Even The Simpsons knows. Screenshot via The Simpsons

When a link to a documentary about Winnipeg being colder than Mars came up in my feed, I felt a pang of sympathy for my former self, struggling year after year in the city of my birth. As shitty as this past deep-freeze of a weekend was in Ontario, I'm currently safe in the relative warmth of another mild Toronto winter.

It was December 31, 2013 when reports flooded social media that it was -29C on Mars, while in Winnipeg, it was hella colder than that, with temperatures before the windchill dropping to -38C.

While that particular day made headlines, Manitoba temperatures are rather prone to drop below those on Mars: as a kid I understood that from Christmas through Easter, -20C was a tolerable day, -10C was awesome, and -30C or lower meant rough times. In Toronto I get to add at least 10 degrees onto each figure.

Looking back, this part of my childhood seems like a past triumph born of desperation: you're not totally sure how you got through it, or if you could do it again. (Quick shout out to all my pals chilling in the 'peg to this day.)

The author as a baby hanging out on a sled in a city colder than Mars. Photo via the author

When I was a kid, Mars was never something we compared Winnipeg's frozen winters to. I never even thought of Mars as having a cold atmosphere: in photographs, the red planet looked pretty balmy compared to the white glare threatening to blind us all on so many crushing mornings when we awoke to newly crested snowdrifts.

Pre-internet, when it was more difficult to compare climate stats, us kids were told our city was "colder than cities in Russia, but not some Russian towns," an odd distinction (plus pretty much untrue), but we longed to be the best, the most, the superlative at something, anything, clinging even to the dubious title of Murder Capital.

We knew it was colder up north (including the mysterious territories where "almost no one lived,"—thanks, Canada's education curriculum), but of the cities getting coverage on national news, it was easy to be confident that we had it the worst, and one of my aunts used to confirm this by, on days when the windchill pushed below -40C or a blizzard dropped 30cm of snow, calling from Vancouver to gloat. I grew up with the understanding that for half the year, my city and I were the planet's underdogs.

And maybe we needed that to pull through each winter. My great and great-great grandparents were likely less hostile colonial settlers and more refugees taken for fools when they immigrated to Canada and arrived at the point where the Red and Assiniboine rivers conjoin. It's understandable that they perhaps began to hold the Red River Valley's harsh conditions as proof of their strength, and an excuse for their failures.

It's easier to be lenient of everything from mediocrity to intense eccentricity in a city where you and all your neighbours are held captive by a cruel deep freeze for half of each year.

There's a renowned tolerance for weirdness (or, at least, white weirdness) in Winnipeg that's best exemplified by the strange art of Guy Maddin and the Royal Art Lodge, or all the musicians who've holed up over the winters making albums. But it also spills over into a stoic acceptance of and openness to humanity's shadowy sides, from substance abuse to mental health issues. Looking back on frank discussions about various family members or downtown maladies, I realize it was Winnipeg attitudes that taught me to look at seemingly perfect families and institutions with suspicion or even pity, wondering what awful secrets might defrost in their yards in the springtime.

Better to wear discontent on the outside, I learned, like the Red River Valley trees, which, frozen for nearly half the year, are forced to stop growing for so long that I imagine they begin again in spring with no recollection of where they left off, rushing to make up lost time through hot, dry Winnipeg summers, twisting their bodies over the years into strange, mangled monstrosities I've never seen the likes of anywhere else.

When describing life in Winnipeg now, I find these warped trees along the riverbank are my easiest metaphor, unless my conversation buddy has seen Guy Maddin's myth-building avantgarde homage My Winnipeg, a film which had my mom lol-ing in the theatre and has served as an icebreaker with random movie lovers from around the world, who tend to then be super impressed that I'm a flesh and blood representative of the place.

And it might have more to do with Winnipeg's small-town vibe (and our murder-capital eschewing "Friendly Manitoba" licence plates), but I can't imagine any new tenant of my old Winnipeg addresses turning me down if I tried. I imagine, more likely, that they'd stand awkwardly in the doorway, smiling politely and letting me mentally replace their furniture with the pre-Ikea ghosts of my past, all the while dreading the moment when my gang of robber pals run in to ransack the place. The tightrope walk of Winnipeg's high tolerance/high crime anxiety-state tracing lines of conflict over a guarded face.

The first time someone pointed out Manitoba-face to me, I was 17. A prodigal son on a brief (or brief-according-to plan) respite back to Winnipeg after a decade of travel pointed at people on the 60 bus, saying he'd never seen faces like these anywhere else on the continent. I understood this more in the years to follow, when I'd become a stunned visitor myself, experiencing culture shock when confronted with symbols of my heritage.

I think it's true that over the years, the human faces in the land that's colder than Mars accrue the same staggered aging effects as the trees: a weathered, frozen countenances which haven't quite taken on the consistency of elm bark, but have been marked by patterns of weather more harsh and vigorous than elsewhere. In moments of vanity I'll wonder if my childhood winters sealed the fate of my features.

Born in February, aka the month when all my friends in Toronto decide to stop going out until it's leather jacket weather again, I remember my cliff-jumping birthday parties clearly, which is surprising given what a cliff-jumping party was.

I don't know where my parents got the idea (I assume their lack of budget made them resourceful), but on February weekends, a gaggle of children (mostly girls) would pile into my dad's truck, and we'd squish together in our puffy snowsuits all the way to the Red River, about a ten minute drive from my house.

There, we'd dive from the riverbanks into the deep (sometimes several-little-girls-high) snow drifts below, again and again, running and throwing ourselves from the cliff edges until someone landed too rough or couldn't take it anymore and started crying, or lay down listlessly on the bank like a fallen soldier in a bright pink snowsuit. Then we'd pull ourselves miserably back to my house and struggle out of our clothing, rings of burning-cold snow lining our wrists, ankles, throats, and waists, and ready to pound back hot chocolate.

I mentioned these parties to a coworker of mine in Toronto and he remarked that my parents were lucky they never got sued, which stands, hilariously, in my memory as one of those moments when someone really can never get where you come from.

CanCon stereotypes are funny, but in Winnipeg, I did get pulled around behind a German Shepard in a wooden sleigh, and my friends and I had igloos or quinzees (basically a hollowed out snow pile) in our yards every winter until we got too lazy, or too cool, to bother building them anymore.

More than any other, though, this now legendary phenomena of Winnipeg being colder than Mars mostly conjures one specific memory for me.

I was 12 or 13, past snow fort age but not past the age where I might have half enthusiastically helped my little brother dig one out over a weekend, when I was walking to school in a blizzard, some of the harshest weather I can remember. Picture a journey-to-the-South-Pole type movie of the week, except instead of your protagonists fighting nature for some noble goal, I was going to my junior high school social studies class. I remember thinking a thought not unfamiliar to Winnipeggers: maybe I should just lie down in the snow and give up.

A city bus stopped beside me, which was odd since I was walking on a side street. The door opened and the driver asked me if I was going to school. When the driver said she was going to give me a lift, I could have cried. I rode the empty miracle bus the few remaining blocks to school as the ice melted off my eyelashes.

In the brick building where life was generally a monotonous nightmare for us all, it turned out while a bunch of kids had stayed home, some had shown up. No one was impressed that I'd dragged my tiny body through such extreme weather, and the heroic rescue faded from my mind for years.

In looking for photos for this essay, I realized I have almost none. We don't take photos when it's 20, or 40, degrees below freezing. We pull our sleeves over our mittens, and keep an eye peeled hoping some kind bus driver, or passing space ship, will offer a ride.

A small section of our Mars is now named after Winnipeg, but the hype has been contested—one Winnipeg Free Press article points out, in typical Winnipeg-hating-on-Winnipeg fashion, that one stat comparison shows Vancouver could be described as colder than Mars.

While I have yet to see Colder Than Mars, the documentary that's attempting to capitalize on 2013's viral Winnipeg vs. Mars sensationalism, it's telling that the trailer starts with one of the two Simpsons quotes that reference the city: "We were born here, what's your excuse."

Winnipeggers, feeling constantly under-appreciated for our abilities to slog through the horror of -50C with the windchill, and don't you dare say the windchill doesn't count, are just as identity obsessed as we are want to compete for worst-place, seeking shout outs like the thirstiest of fanboys.

Yet it's the doc's quick frame of some party girls outside of country bar Whiskey Dix or wherever that makes me a little homesick. For the privileged majority, basic survival through a Winnipeg winter isn't that difficult, but, for the city's entire population, it's actually living through one—going dancing, turning snowdrifts into amusement parks, not stopping to nap in a snowbank forever—that requires incredible emotional stamina.

As a white girl from Fort Garry who still mumbles, "fuck, a booter," when the ground gives and I feel my shoe fill with snow, Winnipeg shaped me in many ways—I won't leave anything of mine in a car without hiding it, which people in Toronto seem to find bizarre—but I'm grateful to its harsh winters for showing me that isolation and intense circumstances can breed not only weirdness but defiance and brilliance, from films like Maddin's Saddest Music in the World, artist Kelly Ruth turning her weaving loom into a noise instrument, or Venetian Snares' fuck-you take on electronic music, to wearing stilettos when the snow is a piled a metre deep because we're fucking having fun this weekend, Ashley.

Winnipeg taught me that if we ever beam people up to the Red planet, there won't just be existence on Mars, there will be life.

Follow Kristel Jax on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

It's almost impossible to estimate the true scale of modern slavery in the UK.

Today's slaves work and live alongside us, often trafficked into the country, their exploitation hidden in plain sight. Traffickers confiscate their passports and documents, leaving them powerless in a country where they have no support network and often don't speak the language. In fact, it's basically impossible to know who's being subjected to what without them coming out and telling you, and it's not like much small talk naturally leads to questions about whether or not you're currently enslaved.

In 2015, British authorities identified 3,266 human trafficking victims, a 39 percent increase from the previous year, which in turn had seen a 34 percent increase from the year before. Worst case scenario: More people are being trafficked. Best case scenario: Authorities are doing a better job of pin-pointing victims. Either way, it's clear that trafficking and slavery are both big problems facing the UK. Parliament passed a new law—the Modern Slavery Bill—in 2015 specifically to help authorities tackle the problem.

Many of the modern slavery cases that make the national news seem to relate to domestic servitude: people being kept in a home and forced to perform housework without pay, like the three women freed from a house in central London after 30 years in 2013, or the 28-year-old woman rescued from an address in the English town of Rochdale this past weekend.

What you hear less of are the cases in which trafficked people are put to work in regular jobs, before their captors collect all the pay for themselves. It's a surprisingly regular occurrence and begs all sorts of questions: Why do they not tell their colleagues what's happening to them? Why do they not immediately report their traffickers to the police? How do they end up in this situation in the first place?

Through the Home Office, I was able to set up a meeting with "K," a Hungarian man—and a victim of that exact kind of enslavement—in his mid-30s. He agreed to talk to me on the condition of anonymity. Sitting down opposite him at a cafe in southeast England, K, dressed all in black and nervously clutching a coffee, took a deep breath and began to tell me his story.

Adopted at three years old with his younger brother, he never knew his birth parents. The brothers were raised in a small Hungarian city, not far from the Slovenian border. When his adopted father passed away, K took a job in a factory to pay the bills.

"I worked there until my car accident in 2002," he said.

Following the crash, K spent three months in a coma and another six months piecing his life together. His memory was impaired, and it wasn't until he found old receipts and letters in his bags that he was able to figure out where he used to be employed. "I went to work and asked if they knew me, and soon, they had me back on the floor," he recalled, sipping his coffee.

He may have found the place, but operating the machinery he used to be an expert at was now a struggle, and before long he was let go.

"I became homeless—the kind of homeless person who wanted to be homeless," he said. "I didn't want anyone to find me at all. I went onto the street, and I was sleeping wherever the night took me."

After a few years of sleeping rough—and a short time working for a local pimp, before apparently handing him over to the police—K heard of an opportunity to make a new start. "Someone told me about a job in England and about this family who was arranging to take people," he told me. "Now I had this get-out. I mean, I couldn't speak English and couldn't get there on my own, but I felt like I needed to run."

The deal was done within two weeks. K met the trafficker, had his documents copied, and booked his flights. It's not really what I'd envisioned as a route into slavery: no abduction, no coercing, ostensibly no shady business. We'd been chatting for a good half an hour at this point, and for the first time, I interrupted K mid-flow. "What were you expecting to happen?" I asked him. "Did you know you were volunteering yourself into modern day slavery?"

"I wasn't really sure what would happen," he responded. "I knew these were the kind of guys looking for slaves—people who no longer cared about life, but who just needed wine, you know, something to eat and shelter. It's all I wanted then. They never told me what I might get paid, and to be honest, I never asked."

