnie Osmond radio-station owner. The show's black characters are generally portrayed as saints, purveyors of soundtrack funk and soul, and objects of clueless characters' casual racism. There's even the cringeworthy validation from fucked-over blues man Lester Grimes (Ato Essandoh), told in flashback to Ritchie, "Are you sure you're not a black man?" I'll reserve judgment on that aspect for a few episodes. I want to believe Vinyl won't be corny.

Vinyl is ostensibly about rock 'n' roll music. It works better than most in that regard. The soundtrack is good, a nice mix of old R&B, rerecorded pre-punk standards, and thankfully there's nary a montage set to "Gimme Shelter" to be found. But the show shines as an oversized morality play. Names like ABBA or Suicide work less as plot points than totemic place-setters. The viewer has to decide to take pleasure in hagiography, even if it's about a music that was supposed to reject such sentiments, with Richie Finestra as a Zelig type given total selfish agency. When he rises, Christlike, literally from rubble, at the end of the first episode, it's hard to not be supremely moved. It's only utter fucking hogwash, but I like it.

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This piece was published in partnership with The Influence.

Four months ago, I dropped my boyfriend James* off at rehab—the same rehab I took my first boyfriend to 10 years before. While James filled out paperwork and spoke with counselors, I worried that his insurance would only cover the five-day detox that never worked for him. I worried that he would die.

It was terrifying, yet familiar. I'm 27. Since the age of 17, I've had three long-term relationships—and all three were with men who were addicted to heroin.

Even though drugs seem to be everywhere in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, where I live, this can't be a coincidence. After the first guy—Timothy, a wrestler I started dating in high school—I told myself I'd never date a heroin-user again. (I don't even smoke weed, and I've never touched opioids.) But it kept happening.

I know everyone else thinks it's weird.

People tend to assume I fall in love with the thrill of addiction. But I fell in love with their personalities—with people who happened to have addiction issues. None of my boyfriends were actively using when we first met. One experimented on the party scene and got into opioids; another got into heroin after being prescribed Percocet; another was in recovery when we got together, but relapsed. All of them were fiercely passionate about their love for me.

I liked their intensity and their edges. They were hard-on-the-outside, soft-on-the-inside types. Bad boys who ran with tough crowds, who cursed and were unpredictable. They were outgoing at parties—fun guys. As an overly cautious person myself, I was drawn to the way they sought out adventure. They were curious about the things that scared me. They protected me, and I felt safe with them.

When I say they were soft on the inside, I mean they knew pain. James lost his dad to suicide. He is one of seven, and all of his siblings have addiction issues. Ryan had to deal with his mom's alcoholism his whole life. They would say they were good at pushing their pain away, but they all had these insecurities that made them so sensitive—a quality that is rare to find in a guy.

With them, I felt understood, and loved as a whole person, all my flaws included. They were uncomfortable people who knew how to comfort others. Because I loved them and they treated me so well, I went out of my way to try to make them comfortable, too.

My friends and family didn't like that. They said that I—a bubbly former cheerleader who demands to be taken to the emergency room if I even have a bad hangover—was too good for them.

"He won't change," everyone told me, which only made me angrier: I don't know that, and he doesn't know that, so who are you to say that?

I cried in the shower because I couldn't find a person who would listen. Even online, everything I read was negative: He's an addict? Dump him!

What no one seemed capable of understanding was that I was in love and fighting for my partner's health—just as theywould if their significant other were ill. I wasn't better than my boyfriends, though I did have an easier time growing up.

Those people who talk down to me also don't understand that what they have is not necessarily better, just because their boyfriends' screw-ups are less stigmatized. When I think about my friends' relationships, I'm not jealous. I can't imagine putting up with half the shit that my friends in "normal" relationships do.

I never worried that my boyfriends would cheat on me, or fall in love with someone else. They were beyond committed to me, devoted almost to the point of obsession. They sent cards with long letters, gifts on every holiday (whether they were stolen or purchased, I don't know). They knew what it was like to have your back against a wall, and so they always had mine.

