Photo via Flickr user Chris Yarzab

I know it's a bit ' law, I think it would be reasonable to think that there might be more of a likelihood for people to call."

Canada's record with harm reduction policies hasn't been great historically but we have a government in place that wants to reform Canada's drug laws, although the Liberals haven't indicated if they will back this private member's bill.

Follow Jack Urwin on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user The US Army

When he first started running for president nine years ago, Barack Obama, a former constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago, spoke frequently about wanting to close the US military prison in Guantanamo Bay.

"As President, I will close Guantanamo, reject the Military Commissions Act and adhere to the Geneva Conventions," Obama said in an August 2007 speech.

Back then, everyone from George W. Bush to Obama's rival, John McCain, agreed the prison needed to go. It was an albatross, a symbol of the horrid brutalities committed in the name of the war on terror—not to mention the most potent propaganda tool terrorist recruiters abroad could possibly have at their disposal.

Eight years later, despite some success here and there trimming the population at the extra-legal Cuban purgatory—mostly by shipping inmates overseas—Obama hasn't been able to wipe it off the face of the earth. He hasn't even come close.

On Tuesday, however, the president laid out a last-ditch plan to make that happen.

Speaking from the White House, Obama outlined a proposal detailing how cost savings from closing Gitmo could help pay for a new facility—location TBD—to house a few dozen inmates in the domestic United States. The rest of the 91 people incarcerated there (Obama inherited 245 detainees in 2009) would be moved to other countries.

At this point, any proposal Obama makes that requires congressional approval is a long shot, but the Gitmo plan in particular doesn't seem likely to become reality. Just last year, he signed a 2015 defense funding law that essentially makes doing what he wants to do impossible unless the law is overturned. But the plan gave Obama a chance to reiterate that despite his failure to close the notorious facility, he's still deeply troubled by its existence.

"I don't want to pass this problem on to the next president, whoever it is," Obama said. "And if, as a nation, we don't deal with this now, when will we deal with it?"

It's only fair that a second-term president who is such a lame duck it's hard to imagine him getting a Supreme Court justice confirmed before leaving office might look ahead to his legacy. And Obama has made real strides when it comes to criminal justice reform for US citizens, leveling out the prison population after decades of growth and engineering the largest release of federal inmates ever.

But for a guy who has overseen everything from NSA surveillance to widespread drone attacks in the Middle East, Gitmo remains a black mark in Obama's civil liberties record—and advocates for closing the facility aren't exactly optimistic he'll finally shut it down.

"The fact that he announced the plan doesn't indicate any growing optimism on the part of the administration or any of the players involved that they're going to close Gitmo," says Joe Pace, an attorney with the human rights group Reprieve. Pace points out that the same defense bill that blocked Obama from spending cash on closing Gitmo required him to send Congress this very proposal.

Which is to say this wasn't some ambitious administration initiative so much as a "homework assignment," as Pace labels it.

The fact remains that Congress controls the government pursestrings, and it will cost a significant chunk of change to build a new facility to house foreign terrorism suspects.

Of course, that wouldn't be necessary if lawmakers didn't see apparently the men in Guantanamo as supervillains capable of breaking out of any prison that is not an island.

"The President is correct that the security arguments against bringing detainees into the United States are way overblown," Matthew Waxman, a Columbia Law professor and senior national security official in the Bush administration, writes in an email. "We already imprison many hardened terrorists in US prisons, and although bringing detainees into the US entails some serious security and logistical challenges, they are certainly manageable if the political will is there."

The problem, then, is less some massive moral shortcoming on Obama's part than NIMBYism—a desire from members of Congress to keep these supposed terrorists as far away from their constituents as possible. And with the Republican presidential field generally supporting waterboarding and other extreme, questionable methods of fighting terrorism, it seems unlikely that Obama's successor will be able or even willing to shut down Gitmo.

"If a crystal ball told me 15 years from now we'd be in the exact same place, I would not be surprised," Pace says.

Follow Matt Taylor on Twitter.

Brady Grattan died at a house party earlier this month. Photo via Facebook.

A teenage boy from New Brunswick died playing a variation of beer pong earlier this month, where he substituted beer for hard liquor at a party in Grande Prairie, Alberta.

Brady Grattan, 18, who moved from Fredericton to Grande Prairie after graduating from high school last year, died February 4 after collapsing during the party.