Everything was paid for and the escape route laid out: K would be in England by October of 2004.

While more victims of modern slavery appear to be getting in touch with authorities, it's believed there are thousands more who aren't. The UK Home Office's Chief Scientific Adviser, Professor Bernard Silverman, estimated in 2013 that there were between 10,000 and 13,000 potential victims of modern enslavement in the United Kingdom.

The website modernslavery.co.uk, run by the Home Office and supported by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, says modern slavery victims in the UK have come from a number of countries—Nigeria, Albania, and Vietnam among them—with 90 from the UK identified in 2013. Hungary is another country that comes up often in people trafficking and enslavement cases, most recently in January of this year, when a West Yorkshire factory owner was found guilty of employing a large number of Hungarians as a "slave workforce."

The situation was much the same in 2004, when K arrived in the UK.

"I landed in Luton, and this guy came to collect me," K told me. "When we got there, I was shown my room, which I was to share with two other men, both of them Hungarian."

There were only three bedrooms in this house in Stoke-On-Trent, but 22 people were living there. K had tobacco, coffee, and his pocket dictionary to help him learn English: "Everything I needed, really."

He started work the next day, and while he kept hold of his passport, he never saw his wages. "Without money or language, you can't get away anywhere, so they had no need to take my documents," K said when I asked what kept him from running.

K was paid £50 a week for his full-time work, with the majority of his salary going directly to his trafficker. "He filled in all the forms when I was signed up for the job—I never saw them."

In April of 2005, K was driven to Bolton to start a new job.

"This went on for 18 months or so," K continued. "We worked , because the traffickers told me they were protecting me from another mafioso. I was getting nothing."

Over time, K's English improved, and he began to once again desire his freedom. "It was after about two years when I wanted my independence back," K recalled. "I had given them too much of my life already. I didn't want to give them any more time."

In the past, K had considered running away, but he says he saw no feasible way out. "For what purpose? To be homeless? No," he said. "Maybe I could have tried to stay in England—it's milder here; I could survive on the street. But I thought they might hurt me. If one person can get away, that means everyone else can get away, and they wouldn't let that slide."

Realizing that he couldn't do it alone, K teamed up with a couple of others in the same situation as him. Hatching a plan in collaboration with the management of the company they worked for in Bolton, everything began to come together. One of the managers took K and the others down to a bank, helped each of them open an account, and started paying their wages directly to them. Soon, the traffickers were complaining, asking where their money was, but the management pointed to a fake banking error.

"A week later, the company told the traffickers that the police were looking for them," said K. "They just packed up and left the country."

For a while, things were stable. It was the summer of 2006, and K and the others were living and working in total freedom. But then it all went to shit again. The contract expired. The six people K lived with, all Hungarian, spoke no English, and finding work alone was tough. With the last of his money, K flew with the others to Hungary, but soon found himself alone again, broke, and homeless.

"I no longer understood Hungary—it had changed. The politics, the people, the culture," he said. "I felt like a stranger. Not even the streets were the same. The city I grew up in was no longer my own."

So, working and saving up again, K bought himself a flight back to the UK.

By December of 2009, he was back in Manchester, working precarious jobs and feeling miserable. He couldn't afford the rent and was set to be on the streets for another winter, until he got a call from an old friend who knew of a group of Hungarians being held as slaves, just like K had been three years before. "He knew what I had done last time, plotting our escape, and he asked if I could help them do the same," K said, smiling.

He went in, undercover. "I traveled to Leeds. A man came to meet me," he said. "When I arrived at the house, what I saw deeply scared me. Everyone there had been trafficked."

As K knew, building trust with a stranger when you've been exploited and manipulated takes time. K grafted, and in return was paid, like the others, just £10 a week. "Finally, after a few months, one guy I was living with decided he wanted to do something rebellious," K grinned. "He started to talk to me, asking questions about what we might do."

What K and his new friends decided to do was get in touch with the Hungarian press and authorities. Before long, an arrest warrant was issued, and the police raided the house.

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Through the Salvation Army, K and the others were taken to a safe house and immediately put into a witness protection program. "When we arrived, it was after a long journey," K said. "We went in the house, and it was so big. I had a living room! I really liked it."

With the resources provided, K soon found work, helping the others find employment too. "To find a job in England, it is easy—whoever says they can't find a job is a liar," he laughed.

As our conversation came to a close, I asked K how he feels now, looking back on what happened.

"It is what it is," he responded. "I want to do more to help stop trafficking and slavery, though. Even if I never get paid for it—even if I am unofficially undercover—I will do it. If I have the chance to clean up more rubbish from the trade and help people, I will. I would do it again. I am single, so at least I don't have to worry about my children and my wife and my house."

K's story puts consent into the spotlight; his decision in 2004 to effectively volunteer himself into slavery, even if he wasn't doing it entirely consciously, raises an important point about what it means to be a slave. We imagine this process to be one of coercion and forced labor, but K offered up his freedom to his traffickers. Had his original traffickers been caught in 2004, this could have complicated the case. But fortunately, under the new trafficking offense in section 2 of the Modern Slavery Bill, the consent of the victim to travel is not relevant.

"I still remember the feeling of not understanding what was happening around me when I first arrived here," K said, rolling a cigarette before leaving. "I was desperate, and they took advantage, exploiting me. I can't let that happen to anyone for as long as I live."

If you suspect that someone you know has been trafficked or is being enslaved, please call the National Human Trafficking Resource Center at 1 (888) 373-7888.

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Barack Obama. Photo via Wikimedia.

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

US News

Obama to Visit Cuba
President Obama will visit Cuba in the coming weeks, making him the first US president to travel to the island since Calvin Coolidge in 1928. Republicans say it should not happen while the Castro family is in power, and Ted Cruz has accused the president of being "an apologist."—ABC News

Hospital Gave Hackers Ransom Money in Bitcoin
A hospital in Los Angeles paid $17,000 in Bitcoins to hackers who had disabled its computer network. Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center CEO Allen Stefanek said paying the ransom was "the quickest and most efficient way to restore our systems."—CBS Los Angeles

Snowden and Google Back Apple
Both Edward Snowden and Google boss Sundar Pichai have backed Apple's refusal to comply with a federal court order to unlock an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters. Forcing companies to hack would "compromise users' privacy," said Pichai.—The Guardian

Military Failing Troops With PTSD
The US military is failing to provide adequate therapy for thousands of active-duty troops suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a new study concludes. The RAND study found only a third of troops with PTSD receive the minimum amount of therapy.—USA Today

International News

Turkey Vows Revenge After Bomb Attack
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has expressed his "determination to retaliate" after a car bomb close to military headquarters in Ankara left at least 28 people dead. A pro-government newspaper claims a Syrian national, identified from fingerprints, was behind the attack.—AP

Radioactive Material Stolen in Iraq
Iraq is searching for "highly dangerous" radioactive material stolen last year, raising fears it could be used as a weapon if acquired by the Islamic State. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) confirmed that Iraq reported the theft in November last year.—Reuters

Aid Arrives in Besieged Syrian Towns
Aid convoys have reached four besieged areas of Syria: two rebel-held areas near Damascus, and two pro-government villages in the north. The UN deliveries are part of an agreement world powers still hope might lead to a "cessation of hostilities" by Friday.—Al Jazeera

Australia Hit By Hairy Panic
A fast-growing tumbleweed called "hairy panic" is clogging up homes in the Australian town of Wangaratta. Caused by dry weather, residents are forced to clear the weeds for several hours every day, with piles of hairy panic reaching roof height in some places.—BBC News

Manny Pacquiao (right) in the ring against Miguel Cotto. Photo via BagoGames

Everything Else

Nike Dumps Manny Pacquiao
The sportswear giant has terminated its contract with Filipino boxer Manny Pacquiao after he said gay people were "worse than animals." Nike said it found the comments "abhorrent."—ESPN

Kanye Rages at SNL Staff
An audio clip of Kanye West yelling at SNL staffers backstage has appeared online. "Don't fuck with me," Kanye shouts, before claiming to be "50 percent more influential" than Stanley Kubrick and Pablo Picasso.—Page Six

El Chapo Says Prison Making Him a Zombie
Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán's lawyer says prison guards are turning him into a "zombie" by refusing to let him sleep for more than two hours at a time. Attorney Juan Pablo Badillo called it "physical and mental torture."—CNN

Islamic State Blamed On Sun Storms
One Oakland University professor thinks electromagnetic cues from sun storms are capable of making us more violent. It revives the research of Russian scientist Alexander Tchijevsky, who thought armed conflicts ebbed in accordance with solar events.—Motherboard

Done with reading today? Watch our video 'Confessions of a Dominatrix'

This article originally appeared on The Trace.

Jeb Bush's unusual and unsteady campaign to win the hearts and minds of Republican primary voters took an odd turn on Tuesday when the former Florida governor shared an image on social media of a .45-caliber handgun engraved with "Gov. Jeb Bush," accompanied by a one-word caption: "America."

Illustrations by Joel Benjamin

It's the day we spend 20 minutes talking about Anderson Cooper and Kathy Griffin that I realize I can no longer afford my therapist. She doesn't take my insurance, and the cost is like a monthly payment on a luxury car. This is a different kind of breakup than I've ever had with a healthcare professional. I don't leave for lack of love. It isn't her. It's Blue Shield.

Now I look back upon our 50-minute sessions with euphoric recall. The beautiful boundaries we set: work boundaries, parental boundaries, sex boundaries. Granted, I never actually upheld any of those boundaries, but the inspiration was there. Most of all I miss her modality: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy combined with mindfulness, which did more in nine months to help me with my anxiety disorder than over a decade of psychodynamic therapy. I'd been in many long-term therapist-patient relationships, but it was never this good.

I approach the Psychology Today therapist finder as one might approach Tinder for the first time: nervous, excited, fantasizing about all of the hot possibilities for "doing the work." Yet my eagerness is quickly squashed by what I find. Have any of these therapists ever used the internet? How can I respect someone with an Earthlink email address? Many of them ask vague, open-ended questions: Not sleeping well or sleeping too much? Feeling depressed or anxious? A few of them are making duckface.

Like Tinder, the mediocre ones start to look good compared to the disasters. There's one therapist who seems like she has what I want: an anxiety specialist, well-educated, takes my insurance. I immediately position her as the therapy It Girl, a must-have. What if I don't get her? I must get her! I set out crafting the perfect email: one that depicts me as fucked-up yet also a real pleasure. She doesn't respond.

Of course, it's always the ones you don't want who want you. Dozens of responses from the Earthlink therapists come flooding in. One woman, we'll call her Therapist #1, has a crazy amount of availability. Like, every day of the week is free. Sorry, but you should at least play a little hard to get. I don't trust that she isn't desperate. But I'm kind of desperate too.

I schedule a session with her and it goes OK. She's compassionate, but definitely too deep in the let's-talk-about-Mommy game for me. Perhaps I am just comparing her to Judy. It's like when you get out of a relationship and your first new fuck is just mediocre. You just want to go running back to that last relationship. I try to remember that Judy wasn't perfect either. One time she even quoted ee cummings.

Therapist #2 doesn't give a shit about my childhood, which is a great sign. Also, her office is three minutes from my house so I try to make myself like her. But halfway through the session I notice that she has a dark hair-dye stain across the front of her scalp and forehead. I try to ignore the stain. Yet I feel like the stain is talking to me.

"Can you accept life advice from someone who can't figure out Clairol?" says the stain.

"Is that what this is really about?" I ask.

"I suggest you move on," says the stain.

I've never had an easy time breaking up with therapists, in part because they don't readily accept the ol' "it's just not working for me." They always want to process the breakup over the course of multiple sessions. You spend more time breaking up than you did working together. But with therapists #1 and #2 it's very easy, because it's less of a breakup and more of a not scheduling a second date. It's basically just swiping left. I start to think that maybe it's better to never commit to a therapist. Could I just see a different therapist every week for the rest of my life?

Therapist #3 has a good vibe—no hair dye issues, and she wears Dansko clogs, which is a good sign. Dansko clogs say, I am comfortable with myself and with my life. I prioritize myself and my own well-being over looking hot for others. I vote Green Party.

Unfortunately, Therapist #3's skill set stops at the clogs. She encourages me to do some "breathing work" around my panic attacks. Sorry, but no. There is nothing worse for a panic attack than focusing on the breathing. The more I pay attention to my breathing the more convinced I am that I'm suffocating. You have to ignore the breathing.