This kind of ride-or-die commitment was compelling. Sometimes, that was a bad thing. When you're dating a guy like this, what you love about them can also be what drives you crazy. That passion can turn into a threat to jump out the window, with them counting down: "Five, four, three—are you going to get back together with me?—two, one."

That wasn't love; it was manipulation. You have to learn the draw the line.

And of course there were other lows—like the time Ryan was out of Suboxone and withdrawing the whole drive back from the Jersey Shore, puking out my car window. I was freaking out over him being so sick, trying to take him to the hospital (of course), but he wouldn't go.

Instead, I drove him to a corner in Philly, where he got out of the car while I parked, panicking—and I mean, freaking the fuck out—while dudes offered me drugs. And then I looked in my rear-view mirror, and Ryan was gone, and I bawled my eyes out as I imagined every awful thing that could have happened to him. Two seconds later, he's back with a big smile on his face and a pink lemonade.

I've been on drug corners, threatened to kill drug-dealers, and followed, high-speed-chase-style, to make sure my boyfriends were going to 12-step meetings (they weren't). I've called their families and their parole officers, spent hours researching treatment online. I looked through phone records—not just to see who they called, but the cellphone towers they pinged. My detective skills are legend.

And it's weird, but having spent so much time researching addiction and making schedules of AA meetings, I sometimes talk like a person in recovery. I catch myself using phrases like "the pink cloud." I know the recovery mantras and the rehab red tape. The red tape drives me crazy.

How could it be so hard to get help for someone? How many times do I have to see RIP on Facebook, or read another obituary about a 24-year-old who "died suddenly," before we fix this? I had so much trouble getting Ryan into rehab that I joked about pulling a John Q until they would take him.

It's heartbreaking to watch your boyfriend suffer like that. I've seen men cry because they could not figure out how to stop the one thing that was destroying their lives. They hated themselves so much for their failures. I wanted to help them feel like they could be ok, that we could be happy together without drugs. I'd light candles and put on meditation music, stay up with them all night when they were withdrawing.

But love wasn't enough. They couldn't do it for their moms, they couldn't do it for themselves, and they couldn't do it for me.

And even during those spells when they were sober, things weren't magically better. James has now been off opioids for a month, and he's always asking me when we can get back together, like I owe it to him now that he's off drugs. But things got to the point that I was always accusing him of being high, investigating everything, and that was no good for either of us. Addiction had become so engrained in our relationship that sobriety didn't fix our problems.

None of this means I'm bitter. I made a decision to end a relationship that had become unhealthy, even though it started out amazing. I still care about all of my boyfriends, and I try to keep in touch. Right now, all of them are off dope. I have faith in their potential, that they will stay strong and make themselves and other people happy, like they did for me.

I don't know whether my pattern of romantic involvement will continue, but I have no regrets about the time I've spent wrapped up in it. Loving these men taught me how to love harder, how to fight for what you love and believe in, and how to never give up on someone because the situation isn't ideal.

My heart grew bigger because of them.

*All names have been changed. Bree Marie is the pseudonym of a woman who lives in Delaware County, Pennsylvania.

This article was originally published by The Influence, a news site that covers the full spectrum of human relationships with drugs. Follow The Influence on Facebook or Twitter.

All photos by Owen Scarbiena

Kate Moss is as British as the Queen, shitty train service, and shirtless men drinking Stella. She's become such an icon of everything UK that those shops on Oxford Street that somehow manage to stay afloat selling bedazzled New Eras and Big Ben broaches now screen-print her face onto cheap white T-shirts as just another souvenir for tourists visiting London.

Her early tale is well told. The Croydon-born 14-year-old was discovered by Sarah Doukas, founder of Storm Model Management, at JFK Airport in New York City. By the following year, she'd appeared on the cover of a British magazine—a monumental milestone for any model. She rose to fame in the early 90s and became known as the "anti-supermodel" of the decade. She's appeared on the covers of more than 300 magazines and been the star of ad campaigns for most of the top fashion houses. But you know all that.