His parents, who are now speaking out to warn others about the perceived dangers of beer pong, said they received a phone call from across the country saying Brady had been found unconscious at a party.

"They were going to put him in hypothermia state, cool his body, and then wake him up over 24 hours and I was hopeful," Brady's father Cory told the CBC.

His parents said they learned from other teens that Brady had been found in a basement of a house party where he'd been playing beer pong. But instead of beer, the kids were drinking hard alcohol—it's unclear exactly what they were consuming.

When paramedics arrived on scene, they resuscitated Brady.

"He flat-lined on the way there, then they revived him again," Grattan said.

By 12:45 AM Brady was in the Intensive Care Unit, where he later died. He was only at the party for about two hours.

Jack Uetrecht, professor of pharmacy and medicine at the University of Toronto, said the situation is "unfortunately not that surprising." But he said it would be near impossible to die from playing beer pong with actual beer.

"With most drugs, if you double the dose you double the concentration in the blood—alcohol doesn't work that way. If you double the dose you more than double the blood concentration. You can get into trouble pretty quickly."

If booze is consumed slowly, or on a full stomach, much of it can be absorbed before reaching the bloodstream. But if you drink it fast enough—like in a game of beer pong—it'll go straight into the blood.

Once your blood-alcohol level reaches 0.4, "you're at risk of dying," he said.

Uetrecht explained that alcohol keeps getting absorbed in a person's body even after they lose consciousness. The risk increases when drugs like Valium and energy drinks are added to the mix, he said.

"With most of these things, people just stop breathing...it's like being under a general anesthetic."

But because Brady was taken to hospital, where machines could breathe for him, Uetrecht said it's possible he died of cardiac arrhythmia, which is when your heart pretty much acts like "a bowl of jelly, it just sort of quivers. The individual muscle cells are contracting but not in a coordinated way so it doesn't pump blood."

As for beer, though, Uetrecht said, "physically to drink enough beer to die, I think it would be hard to do."

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Jus Reign, seen in a Facebook photo.

Toronto YouTube comedian Jasmeet Singh, better known as Jus Reign, says he travels at least once or twice a month, but up until this past weekend, he's never been asked to remove his turban.

In what he describes as an "embarrassing ordeal," Singh, who is Sikh, was asked to take off the turban while clearing security at a San Francisco airport. He told VICE he had finished going through a body scan, metal detectors, and a swab test—where Transportation Security Administration (TSA) staff swab your hands to test for traces of explosives—when he was asked to step into a private room for "an extra screening."

After patting Singh down again, "one of the officers was like 'We're going to need you to remove your turban so we can check that as well.'" Singh asked if it would be possible for them to pat down his turban, and when he was refused, asked to speak to a manager.

After taking "her sweet time getting there," Singh said the manager gave him two choices.

"She was like... 'You can take your turban off and we check and we'll let you go to your flight or you can keep it on and we'll just walk you out to the public space and you can book a flight with someone else or go to another airport.'"

He took off the turban, which they put in a tray and sent it through the X-ray machine, finding nothing.

Singh then asked for a mirror with which to re-apply his turban but was told there were none available.

"They to say that. Especially them taking me into a private screening room and undressing me and telling me in order for me to... dress myself again, I gotta walk out in a public space without my turban."

Singh told VICE his turban has "huge cultural significance" for Sikhs.

"It represents dignity and courage," he said, noting that asking someone to remove a turban is akin to asking someone to remove their underwear.

"It's that same level of humiliation and embarrassment."

He said he felt disrespected the TSA, especially in light of how cooperative he'd been with their demands and that he's never been treated this way in Canadian airports.

However, he said "being a brown man going through airports" he often gets extra screenings.

He believes the turban incident could have been triggered by the "the hate that's being spewed" given the current political climate in the US.

"There's never been a case where anybody has ever hidden anything in their turban."

Singh said he has not received an apology from the TSA and will be filing a complaint with them.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Hitler with a phallic monument

According to a book by the respected historians Jonathan Mayo and Emma Cragie, Adolf Hitler may have had a tiny, deformed penis and only one testicle. This has made the news, but at first it's hard to see why. Because you knew, didn't you? You always knew. Somewhere in the deep crevices in the back of your mind you've been keeping the incontestable truth that Hitler's dick was tiny, and probably kinda weird; it's one of those natural axioms that seems built in to the structure of reality. Shoplifting is basically legal if you don't get caught, Australians are grown in a vat under the bars of chain pubs, your friends all secretly hate you, and Hitler had something seriously wrong with his genitals.