Therapist #4 is actually pretty great. She does a hybrid of CBT, mindfulness, and something she calls psycho-education. In a mere 45 minutes she makes it clear that I have no idea what any of my emotions are. The physical sensations I always interpret as "dying" are misplaced emotions. But do I want to feel my emotions? Fuck no. Also, now I'm really enjoying being single and playing the therapist field. I'm not ready to commit.

I arrive at Therapist #5's office sweating, having just self-flagellated myself by running for 45 minutes in the hot California sun.

"Oh," she says. "Did you just come from a run? That is such amazing self-care! Way to be kind to yourself! Good for you!"

Clearly this therapist has somehow never encountered eating disorders, body dysmorphia, or compulsive exercise. Doesn't she know anything? I don't run to be kind to myself. I run because I'm terrified. I imagine a relationship with this therapist in which she co-signs all my bullshit. I'd probably be dead in three months. Thanks, but I can do that myself.

Then, out of nowhere the It Girl therapist contacts me. It's like she senses all my dates—how popular I am—and now she wants a piece! But I wonder if it is too late for us to begin a real romance. How special can she be? In a sea of 50-minute appointments, all the therapists start to blend together. It's depressing, actually. I'd like to believe my therapist has special powers. But when I see how many of them there are, they just become a crowd of humans. It reminds me that no one knows the answer any more than I do.

What's also illuminating is how never-ending the therapeutic road can be. Like, I always start therapy with the hope of accomplishing a particular goal. Things begin so tangibly. But is there ever really an end? I could do a different kind of work with a different kind of therapist every day and there would probably never be a terminus. Where am I trying to get?

I suppose the end is not really the point. I guess you never get to that mystical place where everything is OK forever. It's always the hope when starting a new relationship that I am finally on my way—that this is it this time! But whether in love or therapy, it's annoying that no one else can fix me.

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All stills from 'Belladonna of Sadness.' Courtesy of Cinelicious Pics

The 1970s were perhaps the grossest chapter of recorded time, an era wherein the previous decade's flower power rotted on the vine and a politically engaged, protest-minded youth culture dissolved into an atmosphere of distinctly hostile decadence. By the time The Joy of Sex, with its illustrations of hairy fornicators, arrived on shelves in '72, sexual freedom had more or less given way to wanton Henry Miller-esque rutting. But for all its prurience, the decade that gave us Deep Throat, Hustler, and Plato's Retreat was also the last time when widespread experimentation dominated the mainstream in every corner of the arts, from the creator-driven films of the New Hollywood and rock 'n' roll's enshrinement of the drug culture in the popular imagination to the spectacle of perfectly normal people reading Gravity's Rainbow. It was also the golden age of cartoon sexuality: Adult animator Ralph Bakshi followed the success of the X-rated Fritz the Cat with burned-out, bell-bottomed exercises in hand-drawn hallucination like Coonskin and Wizards, and the magazine Heavy Metal cornered the market for large-bosomed women riding dragons and beating the shit out of pervy robots.

But the greatest legacy of the 1970s vogue for melding Saturday morning cartoons with Saturday Night Fever was in Japan, where anime succeeded the pornographic "pink film" in marrying transgressive and—especially in the case of hentai—graphic sexual content with eye-popping psychedelic excess. The genre's first masterpiece was Belladonna of Sadness (Kanashimi no Beradonna), a film whose visual style is so sui generis that I can only compare it to Sesame Street if Sesame Street was, as my paternal grandmother believed, a recruiting film for LSD-addled freakazoids and the Church of Satan.

Watch an exclusive trailer of Belladonna of Sadness:

When Belladonna of Sadness was originally released in 1973, it immediately bankrupted its studio, Mushi Production. Mushi had been founded in the early 60s by manga artist Osamu Tezuka, the creator of Astro Boy and Unico, and its style was largely responsible for establishing the frenetic big-eyes-small-mouth aesthetic of anime. But Belladonna actually has more in common visually with Aubrey Beardsley, Yellow Submarine, and the Tarot-card-looking output of the illustrator Kay Nielson, as well as Bakshi at his trippiest. But here I am talking like this is not a film that features a long scene of flora and fauna—giraffes, crocodiles, orange trees, you name it—emerging from people's orifices like something out of a Boschean Hanna Barbara and, reader, that is precisely what I'm talking about.

The plot concerns a purple-haired witch named Jeanne and her seduction by the devil, inexplicably disguised as a little talking penis, who grants her supernatural powers. The remaining storyline, if you can call it that, largely consists of Jeanne's arcane revenge on the nobles responsible for her violent sexual assault (in a ghastly early sequence that's made even more uncomfortable by her attacker's striking resemblance to Hordak from the old She-Ra cartoons). The film is a Joan of Arc pastiche, a musical, an exploitation picture, and a pornographic movie—but what it really is is an excuse for a breathtaking series of montages where a singing, dancing Black Death melts faces into skulls, kaleidoscopic specters of pop-art Americana signify the consummation of Jeanne's pact with the Evil One, and an assortment of infernal penises perform vicissitudes previously undreamt by any human penis, which is perhaps the greatest contribution an animation studio has made to creative physiology since Cab Calloway serenaded Betty Boop in Minnie the Moocher.

Even with so much stylized pandemonium, it can be hard to overlook how frequently Belladonna staggers over the line between transgressive pop-porn and the kind of outright misogyny that mars so many otherwise righteous female-driven revenge narratives. Still, given Jeanne's uncompromising ownership of her profane desires and independence from her milquetoast husband, it was miles more progressive than anything coming out of the West in 1972. The film's montages are bookended by still-life illustrations that resemble art-brut storyboards over which the dialogue is spoken. These episodes, with their curiously unfinished and sketchy figuration of witches and warlocks—like if Egon Schiele drew an edition of The Dungeon Master's Guide—aren't exactly the highlight of the film, but no worse than the old herky-jerky Marvel cartoons from the 60s. And anyway, the second half of the film is largely given over to the psychosexual exploits of Jeanne and her devil friend, who even in his final form retains a phallic hairdo and tells Jeanne, "You are even more beautiful than God," which I think is an awfully sweet thing to say.

Belladonna of Sadness is deserving of a place in the cultural memory because it marks the moment when the Times Square porn groove met manga cuteness, and because it happens to function as an omnibus of 20th century modes, including that of the Impressionist watercolor, the fuzzy Kandinsky-esque geometric dissolve, and the prog-rock album sleeve. It is also clear from some of the dialogue ("Ignoring status is against God! The work of the devil!") that the acceleration of Japanese pop culture was imminent, making Belladonna as much a social document as a benchmark in visual storytelling. And Cinelicious' gorgeous restoration from 35mm and subsequent North American release means that it is destined to take its place in the personal mythos of the retro-fetishist, high-trash, obscurist, art-creep demographic alongside recent rediscoveries like Holy Mountain, Possession, and Hausu.

In other words, Belladonna of Sadness is an answer to the prayers of those whose taste in film has evolved to the point where it echoes Jeanne's rejoinder to Satan, when he asks what she wants to do with her newfound energies: "Anything... so long as it's bad." Caligula would've wept.

J. W. McCormack is a writer whose work has appeared in Bookforum, the Brooklyn Rail, Tin House, the New Inquiry, n+1, Publisher's Weekly, and Conjunctions.

Cinelicious Pics' restored Belladonna of Sadness will screen on May 6 at Metrograph and Alamo Drafthouse in New York and San Francisco, respectively, and May 13 at the Cinefamily in Los Angeles.

This morning, Supreme London dropped the first items from its SS/16 collection. As is customary, fans, collectors, and re-sellers made pilgrimages from all over the UK and Europe to get their hands on clothes and caps from the new season, with some camping out since 9 AM yesterday morning.

The Morrissey T-shirt—the one that caused all the drama, with Morrissey trying to pull out because he didn't like any of the photos taken of him for it, before claiming he had to sever ties because he's a vegetarian and Supreme once collaborated with burger chain White Castle—is what most people up in the front were after. A couple have already appeared on eBay, bumped up to £100 a shirt.

Here, have a look at these photos of everyone lined up outside the Soho store, the abandoned chairs people spent the night on, and the first couple of buyers who made it in and out.

A dominatrix sits down in our chair wearing a creepy mask to share the torturous techniques she uses with her high-powered clients.

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

It was the drug drought that inspired a thousand online moans. But this week, a survey of over 10,000 college students has confirmed what reports around the UK have increasingly hinted at: Ketamine is once again in plentiful supply.

Student website the Tab's annual university drug survey found a significant rise in the number of students in the UK using ketamine in 2016 compared to 2015. The survey also found that students are now paying less per gram than the inflated prices dealers were charging during the drought, which hit the UK in the spring of 2014 and affected supply through most of 2015.

Ketamine's return, according to the survey, is most prominent at universities in Bristol, Manchester, Liverpool, Brighton, and Newcastle—all cities well known for having historically high levels of ketamine use. More than half of the students surveyed at the University of the West of England in Bristol name ketamine as their university's "favorite drug." The survey found most students were paying between £20 and £29 being charged during the shortage.

This is all a far cry from springtime in 2014, when ketamine supplies started drying up, just as the drug was spiking in popularity in Britain. Out of nowhere, ketamine became hard to source, deals were heavily cut, underweight, and triple the usual £15 gram bag price.

Users of online drug forums despaired, with people posting messages like this one: "I've been looking at my living room for the past three weeks, and it's just been normal. When is this going to end?"

Anyone boasting to have sourced some cheap ketamine that wasn't cut with its research chemical alternative, MXE, was immediately swamped by a deluge of PMs. There were maudlin pleas on Twitter, parody sites posting about fake charities set up to help drought sufferers, and the inevitable angry Hitler reaction video.

Nancy Lee, who died after years of ketamine abuse at the age of 23

The lack of supply, however, has done some people a favor. Pre-drought, at £15 a gram, ketamine was incredibly cheap. It enabled people to snort multiple grams of the stuff on a daily basis for relatively little cost, especially if you were funding your habit by selling it to other people. Some friends of Nancy Lee, who died in 2014 at 23, after using ketamine heavily from the age of 16, told me that the drought had prompted them to ditch the drug for good, with some switching to valium and alcohol.

Before the Tab's survey, there were signs that the drought was ending and supply lines into the UK had been re-established. There were the surprise mass seizures at Secret Garden Party in Cambridgeshire last summer. People were getting slapdash with their powder: Someone on vacation allegedly fed some K to a pigeon in Ibiza (his lawyer later said it was salt, not ketamine), and a friend of Kate Middleton's family was caught with it all over his face. It appears that, since the festival season, there has been a re-awakening of the ketamine market, with easier availability, lower prices, and higher purity.

It's hard to say definitively what initiated the ketamine drought and what sparked its return to the UK, but the answers are almost certainly found thousands of miles from Britain's streets. Analysts generally agree that the UK shortage was initiated by a clampdown on the diversion of ketamine onto the black market by authorities in India at the end of 2013.

Since ketamine has grown in popularity, particularly in the UK, India has been the main source of supply, from liquid ketamine bought in street pharmacies and smuggled in rosewater bottles, to larger scale trafficking of powder. Many factories in India—most notably in the western state of Maharashtra—manufacture tons of the drug for legitimate global markets, where ketamine is used in hospitals, dentistry, and in veterinary medicine.

Until the clampdown, it was easy for traffickers to obtain the drug from factories with few questions asked. The law change meant that ketamine became a far more heavily controlled drug, making it harder to obtain from high street chemists and commercially from factories.

Around the same time as the clampdown, 1,175 kg of the drug—more than 1 million grams worth—meant for export to the UK, Australia, and the US was seized at a chemical plant in Maharashtra. Then, in February of 2014, police uncovered a huge haul of 225 kg of ketamine—the equivalent of a year of UK ketamine seizures in one day—in pallets of frozen food after stopping a VW van on the M6 outside Manchester. In June of the same year, ketamine was reclassified by the Home Office from a Class C to a Class B drug, meaning steeper sentences for those caught smuggling the drug into the UK.

The strangulation of supply became evident in the government's drug seizure statistics. Between 2014 to 2015, there were just 56 kg of ketamine seized in England and Wales, a 70 percent fall from the previous year.

So what sparked ketamine's return to the UK's student halls, clubs, and streets? The answer, as is often the case with the world's synthetic drugs market, can be found in China's vast network of underground drug labs.

While there's a high chance traffickers have found new ways to dodge the authorities to continue to divert Indian ketamine into Europe, the key driver behind the resurgence of supply in the UK is a rise in labs making the drug from scratch in China. Ketamine is not an easy to drug to make, but with the correct chemical know-how and equipment, it's no harder than making ecstasy—something Dutch chemists have managed for the past couple of decades.