Over the years, various old shoots have emerged, but recently Kate's first ever professional photographs were rediscovered in a drawer and shared with the world. I spoke to photographer Owen Scarbiena, who had the career-defining job—unbeknown to him at the time—of taking the shots.

VICE: How did you initially land this gig with Kate?
Owen Scarbiena: I'd been doing photography for fashion shoots and stuff, and I'd done some stuff for Premier, Select, and Storm, so obviously I knew Sarah and Caroline in the agencies—and I was always looking for new girls. At the time, I was working on a new project: white designer blouses and sports knickers that girls used to wear at school many moons ago. It was about that time that Sarah Doukas called me from Storm saying she loved my work—which was very clean, minimalist—and that she had this girl, Kate, who I'd love, and it just so happened to fit in with the type of stuff I was doing because she was very fresh.

What was the shoot like on the day?
Kate didn't have any preconceived ideas of how a model should stand. She was just her, which I loved. We did the test with her in the designer blouse and sports kickers, and she was brilliant. It was very slightly awkward, but natural. I would say something like, "It's ten to four at the bus stop" and tell her a story, and she would follow it while I was just clicking away. There was a thing we used to do back in school called natural movement, where you had to pretend you were like a tree. And we did that. So that's how we got those pictures; she wasn't really posing, but just following the story.

She was very open, friendly, and very confident. Easy to get on with, so the whole thing was a laugh. Very easy to mould. You get some girls who are new and are a bit nervous—she wasn't. It was like we'd been hanging out for ages. My daughter was there as well, and they got on, so it was just like shooting an old mate.

How did you find these unseen pictures? Did you just have them locked away?
We shot lots of models—some of them had become famous, but didn't get into editorial or a publisher, and then they just got shelved and forgotten about, so I forgot they existed. So when I met my best friend about a year ago, she was telling me about another friend who ran a gallery and whose job it was to find pictures of gorgeous people, and she said, "Haven't you got pictures of Kate Moss?" They were in my negative drawers, so I hunted through and found them. I didn't even have contacts done, so I had giant contacts done. There was a big picture done and I saw it and thought, Oh my god, is that Kate? That is gorgeous—because I'd only seen them in 24/36, tiny little negative sizes never blown up. Anyway, my friends loved them and wanted them in the gallery, and that's how it started.

Thinking back to that photoshoot, did you have any idea she would become as iconic as she now is?
Absolutely not. You've got the normal models—Cindy Crawford, for example—who are all gorgeous, but there were other models that were odd, quirky, and incredible, and Kate fit into that bracket. So I didn't think she would make it because she didn't fit into that obvious beauty. She's not six feet tall. She had her own quirky gorgeousness, which isn't taken up by the masses.

Did you shoot her again over the years?
I didn't, no. That was it: first and last. I think shortly after that I went to Milan, and while I was away, she got big and then I didn't see her. I bumped into her in Notting Hill and that was it.

What is it about the photos you particularly like looking back on now?
It's a period in my life where I felt bombarded by lots of messy images, and I liked to have things that were clean and feminine, and she was just so fresh and personified the look I loved. So when I look back at them, I think, I love that. With all of the shoots I did the hair, the make-up, and the styling. Not that I was any good at any of the aforementioned; I was just happy to get a lip shine going. I called it guerrilla hair styling: If you have the bare necessities, you can't muck it up. I didn't have hair spray, so I just used a bit of water and olive oil on her hair and skin. Hair stylists used to be my biggest fear, because they go in and just create this thing that was the opposite of what you wanted.

What I remembered the most about Kate was that I thought she'd be able to work well with anybody. She was just so easy. She was good friends with another good friend of mine, Corinne Day, who also used to take loads of pictures of her.

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