It's even in that old British Army marching song: "Hitler Has Only Got One Ball." How did they know? Had they seen it? They didn't need to: it's just so obvious. Look at how strange the guy was. That fussy little mustache; it's clearly just a mirror. His weird hand gestures, or the those strange baggy jodhpurs he had everyone wear. His furious desire to conquer Europe. This is not a man who had everything to industry standard between his legs. And it's a comforting idea: Messed-up people have messed-up ideas; the world is basically a good place, except for the men with small penises.

Of course, it's not just Hitler. Everyone knows—without any evidence except its bright, searing, tautologous truth—that Donald Trump's is probably miniature. (The cartoonist Eli Valley, for instance, captured this axiom perfectly.) What kind of person goes about erecting big gaudy skyscrapers, and then putting his own name on them, in letters 12 feet tall? You don't need Jacques Lacan to tell you that the signifier is always a replacement for the potency of an absent phallus; just go anywhere in Chicago, and look upwards. This stuff is always funny; it's the same kind of bitter humor with which you look at some idiot with 5,000 times as much money as you have, tearing through town in his Lamborghini, and decide that he's compensating for something.

In 2007, a list started doing the rounds online, purporting to describe every rapper the writer and video model Karrine Steffans said she had slept with, and what their dicks were like. And it all made perfect sense: of course Big Boi from OutKast is "bigger and fatter," while Andre 3000 is "long and slim." You can play the same game with politicians, if you want: It's possible to assume with some certainty that Tony Blair's is sleek, streamlined, and revolting, like a single strand of spaghetti, that George W Bush's is a perfect cube, that David Cameron's smells of frying bacon. It's a strange way of humanizing them, pulling away their universalist pretensions, like the pornographic satires of the French Revolution, or the inherent republicanism in the fact that sometimes the Queen has to use the toilet like everyone else.

Funny as it is, though, this is not good historical practice. So Emma Cragie, one of the book's authors, was forced to give an interview with the Independent in which she clarified that the records only show that Hitler's urethra was placed somewhere on the shaft of his penis, not that the thing itself was necessarily any smaller than usual. For all we know, it was huge. This arrangement, known as hypospadias, is described in the book as a "rare condition," but it's actually relatively common: One in 300 men are affected, and there aren't currently millions of people plotting to seize the German state and take over the world. All this is very sensible, but it looks like a strange and incredible spectacle: a Carnegie-nominated author publicly defending Adolf Hitler from the accusation that he had a tiny dick.

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We want to believe. This is why just about every newspaper in the country ran headlines on Adolf Hitler's micropenis, even though the claim wasn't even in the book. Never mind the Fuhrer's gonads, what does this particular fantasy say about the world we're living in right now? There's something Disney-ish about it. The bad guys are bad because they're deformed; you can spot the villain by his scarred face or the warts on her nose. If Nazism is just a function of Hitler's bad dick, all the thousands of perfectly normal people who willingly took part in the mass exterminations are written out of the picture. (And that's how a worrying amount of the folk understanding of the Third Reich goes: a man had hateful ideas, and others were swept up in them; Nazism is decoupled from its base in class society and the state.)

To overanalyze: As Jacques Derrida argued, the history of Western metaphysics can be seen as the persistence of an ontology of "pure presence," a total and complete being that's closely tied up with the unity of the penis—this is why Derrida's term for it was "phallogocentrism." The micropenis is a defacement or a diminishment of this pure presence; in other words, a disruption of phallic coherence that can be coded as evil.

But that's not the world that faces us today. Evil is everywhere, dispersed and omnipresent—not just in the banks and the government; the food you buy is evil, your clothes are exploiting Bangladeshi children, your phone is fueling wars in Africa and sending workers jumping off the roofs of their factories. You might be evil, it's hard to tell. There is no coherence whatsoever. But Hitler's tiny dick helps solve that problem: it localizes all the fracture and confusion of existence into one damaged object. That mad, dizzying ethical circus we're all trying to push our way through coalesces into something clean and simple, where evil can be identified by its physical traits. But in the end, this is very dangerous. Spend too long thinking like this, and you'll end up concluding that a complete, healthy body is good, and any ugly, broken, or deformed body is a pollutant that needs to be got rid of. And who else had ideas like that?