Chinese authorities, responding to rising problematic ketamine use in China and Hong Kong, have tried to limit the availability of the drug's precursor compounds, such as hydroxylamine, a chemical more generally used in the production of nylon. Even so, the number of clandestine labs in China—the epicenter of global ketamine production and use—is rising. Analysts believe not all of the ketamine being pumped out of these places is ending up in the nasal cavities of people in that region and that increased production of ketamine in clandestine laboratories in China has been a contributing factor to the end of the UK drought.

"It is highly likely that ketamine produced in Chinese labs is now reaching the UK market," Martin Raithelhuber, the illicit synthetic drug expert at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), told me. Raithelhuber says the underground labs have proliferated across China in the last six years. Chinese authorities closed more than 100 such labs in 2014. The export of ketamine from China to Europe, he pointed out, follows an already established route of other relatively novel psychoactive substances, such as synthetic cannabis and cathinones (chemical "cousins" of amphetamines) including mephedrone.

It should come as no surprise that China, the world's biggest trading nation, is rapidly becoming the world's number one provider for the rising market in synthetic psychoactive drugs, of which ketamine is one of the most popular in Britain.

It will only be a matter of time—maybe a decade or two—before the global supply of plant-based drugs, such as cannabis, cocaine, and heroin, is eclipsed by the trade in man-made substances designed to mimic, at a far cheaper cost, the effects of intoxicants that grow out of the ground.

This shift will turn China, a country with some of the harshest anti-drug laws in the world, into the planet's biggest drug dealer. If that's a situation the West dreads, then there is only one way of avoiding it—but it's not one governments in Europe and the Americas will be particularly keen to back: the legalization of the plants that people have been using to get high for thousands of years.

Follow VICE's Narcomania series on Twitter.

For the full results of the Tab's 2016 drug survey, have a look at here, here, and here.

Tom McClean and "Moby" the whale. All photos by Luke Montgomery

I'm standing at the edge of a sea loch in the West Highlands of Scotland staring at a 60-foot sperm whale, its huge tail rising up from the hillside of rock and heather across the water. Moving closer, I can see the painted foam that forms its skin and the 3/4 inch steel panels that curve round its belly. It's a boat—but not like any other you've seen before.

Its creator, Tom McClean, is standing next to me. We're staying with McClean at the outdoor adventure center he's been running on a remote shore of Loch Nevis, near the Isle of Skye, for over four decades. During that time, he's been having adventures of his own: This extraordinary boat is just the latest enterprise in a lifetime of turning the excesses of his imagination into brute reality.

"I stayed an adventurer," he says. "Coming up with original ideas. Having a go at this and having a go at that."

Mainly, McClean's been having a go at the Atlantic Ocean. In 1969, while a soldier in the SAS, he was the first person to row alone across the North Atlantic from Newfoundland to Ireland, a journey of more than 2,000 miles, battling for 71 days through monstrous storms, waves the size of houses, freezing temperatures, and a capsizing. After that, there were four more solo Atlantic crossings, in crafts of various sizes and degrees of eccentricity. In 1982, he set the record for the smallest boat to ever cross the Atlantic, a 9'9" yacht called Giltspur. When Bill Dunlop, an American, crossed three weeks later in a boat 8 inches smaller, McClean sawed two feet off his with a chainsaw, went again, and reclaimed the record.

In 1985, he spent 40 days living alone on Rockall, the pillar of granite rock sticking out of the Atlantic a couple of hundred miles west of the Hebrides, in a self-directed (and largely fruitless) attempt to assert Britain's territorial claim to the islet. A few years later, at age 44, he was rowing the North Atlantic once more, crossing in 50 days to set the record for the fastest time. Then, looking for a marketing opportunity to get him on the ocean again, he went across the Atlantic from New York in a boat the shape of a beer bottle. Sponsored, oddly enough, by Typhoo Tea.

His latest project is Moby, a 65-ton boat the size and shape of a sperm whale, complete with a painted mouth and eyes and a blow-hole that shoots water high into the air. Again, he wants to cross the Atlantic: "I've put a big, big effort into it all," he says. "A lot of people have a great pipe dream, and of course, they run out of money, and it all fizzles out and stops. But we kept going. All we want now is someone to make good use of it."

The whale-boat was dreamed up when, home again from his adventuring in the mid-1990s, McClean found his thoughts returning to another attention-grabbing ocean crossing. "Moby" was McClean's nickname in the army because he was always "spouting off."

He designed the boat himself, after a nautical engineer he approached to draw up plans told him he was crazy. Work took place at a fabricating yard. "Why would you go to a boat-builder when he'll charge you ten times?" he says breezily.

Since a successful inaugural trip round the British coast in the late 90s, Moby has been stranded in the Highlands. McClean's vision for giving her new life now is based on clean energy—he's replacing the "reliable, but noisy and smelly" diesel engines that power the whale-ship with electric motors to create a publicity vehicle for a zero-carbon environmental campaign: "You haven't got the dirty old diesels thumping around. You've got rid of them ,and the whale's an example for all boats. I really like the idea of a company getting involved and saving the planet and doing good." He hopes an NGO like Greenpeace ,or a renewable energy business, will back the project.

It's surprising that McClean isn't already a national figure, particularly in a nation that so reveres its sailors and explorers. The audaciousness of his achievements seem a match for anything Sir Ranulph Fiennes, fellow explorer and endurance record holder, has pulled off.

But then it's fair to say that adventuring isn't what it used to be. Scientific and technological advance have narrowed the opportunities for today's would-be Ernest Shackletons and Amelia Earharts. Adventuring has never been more popular: Grylls, Cracknell, Fogle, Mears, and others curiously echo the plucky public-school Victorian heroes of G.A. Henty's "books for boys"—yet their popularity is largely from the comfort of the living-room sofa. The world's jungles, mountains, and exotic cities have become holiday destinations, available to anyone with a modest amount of money to spend. Even Everest has become a rubbish-strewn tourist trap. We live in unheroic times.

If someone calls me a big-headed bastard or tells me I'm fucking mad, I just feel good.

Ocean-rowing is now a sport. There's an annual sponsored race to cross the Atlantic with 30 rowing boats taking part, all equipped with GPS navigation, radio, solar panels, and satellite-phones. It's still a huge challenge, but it's a long way from the leap into the unknown undertaken by adventurers like McClean, who played an important role in showing us that there are human qualities gained through adversity, difficulty, and risk—virtues perhaps under threat in a cosseted technological age.

As McClean gives me a tour of the boat, he scrambles up Moby's tail. A short, stocky figure—he's only 5'6" but gives the impression of huge physical strength and vitality. He's 73 years old but as eager for his next adventure as someone a tenth of his age.

When we sit down in the sitting room of the stone cottage he built himself, I ask him how he found the inner strength to get through the challenges he's taken on. "It's not a case that you're gritting your teeth and saying, 'I'm not gonna give in'," he says. "It's in your body. It's in your being. I don't think you can train for that—and that comes from when I was in the junior orphanage, Fegan's Homes at Yardley Gobion."

Born out of wedlock in Ireland during World War II, McClean was first put into foster care in Dublin and then brought to an English orphanage in Northamptonshire in 1947. Fegan's was a Dickensian institution of the sort that no longer exists: hundreds of boys, all with their own number; Bible classes every day, gruel. Fighting between the boys was a way of life, and so were the beatings McClean received from the adults in charge. His arrival there as a three-year-old was, he writes in his autobiography Rough Passage, "the start of what was to be almost 12 years of constant battle for survival."

"The staff used to hold my nose and shove gristle down my mouth," he tells me. "I'd bite their fingers, and then they'd get the cane out and beat me, saying, 'You will cry!' And I'd say, 'I'm not fucking crying.' Well, I wouldn't swear. I didn't know what swearing was then."

There's no sense of anger or bitterness in his voice. He talks about his time in the orphanage with wry amusement, crediting the experience with shaping his stubbornness. "That's where it comes from," he says matter-of-factly. "You can cut my head off, but I won't do it, you know?"

Most people, I suggest—let alone a small boy without a mother or father—would have been left traumatized. "They would completely flip," he says. "And they'd be saying, 'Why me?' So somewhere down the line it's just in me. I'm not saying I'm good. I'm just saying it is me. We're all different."

McClean left the orphanage at 15 and got a series of jobs on farms and building sites before he joined the army. He signed up with the Parachute Regiment and soon found himself in the Borneo jungle fighting Indonesian communists: "We were doing four-man patrols, going over the border and doing 20 grid squares, making sure there wasn't anybody there you could shoot."

He quickly adapted to his environment. A bout of tonsillitis towards the end of the tour meant he was stationed as a liaison in a local village, where he learned to hunt monkeys with a local tribe, using a blowpipe that now rests in the corner of the sitting-room: "I enjoyed Borneo," he says. "I used to drink their drink. Rice and birds and things all fermented in a big pot. And you'd pass this bowl around and get pissed on it."

After further tours of Aden and Malaya, he returned to the UK to give civilian life a go. But it wasn't long before he was hankering for action again. A couple of months later, he drove to the Special Air Service base at Hereford, England, in his van and simply asked to go on the selection course.

Those who serve in "The Regiment," as former members like McClean call it, are self-motivated and self-sufficient, capable of surviving alone in the most hostile environments. They are also ruthlessly efficient killers. The selection course is famously brutal. Then as now, it involves grueling marches across the Brecon Beacons mountain range in South Wales, lone survival exercises that go on for weeks, and a nasty resistance-to-interrogation section.

"Yes it is tough, but when you're young, you're super fit," he shrugs. "It's like being out on the ocean week in, week out, month in, month out, no radio, no noise. Did I ever give in? No. I didn't want to. I didn't feel under pressure. I don't know why I'm like that... I just have a quiet confidence that I wanna do it, and I'm gonna do it. There's a laid-back attitude that comes with that."

Out of 105 applicants, only McClean and two others passed.

"It's not the big tough guy who's the first one to cross the end," he says. "It's his attitude—it's what motivates him. So when he's in a hole for weeks, just laying up, he's not uptight—he's just biding his time."

There is something of the Zen master about McClean. When would-be ocean-rowers ring him up wondering if they've got what it takes, he asks them a simple question: Could they sit in a cupboard for three days?

He first decided to row the Atlantic solo after chancing upon a newspaper article in the Borneo jungle about two men he'd known from his parachute regiment who were planning to do it, John Ridgway and Chay Blyth. Rowing the Atlantic was one of the great remaining feats of adventure at the time. And a hugely risky one. That same summer of 1966, two British journalists, David Johnstone and John Hoare, had perished in the attempt after three months at sea when their boat was capsized in a storm.

Still, McClean fancied it: "I thought, Mmm I like the idea of that. I could do that. Not in a big way. I knew I had something on my side with the inner me. Making use of what I am."

McClean was 26 when he set off in his small fishing dory on May 17, 1969. No one at that time had ever successfully rowed alone across an ocean. He had never rowed in open seas and knew almost nothing about ocean navigation. When he first decided to do the crossing, the only rowing experience he had was a couple of afternoons on the Serpentine in Hyde Park.

No training could have prepared him for what was in store, though. His account of the voyage in his biography is one of unremitting discomfort, uncertainty, and isolation. Everything is wet, all the time. Some nights it is only the constant bailing of seawater that prevents him from drowning. He was often tracked by sharks. He rowed on a solid wooden bench for almost two and a half months.

Was he scared that he might die at sea before he left? "The way I look at it is it's how good your boat is. If your boat's not gonna sink, you're gonna stay alive. Well, OK, until you run completely out of food, and you don't catch any fish, then you're gonna die. But I suppose I was just 100 percent sure."

One part of the adventure was entirely out of his hands, though. The previous year a man called John Fairfax made it known that he also intended to be the first person to row alone across the Atlantic. "A nice guy but a wild guy," reflects McClean. "Even wilder than me. Even madder, maybe."

Fairfax must be one of the most extreme characters ever to pick up a pair of oars. An inveterate gambler who saw out his days playing baccarat in the casinos of Las Vegas, he grew up in Argentina with his Bulgarian mother, spending months at a time as a teenager living in the Amazon jungle, and returning to Buenos Aires to sell jaguar skins. Later, after blowing a $10,000 inheritance on a road trip across the US with a Chinese call-girl, he captained a ship for three years smuggling guns, whiskey, and cigarettes all over the world. Laying low as a fisherman in Jamaica after the authorities had intervened, he decided to come to England to try and turn a childhood dream of rowing the Atlantic into reality.