Follow Sam Kriss on Twitter.

Photo by Flickr user Bob Doran.

Medical marijuana patients in Canada are free to grow their own plants after a Federal Court judge ruled the current laws forbidding that are unconstitutional.

Under former prime minister Stephen Harper, the Conservative government banned cannabis patients from growing their own supply, forcing them to purchase weed from licensed producers. Previously, patients were permitted to grow under the Marihuana Medical Access Regulations (MMAR) program.

The restrictions were challenged by four BC residents, who claimed they were a violation of Charter rights. On Wednesday, Judge Michael Phelan sided with the plaintiffs in a Vancouver courtroom. He has suspended his decision for six months to give the Liberal government time to create new legislation. In the meantime, Canadians with licenses to produce marijuana under the MMAR can continue to do so.

Elmer, Ontario patient Kyle Morrison, 36, who suffers from arthritis and herniated discs stemming from a workplace injury, told VICE he's relieved to hear the news. Morrison has had an MMAR license for the last five years allowing him to be in possession of 15 plants. He wants to continue to grow his own pot.

"I my own poultry... I hunt. I basically don't buy meat from a grocery store and I don't want to smoke grocery store cannabis," he said.

Morrison, who also suffers from mental health issues, said he wanted his children to be free to grow medical marijuana should they require it in the future.

Longtime pot activist and patient Tracy Curley told VICE the news was "really, really good" but that she suspects the Crown prosecutor will appeal the decision.

Curley was speaking by phone from Ottawa, where she attended a Senate meeting about marijuana legalization.

That panel, which included former Toronto police chief and Liberal MP Bill Blair, the president of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police and experts on substance abuse, left Curley "heartbroken" because it made no mention of patients, she said.

The conversation revolved around having strict regulations for legalization, taxation, the black market and "saving the children," she said. But there was no commitment to end the arrests of medical cannabis users or talk of making marijuana more accessible and affordable for patients.

"The way we've gotten to this point through court case after court case is by patients fighting for this and it literally felt like we had just been forgotten."

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Just before Valentine's Day, Electronic Arts (EA) posted some print-at-home cards on its Instagram account. Decorated with imagery from the company's range of titles, these featured your standard, not-at-all-corny messages of affection as filtered through video gaming series, such as "You Are The Keeper Of My Heart!" beside a FIFA goalkeeper and "I Have Faith In You, Valentine" on a Mirror's Edge design. A sweet enough marketing strategy, which might have encouraged a gamer or two to dip back into Dragon Age: Inquisition after treating their other half to a fancy dinner, but nobody in the comments gave much of a shit about the cheesy creations. Bar two or three legit remarks on relevant series, every single public post was a request for the one game EA has yet to make, and the one that everyone seemingly needs them to: Skate 4.

Long-suffering fans trolling EA's socials is not a new thing. In January, an announcement for EA's Play event was met by a flood of people asking about Skate 4, with Eurogamer noting a similar pattern to the Instagram comments. Just type "Skate 4" into a Twitter search and you'll return hundreds of posts about the game that isn't (yet) a game at all. It's glaringly obvious that this is a game that fans of four-wheeled interactive entertainment need in their lives, so what EA should be doing, right now, is dropping all other projects and getting the hell on with it. OK, perhaps that's asking a bit much. But a new Skate would be amazing, wouldn't it? Obviously, yes.

Comments on EA's Instagram account

For me, and I think a lot of players of my generation, the Skate franchise isn't merely a great collection of games, but also experiences that coincided with the end of childhood. Skate, the first game of 2007, helped me finally let go of the Tony Hawk series, which was in a state of serious decline. I adored those games, at least up until Tony Hawk's American Wasteland, and absolutely hammered them, seeing every secret they hid away until I'd turned each release inside out and back again.