McClean with the "Giltspur," the smallest boat to cross the Atlantic Ocean, in 1982

By 1968, with McClean receiving permission for unpaid leave from the SAS, both men were making preparations. As soon as Fairfax had gotten his boat finished that winter, he wanted to be off, so he opted to take the east to west mid-Atlantic route from the Canary Islands to Florida. It meant he had a four-month start over McClean, who was taking the shorter, harsher route from Newfoundland.

The two men were out on the ocean at the same time for several months, but Fairfax finally reached Florida on July 19, 1969. The very next day Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. Even among the fanfare of that moment, it was a synchronicity not lost on the Apollo astronauts, who wrote a letter to Fairfax congratulating him on his achievement, concluding that they were "fellow explorers."

McClean landed on the sands of Blacksod Bay in Ireland eight days later. Unlike his rival, he never boarded any of the ships he came across, and he never took supplies from them, getting across the surface of the ocean through his expertise in survival, his military discipline, and a phenomenal level of determination.

Fairfax had said, "I'm after a battle with nature, primitive, and raw." Did he feel the same? "If I was going out there to beat the Atlantic—no, no, that's the wrong approach. You can't beat the elements. You'll end in the bloody sea, you'll drown. No, no. I'll bob along with it. Go with it. Bend with the wind. It's more subtle. Your chances are greater."

You can't beat the elements. You'll end in the bloody sea, you'll drown. Go with it. Bend with the wind. It's more subtle.

How did he feel when he did it the first time? "Oh, it's everything, it's everything," he says. "Of course, the danger was, when I went and did it again, that I'd think I was super-duper and get it all wrong. But if you double up the safety, and you're at one with the..." He trails off. "All you've got is the sky, the sea, and a boat. A few bits of kit. You've got to be contented with nothing."

Given that he's thrived in what most would consider to be unbearable situations—does he feel different than most people? "Oh yeah. But we're all special. We're all different, so we're all special. The thing is not to get big-headed. No, I'm quiet with it in a way. Smug, in a sort of way." He laughs. "Because if someone calls me a big-headed bastard or tells me I'm fucking mad—I just feel good. I like that. Bring it on. I know other people admire me for it all, so I'm not mad."

Unlike so many other British sailors, adventurers, and record-breakers, McClean has never received an official honor. Maybe he's too eccentric for it. He sees this as an honor in itself. He's a patriot, but he's also an outsider who has never played the celebrity game. Still, he happily welcomes groups to Loch Nevis and has done after-dinner speaking and motivational talks all over the country.

He characterizes his approach to life as "make-do-and-mend," which is an accurate way to describe his lack of pretension and absence of interest in the upmarket side of the sailing world—the yachting crowd. "I'm not trained in anything. But I'll make the bloody boat move forward," he says. "And that's, really, the way I've been all the way through my life."

It's how he made a home in the Highlands, building the adventure center himself, making a family life with his wife Jill. Despite all his successes, for 20 years, he earned extra cash diving for clams in the loch: "I'm quite happy being here," he says. "I could be down in Brighton in a flat or somewhere, but I'm here. I'd be happy in Brighton. I'd probably be flogging something. I don't know what. Doing a business of some sort."

Does he have a favorite of all his adventures? "The first one is the real adventure. Because you're doing the unknown. Adventure to me is the unknown. Just pushing yourself into the unknown."

Later that day, as I watch him standing in front of Moby for a photograph, the whale boat seems as much a work of art as the simple "marketing idea" McClean says it is. It's mythic dimension resonates with so much of his own life. Pioneering psychologist Carl Jung saw the story of Jonah and the whale as an archetypal legend, with the story of an individual being swallowed up by some creature and then spat out recurring in cultures and religions all around the world—whether a whale or a dragon or a wolf. He called it the "Myth of the Night Sea Journey," with the hero undergoing a descent into darkness or temporary death. When he emerges alive after this encounter with the raw power of nature he's transformed, he has a wholeness he lacked before.

Whales have a powerful hold on the human imagination. You only have to think of the huge crowds drawn to the riverside in England when one was stranded in the Thames in 2006, or the reach of Herman Melville's Moby Dick. It makes it a potent image for McClean's environmental campaign. But it's also an allegorical representation of his own life—the orphan-boy spewed up by the Atlantic onto an Irish beach. A boy who underwent, in Jung's phrase, "The perilous adventure of the night sea journey, whose end and aim is the restoration of life, resurrection, and the triumph over death." Whether or not it's a symbol of McClean's own journey, Moby is his monument to the spirit of adventure itself.

McClean would, of course, downplay such high-flown talk. In a couple of weeks, he's going on a camping trip with his two grown-up sons, crawling round the Peak District for three days in whatever wet and cold an English winter can throw at them: "It's still in me to be basic and simple and straightforward," he says. "I enjoy the simplicity of it all. Nothing grand. I'll be happy. They'll bugger off up the hill and put Radio 4 on and leave me alone, and I'll have a kip for three hours. And they say, 'Well what a boring fucking thing to do, just lay there and kip.' But I feel quite smug. I don't know. It's just nice."

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Find more of Luke's photos on his website.

Illustration by Joshua Hanton

This article originally appeared on VICE Denmark

This week, our Danish colleagues heard that Copenhagen's mayor of integration, Anna Mee Allerslev, wants to outfit the city with "racism inspectors"—a team of undercover agents tasked with registering and fighting discrimination in the Danish capital's nightlife. The idea is to have young Copenhageners of immigrant backgrounds visit the city's bars and clubs to see if they are turned away at the door solely because of their skin color.

The proposal is part of a larger plan of action to combat discrimination, to which the city council has allocated 4.9 million kroner in 2016. Having initially been voted down by the Danish right wing, who don't feel it is the city's responsibility to prod around Copenhagen's party scene, the initiative has now been revised and is set to have its fate decided by another vote on February 22.

A similar arrangement, however, has already been implemented by Denmark's Scandinavian brethren in Norway. Since 2010, the city of Oslo has been hiring people to check if bouncers are sending clubbers away because of their skin color. The punishment is a temporary suspension of the establishment's liquor license, which effectively means it must shut down until further notice.

The inspection of an Oslo nightclub entails two groups of 2–5 people positioning themselves in the line outside. The only visible difference between the groups—who pretend not to know each other—is that one consists exclusively of white people, while the other is made up of non-white Norwegians. The two groups are similarly dressed and also consist of a similar male/female ratio.

A total of 278 inspections have been carried out since 2010, with the anti-racism squad successfully clamping down on a total of 12 establishments. Gunnhild Haugen, the administrator in charge of Oslo's initiative, has no doubt that the plan has been working. We caught up with her to find out more about what these agents are actually up to in the lines of Oslo at night.

VICE: Why carry out these inspections?
Gunnhild Haugen: We're doing this because we receive a large number of complaints from people claiming that they have faced discrimination at the doors of Oslo's nightclubs. But there is a huge amount of uncertainty surrounding how widely this is actually happening, so our initiative is also meant to discern the true extent of the problem. Racism is often hard to document; it's up to each individual to report it, and then he or she needs to actually prove that the discrimination was based solely on skin color. That's why we feel it is our society's duty to get to the bottom of this.

How are the instructors trained?
We explain our objectives and the mission—what they're allowed to do and what they can't do. The inspectors we hire are primarily trained by our own employees. They are obviously strictly prohibited from inciting or provoking any action from the bouncers themselves.

How do you pick out their outfits? Are they all identically dressed—same shirts, same trousers, same shoes, same haircuts?
They're almost identically dressed—within reason of course. There are slight variations in the outfits. We dress them in a way that ensures that the establishments won't be able to claim that the people in Group 2 were denied entry because they were dressed differently. Then they get in line next to each other, and we see if both groups make it into the club.

How do you document the exchange?
We don't film or record anything. We carry out the inspection, write a report, and present it to the nightclub in question. The owner is then allowed to comment. We have attorneys review the entire thing before we draw any conclusions.

Related: Watch our interview with the USA Freedom Kids, the patriotic preteen girls singing Donald Trump's praises

How do the nightclub owners react, when confronted with your exposé?
No one has ever admitted to racial discrimination. They'll say things like, "They weren't adhering to the dress code" or that there was a guest list, or that it was a private party. But then, it naturally becomes a problem for them that our group of white Norwegians was allowed to enter despite not being on the guest list or invited to the private party. And they rarely have a good explanation for that.

What is the worst example of nightlife discrimination you've come across?
I think the worst kind of discrimination is the discrimination we don't see—in nightclubs or outside. There are people experiencing this up close and personally, and I think the worst happens when we're not around. But we're trying our hardest to expose the nightclubs responsible for discrimination.

You've carried out 278 inspections and found 12 examples of discrimination. That's not a whole lot. Is it worth the resources that are being spent on inspecting?
I think 12 cases in five years is a lot. It's true that keeping Oslo's nightlife clean costs money, but it's worth it. The benefits of battling racism obviously outweigh the costs.

Has Copenhagen gotten in touch with you at all?
Yes. Copenhagen has showed great interest in the inspections initiative—it has asked about how we carry them out and what results they've yielded so far.

All photos by Rob Blakers and Greenpeace

On January 13, a series of dry storms passed over Tasmania, setting fire to the state's northwest with lightning strikes. These spot fires smoldered through some 73,000 hectares of alpine vegetation and temperate rainforest, a lot of which will come back slowly, or not at all.

Much of Tasmania's World Heritage area is too wet and high-altitude to burn, allowing plant species to evolve without fire. While these conditions have helped to create distinctive forests, they've also left the place vulnerable to climate change.

In the past weeks, there's been a lot of blame leveled at climate change for the current condition of the World Heritage area. Of course, climate change is the sort of insidious threat that can't be held definitively responsible, but things like warmer springs and summers, which allow peat and forest landscapes to dry out, coupled with an increase in storms, which provide a source of ignition, make it a prime suspect.

Tasmania's forests are precious because they evolved in isolation, unaffected by settlement until recently. The heritage area's 1.6 million hectares contain some of the deepest caves in the country and some of the oldest and tallest living plants on the planet. Then there are hundreds of archaeological sites, many holding evidence of how indigenous people lived through the last ice age.

For scientists and conservationists, these photos depict a journey toward an extremely sad future.

NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio and other city officials at a special housing unit on Rikers Island in 2014. (AP Photo/The Daily News, Susan Watts, Pool, File)

This story was co-published with the Marshall Project.

The speaker of the New York City Council shook up the political landscape this week when she announced a slate of reforms aimed at reducing the population at Rikers Island in order to realize the "dream" of shutting down the city's infamous jail complex. The proposal by Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, which included setting up a commission headed by the state's former chief judge, drew the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo, while Mayor Bill de Blasio called it "noble" but "very difficult."

In her address, Mark-Viverito drew on the story of Kalief Browder, who was held on Rikers Island as a teenager for three years, two in solitary confinement, without ever standing trial. He was beaten by guards and fellow prisoners, and the violence was captured on surveillance cameras. The charges were eventually dropped. At home last year, he committed suicide, and his story has become a touchstone for many reform advocates. "Rikers Island has come to represent our worst tendencies and our biggest failures," Mark-Viverito said before an audience that included Venida Browder, Kalief's mother.

Browder spoke with the Marshall Project's Alysia Santo about her son and the movement to close Rikers Island. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

One argument in favor of shutting down Rikers is that it is so isolated from the rest of the city. It's practically invisible to the public and difficult for people to visit. When Kalief was on Rikers Island, how often would you visit? What was that trip like?
Let me tell you, that is an all-day trip. I'm in the Bronx, and it took about two and a half hours on a good day. It's a job. But I went every weekend for three years.

If he was in a facility in the Bronx, I could have went on a weekday, and that would have made him more at ease—instead of him having to wait for the weekend to see his mom. If he was closer, I could have been more of a support for him.

Sometimes, I would cry because there was nothing I could do. He used to tell me, "Mom, stop crying," because people would notice. But as his mother, I'm supposed to protect him. But there was nothing I could do with him being in there. When he first told me how he was being beat, I said, "Well, Kalief, I can go over their heads, and I can go tell." And he said, "No, Mom. Don't do that." Because he was afraid of what would happen to him.

When Kalief first came home from Rikers Island, what was the first thing you noticed?
Physically, he was here, but mentally, he was still in Rikers. The solitary confinement really messed him up. It made him very paranoid. He was terrified of ever having to go back to Rikers. He felt that people were police plants, trying to get him. He was afraid to trust anybody. He even told me one time, "I don't know if I can trust you." To show you how far his paranoia went, it got to the point where I couldn't watch certain TV channels because he said they were linked to the police, and if I had those channels on, they could see or hear anything going on in the house.

He was angry all the time. He got in a verbal altercation with one of his brothers, and next thing you know, they started fighting. I was looking at Kalief, and a look came over him that wasn't Kalief. And it terrified me. And his brother had to go to the hospital because he threw him onto a glass table, and his brother cut his foot. Kalief later apologized and told me, "Ma, I don't know what happened, but I was back at Rikers, and I had to fight."

His paranoia continued to progress to where he wouldn't even talk to me in the house if it was something dealing with the case or what happened at Rikers. If I needed to talk to him, we had to go outside the house and outside the front gate. The night before his suicide, he was just pacing back and forth in the house. And then he said, "Ma, I gotta talk to you." So we went outside the gate and he said, "Ma I don't know what to do." He was talking about a message on Facebook. He said, "They said they warned me, and I didn't listen." And he was terrified. He had tears in his eyes. I don't know what the message said. His brother knew his password, and when I checked it Saturday evening after the police took his body away, every piece of message or information, it was all erased.

So no one knows what scared him that night before?
He tried to show me one message, but I didn't see what he saw. I couldn't understand it, and I didn't want him to see me not believing him. And I was proud that he told me, but at the same time, it hurt that he was going through so much.

What would justice for Kalief look like?
I want the city—and when I say city, I mean the NYPD, the courts, and Rikers—I want them to admit that they're the reason my son is dead. He never had any mental issues till he went to Rikers. These are people that take our kids. Sixteen is a kid. If Kalief were here, and I beat him and mistreated him, I'd be in jail for child abuse.

They need to do away with Rikers. That's the gist of it. It's a horrible place. Shut it down. They can make different facilities in the boroughs where the child lives. Maybe that would help.

Kalief's story has caused people to take a second look at our justice system and feel compassion when they might not have otherwise. Has all this attention surprised you?
It really surprised me, especially when President Obama opened his editorial about ending solitary confinement for juveniles with Kalief's story. I've met a lot of people, judges, politicians. I've even met Sandra Bland's mom. And out of all the people I met, she is the one that really understands my pain, because she lost her child. When we met, her hug really hit me. And I could not control my tears.

I admire her because she goes out there and travels to different states to speak. Me, I speak here and there, but if it was up to me, I'd just stay in my room and be with Kalief, with his pictures and everything. I cry every day. Every day. He may have hung himself, but the strings were pulled by the system. They destroyed my family, and they definitely destroyed me. And I've lost faith in the judicial system, the police. Not all cops are bad, and not all COs are bad, but being that the bad ones destroyed my son, it's hard. It's a lot to deal with.

I was going through his things after he died, and I came across a questionnaire he had to fill out for therapy or something. It said: "What do you do when you're angry? Who do you go to talk to?" And the first person he put was me. Do you know how I felt that he put me? I'm sorry (crying). He put me down first, and there was nothing I could do to stop him.

And you know, I just miss my son so much. He was my youngest. He was my baby. I have to go out there and speak on his behalf. And I hope one day he will get the justice he deserves. They are waiting for this story to die and get swept under the rug. It's not going away because I'm not going to let it go away.

This article was originally published by the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that covers the US criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletter, or follow the Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.

A woman with syphiloderma. All images courtesy of the Mütter Museum

Skin is perhaps the most versatile part of the human body: It regulates the body's temperature, it can signal internal disease, it can become artwork. At times, human skin has even been used to bind books and create drums (so useful!). Because skin is so cool, it's earned a new permanent exhibit at Philadelphia's Mütter Museum, which opened over the weekend.

The Mütter Museum is well-known for its collection of medical oddities: Among its more famous items are Grover Cleveland's jaw tumor, a slice of Albert Einstein's brain, and a 7'6" human skeleton, the tallest on display in North America.

"Our Finest Clothing: A Layered History of our Skin" lives up to the museum's provocative reputation. The exhibit features an array of tattooed human skin, wax models and illustrations of various skin diseases, and a large jar of of skin pickings donated by woman living with dermatillomania, a psychological condition involving obsessive skin picking. The goal of the exhibit, according to the museum's announcement, is "to explore the biology, pathology, and cultural aspects of skin from both a historical and contemporary angle."

I reached out to curator Anna Dhody to find out why she had chosen skin as the centerpiece of the exhibit.

VICE: What's the scope of how skin is talked about in this exhibit?
Anna Dhody: We talk about, for instance, just what is skin. We have a few fun skin facts. One of the ones I particularly like says, "In the time it takes you to read this panel, your body will have shed over 30,000 skin cells." It takes about a minute to read that, and you'll have shed 30,000 skin cells. An average human will shed about nine pounds of dead skin cells in a year. And it takes about a month for you to regrow. Your whole skin regenerates in that time.

We have skin and culture—body modification involving the skin, tattooing, piercing, scarification, things like that. Think about how many people in the world are tattooed or pierced. I think 85 percent or so of Americans have at least an ear piercing. These are all things that directly affect your skin, and I think we deal a lot with skin and culture—with these body modifications, we have some amazing tattooed skin on exhibit that I think people are really going to enjoy. There is a small section on dermatology, but in this particular exhibit, I wanted to get away from "ologizing" it too much.

A preserved tattoo in the collection

How did you get the preserved tattoos in the exhibit?
The tattoos came as part of a larger donation from a medical institution, and we were very, very happy to accept them. Unfortunately, when they came to us, they had been either found as a collection, or they had somehow been disassociated from their provenance, which means that what we know about those specimens is only what we can see. Looking at them, we've had people that are very knowledgeable in historical tattoos say that these are quite old—maybe over a hundred years old. We're in the process of hopefully getting a researcher who is going to come in early April and do a write up for us, so we can get more information about them.

You also have a jar of skin pickings on display. Tell me about that.
It's a little bit outside the norm of the traditional content of the skin exhibit. from a very nice young lady who informed me that her "roommate" moved out and managed to take everything except this jar of skin. And did I want it? And of course, this raised a little red flag, because I'm like, "Really? Your roommate, huh?" I was intrigued, and I didn't immediately respond. I did some research, and, ultimately, I said, "Yes, I'll take it." A couple weeks or days passed, and I got this package in the mail—two Trader Joe's organic strawberry preserve jars containing the skin with a wonderful note saying, "Yeah, you know how I said it was my roommate? Well, it's me."

The jar of skin pickings

Wow. Why was she picking her skin in the first place?
This is a woman, who has dermatillomania and is acutely aware, knows that she has it. According to her, she has the condition contained where she only picks the skin off of her feet. You'll notice that some of the pickings are darker in color than others, and that's during the winter when she was wearing black socks. very detailed letter—very interesting.

These kinds of donations—tattooed skin, skin pickings—seem very personal. How did your colleagues react to these items?
I mean, I got a lot of flack from my co-workers who—believe it or not, even in this museum—were a little skeeved out by this jar of human skin. For me, what this enables me to do is something that is very hard for other medical museum curators to do, which is to talk about a mental condition while having a very didactic physical representation of it that the person can see. You can't bottle depression; you can't bottle schizophrenia and show it in a way that is really evocative. So by having this jar of skin and then talking about dermatillomania, I'm able to educate our visitors about this mental condition in a way that is very powerful.

A woman with zoster, a reactivation of the chicken pox

Besides mental disorders, the skin diseases are also a big part of this display, right?
Our director, Robert, had skin cancer, and his skin cancer slides are in the exhibit, along with his account of having skin cancer and what he went through to get rid of it. It's in a third person narrative, but it's a personalization of that. If you poll, most of the people coming into the museum are either going to have had it or know somebody close to them who had skin cancer. So, we do talk about that, and I think looking at his actual slides is really interesting when viewed in context with the panel. Otherwise, you're just looking at these slides, which might not be so interesting. But then you realize with this panel that, Hey! That's the director of the Mütter Museum's skin right there. I think that was really interesting.

What about more obsolete skin diseases—things like syphilis, smallpox, and other ailments we fortunately we don't see much of any more?
.

A person with dermatitis exfoliativa

Have you had any skin donations offers from living people? I mean, are people coming to you with their tattoos?
We have a lot of people approach us, but then they find out that the burden—both financially and logistically—is on them. I mean, obviously, people want to do a full body donation, but that's just not possible. We don't have the room! Then they say, "Well, you can just take this bit and piece of me," and we're like, "We do not have the proper medical or scientific facilities to make that kind of extraction." So we tell them that this is something that just has to be supported financially entirely on your part, and we're sorry we just don't have the ability to support that.

I do get things like, "I have had my husband's gall bladder." Those are primary donations that are a little bit easier to obtain and those I'll try to do. But, in terms of people willing things after they die, it's just a bit too much logistical rigmarole to go around to that. People tend to think they're a little bit more special than they really are. And that sounds like a horrible thing to say. I hate to be tell people that. We're like, "You know, thanks, but no thanks."

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Follow Simon Davis on Twitter.

Mobile games sold on the strength of a featured celebrity are, usually, almighty heaps of crap. Katy Perry Pop was a disaster, and there wasn't even a note of Perry's own music in it. As we've previously noted, Kim Kardashian: Hollywood is more of a debt-encouraging nightmare than a fame-and-fortune dreams simulator. And Demi Lovato's Path to Fame was a shameless suck-up to its title star, in which your character creeps around kissing the "Cool for the Summer" singer's ass until she decides that, OK, you're not a total loser.

Legacy of the Beast is somewhat different. A turn-based action RPG coming to tablets and smartphones later in 2016, the game is based on the lore of Iron Maiden. It is, according to its co-developers at Vancouver's Roadhouse Interactive, as much a game for those who've never heard a solitary Maiden riff as it is a treat for veteran fans who own every import seven-inch. Which is lucky for me, as I don't really give a shit about what Eddie first appeared on which album sleeve—I'm way more interested in seeing what Maiden's zombie-like mascot can do on the field of battle.

"We wanted to create a really compelling RPG, first and foremost," says the game director at Roadhouse, Hamish Millar. "So we're looking to cater to people who love those games." Llexi Leon, who works on the interactive side of Maiden's output at London-based management company Phantom Music, jumps in: "From our side, this is an incredible discovery platform. We didn't want a game that only Maiden fans can enjoy—we wanted an awesome game that might introduce Maiden lore to people for the first time.

"This mythology is awesome, and the stories are fantastic. There's been 40 years of Eddie, and we're trying to get every one of those iterations into this game. Everything you see in the game is derived from pre-existing album art. It's not like we're just pulling this stuff out of a hat. It's all there to be studied and recreated."

How Legacy of the Beast plays rather betrays the influences of its makers at Roadhouse, who are partnering with British studio 50cc Games on the project. After selecting a stage from three-dimensions hub worlds, not unlike those seen in Super Mario Bros. 3, each of which is based on a Maiden LP—there's an Egyptian world, for example, that draws on the artwork of 1984's Powerslave—the player is pitched into combat against waves of enemies, culminating in a boss-level opponent. And how these battles progress isn't so unlike Square games of the past. There's more than a hint of Final Fantasy in here, with "limit break"–style special moves available to the player's roster, while a time-traveling mechanic—each zone can be seen in the past, present, and future—makes me think back to Chrono Trigger. (Not to mention Sonic CD, but that doesn't quite fit the RPG model.)

"We grew up on that stuff, those old RPGs, and those games are part of the reason we got into this industry," Hamish says. "I don't think it's a conscious thing, that we've referenced those games, but they're definitely in our DNA."

In each battle, up to three selectable Eddies line up, albeit one at a time, beside a couple of minions. The player can switch between Eddies while in the fight, as each one—there's Trooper Eddie, Pharaoh Eddie, Wicker Man Eddie, Gunner Eddie, and so on—has his own unique abilities to either dish out damage or perk-up your team. Special moves require the player to tap rapidly to power up the attack, and then time his or her blow with a shrinking circle over the target. Might be a projectile shot, might be a whopping great thump, but either way, the bad guys go down. Suffice it to say, that while this is a turn-based game, there's a lot more digit-action to it than your standard menus-only take on the genre.

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Related: Watch our report on the deadly asbestos industry

"Hopefully, it's a game that's easy to pick up and play but also hard to master," Llexi says. "The depth will reveal itself as you progress. Everyone gets an Eddie at the beginning—you want people to think it's cool from the outset. And every time you unlock a new character, you get the chance to perfect his timings, rather than getting overwhelmed with loads at once."

Hamish agrees that, while it's easy to assume mobile games will be less detailed than computer or console alternatives, this is far from a "casual" experience. "A lot of the games we've been looking at as examples of keeping players in RPGs for the longest times, in engaging and fun experiences, they can be very complex, particularly in their feature set and UI (user interface). So we wanted to take those great mechanics but make a game that was accessible."

Legacy of the Beast will be a free-to-play game, and that naturally means that micro transactions are included. But with all involved in the game aiming for it to be a PvP hit, as well it having a solid single-player campaign, they're very wary of getting into a "pay to win" situation.

"Eddie Coins are the primary currency, and most of the stuff you can get in the game can be bought using that," Harris tells me. "You can pay with real money to accelerate your progress, and power up your team. But because there's a competitive, PvP component coming to the game, we can't have a pure 'pay to win' model. So many players will want to be competitive but won't want to pay real money, and if we skew it to favor those who do pay, those other players will leave. So it's all about balance. You want to reward the players who want to spend—but not so much that you turn away those who can't afford to."

"All the content is accessible to anyone, regardless of whether or not you spend a penny," Llexi adds. "It is a free-to-play game, for sure, but if you want it all now—as many Eddies as you can handle—then there should be a facility for people to do that. I think anyone who really enjoys this experience, who moves beyond a casual attachment, may want to spend a little money on it to explore what's available. It's endless, what we can do with this. But we need to make sure nobody feels trapped behind a paywall. You can play through the whole campaign without paying."

Whether or not Legacy of the Beast successfully attracts players without a Maiden record to their name, or exclusively appeals to the band's existing (massive) audience, remains to be seen. But even with tweaks to be made before it launches later in 2016, the game looks more like the real deal than any celeb-endorsed mobile affair before it, at least that I can think of. Will it be better than Kanye's game about his mom? Honestly, probably.

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

Stunningly realistic Photoshop image via Flickr users Mike Kalasnik, Michael Vadon, and Catholic United Financial

Read: Donald Trump and the Art of Having No Shame

During his flight back to the Vatican after a week-long trip in Mexico, Pope Francis suggested to reporters that Donald Trump's border wall plan is decidedly un-Christian, the New York Times reports.

The Catholic Church's cool-ass pope was careful not to actually say that Trump isn't Christian because he "was not going to get involved" in the shit show that is the current election season—but Pope Francis made it clear that "a person who only thinks about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian."

"I say only that this man is not Christian if he has said things like that," the pope continued.

Regardless of the delicate way the pope avoided questioning Trump's religion directly, the business mogul and GOP presidential hopeful came back swinging.

"If and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS, which as everyone knows is ISIS's ultimate trophy, I can promise you that the Pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been President," Trump said in a statement on his website. "For a religious leader to question a person's faith is disgraceful." He then called the pope a "pawn" being used by the Mexican government.

The whole concept of Donald Trump beefing with the pontiff is honestly fucking amazing—maybe Francis is the babyface this election needs.

The trill has landed in South Carolina, a.k.a. South Cakalaka to the locals, and I've been through these parts before many times. I feel like one of them. The people here are Southern and proud of it. So am I. And why not? The South has a deep and rich cultural history. Music. Food. Art. Sports. Some the best who ever did it did it here. For most of us, Southern Pride is worn like a badge of honor.

But there's a part of Southern history that very few of us down here are proud of. From slavery to Jim Crow to last year's shooting at a black church in Charleston, racists have been rearing their ugly heads in these parts for centuries. Some wear suits and ties. Some wear badges and judicial robes. And some wear white sheets and hoods. But they all have the same hateful blood pumping in their veins. It's the world we navigate as people of color down here. Welcome to the South.

Being black in the South varies from city to city, in terms of style and grooming, but dealing with racism is pretty much the same across the board. I grew up in Port Arthur, Texas; our neighboring town, Bridge City, has had basically zero black residents for my entire life. It's the same in Vidor, another suburb, which was a KKK haven for years. James Byrd Jr. was dragged less than 100 miles from where I grew up. I've seen racism and its effects in my life and the lives of those around me. I'm sick of it. But that's the South.

Our first stop is in Walterboro, where Donald Trump is having a rally Wednesday before South Carolina's Republican primary this weekend. Normally, I wouldn't go this deep into the country without my pistol because shit pops off in the woods. Trust me. Small towns in the South operate differently than other places—what happens here stays here but not in a cool Vegas way. But we have a camera, so if something happens, at least there'll be proof. My Raiders jacket doesn't help me fit in, but I don't wanna fit in. I want it to be very clear who I am and what I represent.

On the drive out, we see several Confederate flags on the highway, but that's not a surprise. If you follow the news at all, you know people down here care strongly about the flag. And I get it. For many poor white people in the South who either don't have or don't claim foreign ancestry, it's pretty much the only history they have, and they're holding on like GI Joe with the Kung-Fu Grip.

As we close in on our destination, I see a truck with not one but two American flags on the back, along with the Don't Tread On Me flag you see around South Carolina. We meet the owner, Larry Johnson, and it turns out Larry actually has five American flags—and also five Confederate bumper stickers. That's right, five. If you wanna know who a man is in the Deep South, look at his back window and bumper stickers.

Larry tells me that he and I have the same history, and while I agree that as Southerners our pasts are intertwined, I let him know we stand on very different sides and shoulders. He says the Civil War wasn't about race but about business; when I argue that the business was slavery, he starts talking about Egyptians having white slaves. I want to let him know that by acknowledging that fact, he's admitting black people were the first people to walk the Earth, but I don't wanna see his head explode, so I simply state that a huge part of the Confederate fight was about owning people as property to harvest goods under constant threat of abuse or death. He then informs me about his "black friends, white friends, and yellow friends." Yellow friends? Who the fuck are his yellow friends? Big Bird and Bart Simpson. I smile and move on.

We're mad early because everyone wants a front row seat to the Trump show, and I don't how long before they find out what type of shit I'm on and run me off. There are still two hours to go before the man shows up, and already there's a line about 100 folks deep to get into the event. Most of them are over 40, but they have the urgency of teenage girls at a Taylor Swift signing. The first lady in line tells me she's already seen Trump speak twice before, but that she's never had such a great view. She talks a little bit about how he'll change the country, but her eyes seem to say, "He's just so dreamy!" As we talk, the doors open, and the crowd rushes at them like a Black Friday mob.

There's a lot of camo here, and it ain't Bape. It's more of the hunting sort. There was a little bit of that vibe in New Hampshire last week, but here in South Carolina, it's literally part of the build out. The entire stage backdrop is camo, behind 18-wheelers packed with fresh cut logs and a podium that is literally made out of bales of hay. My Raiders starter draws some small talk from sports fans in the crowd. It also gets me some hard stares, but to be fair, it might be more than the jacket that bothers people here. I'm sure most of crowd would assume I'm against Trump. Which I am, but that doesn't necessarily mean I'm against them.

And the more I talk to people, the more I realize that these supporters are more anti-Obama and anti-liberal than they are pro-Trump. Their decision to back Donald seemed to have little to do with whether he's the best Republican in the presidential race, or even the most conservative candidate. These people are so upset by the current administration that some of them are willing to compromise their values if it means that the other side loses.

The rally isn't all hunting vests and trucker hats, though. There are many people who don't fit into the typical image of a Trump supporter. You can tell by their clothes, their hair, and of course, by their skin color. Traditionally, the political assumption has been that black people are a monolith, collectively aligned in ideals and values. But while some elements of the black experience are similar, each individual is unique. For some black people, whether its for geographical or financial reasons, color has never been an issue. For others, it's the only issue.

We talk to Dolphus Pinckney, a black father who's brought his young son Hunter here because he likes how Trump speaks, how he says what's on his mind. It's a sentiment I've heard from almost everyone at these rallies. And it's a bit troubling, to be honest. People, by nature, gravitate to the loudest voice in a room. Except right now, the room is our country. And while Trump may be the loudest voice, he isn't actually saying anything. He's just promising to "win so much you're gonna get tired of winning!"

But Trump wins no matter what. For a capitalist like Trump, winning the Republican nomination will be like pulling off the ultimate moral Ponzi scheme; losing simply means more speaking tours and book sales. In the world of politics, where lies and deception are currency, Trump is even richer than in real life. The only real losers here are us. He's specifically targeting people who are upset with their station in life and looking for someone to blame—and giving them something to point their collective finger at.

When I hear the opera strains coming out over the speakers, I know Trump is close. Then comes the Rolling Stones, which means Donald is about to take the stage. The Walterboro rally is outside, so there's nowhere for the campaign to play its usual intro propaganda film, but the people here don't really need to be swayed. They know who they want, and they are just looking to be part of the show. The campaign herds us into the press staging area and back to the cage we go.

The Lowcountry Sportsmen, the official hosts of the rally, take the stage and talk about how they wouldn't say the things Trump says, but they're glad he's around to say them. They also talk about how an AR-15 is a great gun for a young girl because it doesn't kick. What the fuck a young girl needs an assault rifle for I have no idea. Then, on the count of three, they all chant "Build that wall!" I assume that means the wall Trump plans on building on the US-Mexico border.

As Trump takes the stage, complimenting the sportsmen who introduced him as "very rich and very nice," I get it. This isn't about politics. This is about a famous person from television coming to town. This election isn't really about the issues at hand—it's a popularity contest, made for reality TV. And this dude is the Honey Boo Boo of this political pageant.

The tone of Trump's speech is the same as it always it is, except this time, he's leaning on the Second Amendment like an armrest. This is Lowcountry—guns are like a sixth finger or a third arm for people here. He goes on for a while about how conservative he is about Common Core and immigration and this and that, and for the first time, I see a person or two giggle. They know this guy isn't a conservative. But they don't give a shit. It sounds good, and that's all that matters to a mob.

Trump finishes talking, and the people applaud him as he exits. But I'm done with this bringing America back shit. This guy is Mussolini. He's Dr. Evil with hair. Shit, even his hair is evil. So evil it won't even listen to him. It has its own separate agenda. But we can't leave. No one is allowed off the grounds until Trump is gone. Trump's team informs us that if we leave the press cage for any reason, the campaign will pull our credentials for good.

We play it cool, but at this point, I've endured more dirty looks and side-eye than I can handle. Every time I talk into the camera people take pictures and record from the sidelines, waiting to tattle on me to Trump staffers. The crowd is no longer on its best behavior. The unspoken message from the silent majority is crystal clear: We are not welcome here. That's cool. I was on the way up out this bitch anyway. You ain't gotta love me. My momma do. Peace.

Follow Bun B on Twitter.

Shehla Rashid, vice president of Jawaharlal Nehru University's student union, with other protesters. All photos by Daniel Oberhaus

Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) was eerily deserted as I passed the police barricades at its gates earlier this week. Over the weekend, thousands of demonstrators had converged at the university in South New Delhi to protest the arrest of the school's student union president, Kanhaiya Kumar, but on Monday, the school seemed quiet.

Kumar was arrested last Friday, after organizing a meeting to criticize the "judicial killing" of Afzal Guru, a Kashmiri man who was convicted of masterminding the terror attacks on India's Parliament in 2001 (his conviction is contested). Members of JNU's right-wing student organization Akhil Bharatiya Vidhyarthi Parishad (ABVP) tried to stop the meeting. When that failed, some students claim the group showed up to intimidate participants in the meeting, who responded by voicing what authorities have characterized as anti-national slogans.

These "anti-national" remarks were used as grounds for the university to ban eight JNU students from all academic activity, pending a disciplinary hearing. Kumar, who was arrested by Delhi police and was charged with sedition, the crime of inciting rebellion against the government, has been held without bail since Friday.

Earlier this week, the student union called for a student strike, which is meant to last until authorities have guaranteed Kumar's unconditional release. Protestors say the fight for Kumar's release has taken on larger symbolic dimensions, calling into question the tactics used by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), India's ruling Hindu nationalist party, and its student wing, the ABVP, to stifle intellectual dissent in the country. Their fight has drawn international attention, including a letter of support from a number of leading academics, including Noam Chomsky and Judith Butler.

While most of the campus was quiet on Monday from the strike, I found several hundred protestors gathered on the steps of the JNU administration building, where student union vice president Shehla Rashid addressed the crowd.

"An atmosphere of fear has been created on the campus," Rashid told supporters. "Any institutional process or enquiry has to be conducted in an atmosphere that ensures safety and dignity for the students. The students cannot present their case in an situation where they have been already debarred, where they've already been branded and demonized."

India's sedition law, which is now being used against Kumar, was originally instituted under the British Raj in 1860 and was used to imprison Mahatma Gandhi for six years after he wrote magazine articles critiquing British rule in India. More recently, the Indian authorities have used it to charge people who failed to stand during the national anthem and people who protested a nuclear power plant.

Kumar denies he made any of the remarks he was arrested for, telling a court this week that "I dissociate myself from slogans that were shouted during the event," according to The Indian Express. But several government officials support his arrest under the sedition law. India's Home Minister Rajnath Singh, for example, told reporters last week that "if anyone raises anti-India slogans, tries to raise questions on the country's unity and integrity, they will not be spared. Stringent action will be taken against them." Similarly, India's Human Resource Development Minister Smriti Irani said that the nation "will never tolerate an insult to Mother India." Both politicians are members of the BJP.

The party, which came to power after Narendra Modi was elected prime minister in 2014, has been criticized by the student protestors for using its student wing, the ABVP, to stomp out opposition on campuses. Protestors who visited the courthouse where Kumar was scheduled to appear on Monday told me they saw more evidence of these tactics: They were promptly ejected and physically harassed by lawyers.

"What we saw at who've taken oaths to defend the constitution of this country behaved like storm troopers of a fascist government."

Similar incidents at other Indian universities have buoyed the suspicion that intellectual discourse and dissent are under attack. Last month, the ABVP at Allahabad University threatened violence against the speaker at a panel on "Democracy, the Media, and Freedom of Expression" on the basis that he was "anti-national." In July, members of the ABVP at Hyderabad University alleged that they were attacked by members of Ambedkar Students Association, a group representing the Dalit, or "untouchable," caste. Those allegations led to the suspension of five members of the ASA, one of whom later committed suicide.

For now, Kumar's fate remains uncertain. When he reappeared in court Wednesday, he was ordered to be held in judicial custody until March 2. If Kumar is ultimately found guilty of sedition, the conviction can carry a life sentence.

Still, the students at JNU are committed to ensuring his release—not just for Kumar's sake but also to maintain the intellectual integrity of Indian university life. "Let's be clear: Things are not going to get easier, they're going to get more difficult," Menon said. "It's a long drawn out struggle, but we will fight and stay the cause."

Follow Daniel Oberhaus on Twitter.

New York City cops have used 'StingRay' technology to track cell phones more than 1,000 times since 2008. Photo by Erland Grøtberg/via Getty

For the past several years, police departments across America have been using a nifty new piece of technology to trace the location of suspects. IMSI-catchers—commonly known as "StingRays" after the most popular brand name—are small boxes that gather all cell signals in a given area by mimicking a cell phone tower. And they've grown increasingly popular even as the federal government has issued stricter guidelines as to where and how the technology should be used.

But thanks to bizarre non-disclosure agreements struck between the FBI and the manufacturer of the StingRay, the Harris Corporation, the devices are rarely entered into evidence as part of a criminal case. That often leads to prosecutions marred by glaring holes as to exactly how the cops knew where a person was located, defense lawyers argue. The New York Police Department and other law enforcement agencies are strictly barred from speaking about the use of StingRays, even under court order, and even if their use is central to prosecution.

"There are all these cases where the police just magically locate people, so the police will say we went looking and found this guy at a specific location," said Joshua Insley, a defense attorney in Baltimore who's been working on cases involving StingRays for the past several years. "Then you actually interview the defendant and he'll say, 'Yeah, my phone started ringing, it wouldn't turn off, I didn't have any service and all of a sudden the police were at my door'."

Disturbances of cell service are often one of the first signs of a StingRay-assisted apprehension, according to Insley, but understanding the full scope of their use would require some level of cooperation by law enforcement. Lawyers and due process advocates have been fighting for years to get information on Stingrays and their use dished out to the public, with only occasional success.

Last week, the NYPD finally answered some parts of a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request by the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) about the use of the StingRay. The documents released, which showed that the NYPD has used the StingRay more than 1,000 times since 2008, paint a portrait of a law enforcement agency that uses the stingRay to apprehend individuals suspected of committing serious crimes like murder but also more trivial infractions like a prank call to 9-1-1.

Of course, you shouldn't bother asking New York's finest or any other police department for specifics of why or how they use the StingRay. They're not telling.

In a statement to VICE, the NYPD said that even though StingRays are capable of storing communications and collecting phone numbers of thousands of New Yorkers in a single go, the privacy of New Yorkers is not at risk. "What is at risk is the safety of New Yorkers, without the limited use of this technology to locate dangerous fugitives," J. Peter Donald, the director of communications for the department, said in a statement.

While the documents released do show that New York police have used the StingRay to locate suspected murderers, rapists, and kidnappers, a litany of other charges have apparently merited the use of StingRays as well. These include money laundering, contempt of court, and identity theft.

"The scary thing about them is we really have no idea when they're being used," said Sid Thaxter, an attorney at the Bronx Defenders. "This is military grade technology being used on civilians and intentionally hidden from the judicial process. It is theoretically possible to uncover the use of IMSI catchers by looking at the circumstances of someone's arrest or gaps in paperwork, but that is only guesswork."

More than a hundred people have been arrested after a StingRay helped locate them in Bronx County over the past seven years, and Thaxter believes that at least a few of his office's clients have been apprehended that way. Not that any mention of a StringRay ever comes up in court documents.

You have to look pretty hard to get even a vague sense these devices might be in play.

For example, last year, a Bronx man named Dominick Davis who was charged with murder filed a motion attempting to have his confession tossed after police officers used a series of cell phone "pings" to find his location. They did this without a warrant and failed to disclose to a judge the next morning that they had already "pinged" his phone. In testimony, the head of the NYPD's Bronx Homicide Unit, Lieutenant William O'Toole, explained that the department will often proceed without a court order if officers need to locate an individual immediately, and that Davis was fairly easy to locate thanks to information provided by his cell phone company. But the NYPD was unclear about which cell phone company was contacted, instead focusing on the "pings" that were received from a cell phone tower.

Davis's motion was denied.

It's unclear whether a StingRay was actually used in Davis's apprehension, but cases like this show just how fraught the distinction can be between lawful and unlawful action by police, especially when they've agreed to keep a tight lid on their technology.

In April, Detective Emmanuel Cabreja, a member of the Baltimore Police Department's Advanced Technical Team, was called to testify in the trial of two people who had been tracked and apprehended with the help of a StingRay in 2013. The detective came to court with the FBI's non-disclosure agreement in hand.

Joshua Insley asked Cabreja, "Does this document instruct you to withhold evidence from the state's attorney and Circuit Court, even upon court order to produce?"

"Yes," Cabreja replied.

"Our understanding in Baltimore was that the StingRay was supposed to be of use in the most extreme circumstances, like terrorism. Who cares about the Fourth Amendment if you need to locate a bomb?" Insley told VICE. "But the first case I got was of an attempted robbery of a pizza delivery man. It's now in use as a standard crime-fighting device, and there are tons of cases where the police just magically find someone."

StingRays first gained wide use by police departments after passage of the 2001 Patriot Act, when "pen register orders," also known as "trap and trace court orders," began to proliferate in criminal investigations. Unlike the high privacy standards imposed on judicial warrants for surveillance, pen register orders only require any information obtained to likely be "relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation." (Last year, though, the Department of Justice shifted its own policy to require that all federal agents get a judicial warrant to deploy a StingRay, and not just a pen register.)

That means the feds are adhering to a higher privacy standard than many local beat cops.

"The NYPD said to us that it doesn't have a written policy, which is very concerning. This is a very powerful surveillance device, and if it's going to be used, it should certainly be used with robust policies in place," said Mariko Hirose, a senior staff attorney at the New York Civil Liberties Union. "In certain configurations, a StingRay can intercept the contents of communications and emails."

Local cops, of course, tend to deny this.

"The NYPD does not capture the contents of communications, as the NYCLU stated," Donald, the department spokesman, told VICE. "Furthermore, the NYPD does not and never has swept up information from cell phones nearby."

Until there's an actual policy in place for disclosing their use, or police departments divulge more about their new favorite toy, we'll just have to take their word for it.

Follow Max Rivlin-Nadler on Twitter.

Arty horror darling The Witch is terrifying as fuck, but that's just one of many reasons it's caught on among film freaks. Robert Eggers's feature-length debut is a phantasmagoria that draws from historical records of New England's Puritan era, including the writings of clergymen Samuel Willard and Cotton Mather, as well as longstanding folklore about the supernatural. It's also an incredibly subversive movie that features a final girl who does whatever it takes to save herself, even if that means damnation.

The film follows the story of an intensely religious Puritan family with a couple of rather large crosses to bear, from dying crops to the mysterious disappearance of their newborn baby. Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) is the family's oldest daughter, a workhorse just this side of puberty that makes her a threat to her mother Katherine (Kate Dickie from Game of Thrones) and a temptation for her brother Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw). The claustrophobic farmhouse is bursting with secrets, but the mounting tension inside is nothing compared to what actually is lurking in the woods.

When everything goes to hell, Thomasin is the only one left standing. As many teenage girls do, she embraces everything she's been accused of, and you can hardly blame her. It's the sort of perverse ending that would have delighted Angela Carter, who famously reworked Charles Perrault's fairy tales into feminist parables where Little Red gets in bed with the Wolf and Bluebeard is thwarted by his new bride's wily, gun-toting mother.

The Witch's distributor, A24, has leaned into the overtly Satanic overtones of the movie by linking up with The Satanic Temple for performance events and screenings in NYC, Los Angeles, Austin, and Detroit. The Temple's national spokesperson herself, Jex Blackmore, referred to the film as "a transformative Satanic experience."

"I think part of what makes the film so horrific is that the things that the witch character is engaged with are so taboo and demonic. But those things come from our own folklore about women," Blackmore said over the phone. "We don't typically use the word witch any more, but we do use the word bitch!" Blackmore added with a laugh. "It's interesting because it's applied in the same way. It's applied to women who are freethinking and speak their minds. It's applied to women who fight for their own reproductive health rights, and it's often applied even to women who kind of excel in the work world."

The feminist appeal of The Witch is in step with the current New Age-y zeitgeist, at least symbolically. Although it stands to reason that most modern supernaturally inclined ladies, myself included, are more interested in futzing with tarot cards and crystals than kicking back with Old Scratch, our urges come from a very similar place—an exhaustion with the stifling status quo.

Alex Mar, author of Witches in America and director of American Mystic, concurred. "Modern-day American witches—or Pagan priestesses—have been reclaiming that word," she said, "changing its meaning, using the label of witch as a way to say, 'I'm not afraid of living on the fringe of society, I'm not afraid of being misunderstood, I don't need to be a part of the mainstream, I don't need to be the kind of woman who fits neatly into a feminine role.' A woman can be a priest. A woman can train in a 'mystery' tradition. A woman can see her sexuality as a source of power, not a political bargaining chip."

Ultimately, the movie's subversion is as sly as Satan himself; it's so visually and aurally overwhelming that, by the time the credits roll, you're left dazed and blinking. It's a fantasy of liberation, and one that has more in common with what's happening in Hollywood than you might think. Kier-La Janisse, a film writer and founder of the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, described the ending as "a huge feminist kick in the balls, for sure."

"I think horror movies often reflect our political landscape, so it doesn't surprise me that we're seeing more witches while debates about feminism are overwhelming online discussions and the CDC is recommending that women abstain from alcohol unless they are on birth control." —Alison Nastasi

Janisse explained, "Over the last year we've seen a number of articles exposing the gender bias in Hollywood, programs instated in several countries to help address the gender imbalance when it comes to filmmaking resources, and a lot of films that take place in female space. On the mainstream side, you have a film like Suffragette, and on the odd side, you have things like The Witch. But both are coming from the same place and demanding conversation." Suffragette has been criticized for "whitewashing" the British suffragette movement, and for an ill-conceived photo shoot with the leads wearing shirts reading, "I'd rather be a rebel than a slave." Frankly, it's not a very good movie, but there's no denying that the strong female presence in front of and behind the camera is hopefully a taste of things to come. It's just that that conversation needs to be much more inclusive—something that the various strains of paganism and occult belief around the world have going for them.

Flavorwire writer Alison Nastasi, who contributed to Janisse's book Satanic Panic, sees modern witches "as any subculture or social movement—a way of empowering the outcast, including women, LGBT, and non-white people. Practitioners of witchcraft and the occult have the ability to take a sense of disillusionment and use it to create an intimate bond or community of empowered individuals. This results in a counterculture of self-reliance," she explained.

"I think horror movies often reflect our political landscape," she added, "so it doesn't surprise me that we're seeing more witches while debates about feminism are overwhelming online discussions and the CDC is recommending that women abstain from alcohol unless they are on birth control." After all, few things are scarier than a cabal of government cronies deciding the fate of our reproductive health and individual liberty.

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The Witch is in theaters Friday, February 19.