Now, don't misunderstand me here: American Wasteland was alright, and I even spent a lot of time with Tony Hawk's Project 8 when it came along in 2006. But there's no argument whatsoever that these were inferior productions compared to the majesty of what the Tony Hawk games had achieved before. I was sticking with them largely due to a lack of other options—a situation that changed in 2007 with Skate and its completely different approach to skateboard control. Its emphasis was more on realism than extravagant combos that'd land you in hospital, at best, if you ever attempted them for real. This was the virtual skateboarding experience I needed. Outselling Tony Hawk's Proving Ground two to one, Skate helped EA snatch the kickflip crown from Activision. It's one they've held ever since, even without releasing a new-gen game, with 2015's Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 failing to revive its series' flat-lining fortunes.

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Skate 3, to date the most recent release in the series, came out in 2010. Come 2013, its sales were expectedly low, and its relevance waning. The mainstream had apparently moved on—skateboarding games were done, over. But come 2014, the world's most popular YouTuber intervened. PewDiePie's Skate 3 videos of early 2014 attracted tens of millions of views, and as a result the game itself began to sell again. EA had to reprint it, to meet demand. It had become a let's play hit, albeit more because of its glitches and Hall Of Meat mode—in which you score points by actively injuring your skater of choice—than its array of tricks. The internet had spoken and Skate 3 was reborn, introduced to a new generation of stream-glued gamers who duly wanted to try it for themselves. Naturally, this has only increased the volume of calls for a new Skate. So why aren't EA eager to milk the cash cow sat not just in front of them, but practically on their faces? Yeah, about that. There's a tiny problem with making another Skate. The studio that made the previous ones doesn't exist anymore.

EA Black Box, the Canadian developer of all things Skate, including the spin-off Skate It, which was pretty terrible if I remember rightly, was closed by its parent company in 2013. Need for Speed: The Run was its final game, released in 2011. The team broke apart, with individuals going on to work on titles including The Crew, Project CARS, and 2015's FMV-loaded Need for Speed reboot.

Read on VICE Sports: Watch our video on China's skateboarding revolution

If Skate 4 was to be made, to the standards the series' fans both old and new expect, EA would either need to get the old gang back together—highly unlikely—or commission a suitable replacement studio. And EA being EA, it's unlikely the company would look outside of its subsidiaries. So who could they go for? There's Ghost Games in Sweden, makers of last year's Need for Speed, which while possessing its share of setbacks did deliver a great open-world environment to blaze around in. It was fun, some of the time, too—and a fun, open-world (ish, perhaps scale it down somewhat) Skate title would be fairly amazing in theory. But Ghost is already working on the next Need for Speed, which moves them out of the frame. The UK-based Criterion Games is also busy on a driving game, which probably won't be a new Burnout, despite calls for one. Another of EA's Swedish studios, DICE, is more shooter-focused, having put together Star Wars: Battlefront and currently developing Mirror's Edge Catalyst, which basically leaves EA Canada. The team in Burnaby, British Columbia is best known for its EA Sports series—FIFA, NHL, NBA Live up until 2010—but also produced the SSX snowboarding games and snowmobile racer Sled Storm, which suggests they'd have what it takes to deliver a new Skate. Perhaps it's time for football to take a year off?

This development conundrum is probably a contributing factor as to why EA hasn't started development on Skate 4. At least, why they haven't publicly announced their intentions to make one, anyway, as leaks can and do happen. In the middle of February 2016, rumors began to spread that a new Skate was coming, as early as summer 2016, when an Australian games retailer posted pre-order information for a game released on August 23rd. The listing was quickly removed, and it might be complete bullshit—but then again, perhaps the wheels are in motion and Skate 4 is rolling its way towards us as we speak. It makes total sense for EA to put it out—they'd make a mint, surely, something that'd keep investors happy while socials-spamming gamers get what they're after, too. It's a win-win.

So, EA, allow me to address you directly: Please make another Skate. Or, if you are, tell us. I refuse to let Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 be the only major skateboarding game on contemporary consoles. The stain it has left on my beloved childhood memories, and the genre as a whole, will scorch my retinas for the foreseeable. Release Skate 4, make it truly open world, let us break our bones for fun and pit us against each other online. Basically, give us another kick-ass Skate game. Do that for us, and all that "worst company in America" stuff, from a few years back, we can help that go away forever.

Follow Emma Quinlan on Twitter.

An elephant calf trained with bullhooks and ropes at the Center for Elephant Conservation. Photo via PETA

By most accounts, the life of a circus elephant isn't easy: There are long stretches of traveling by train, from town to town, chained in place and standing in your own shit. There's performing bizarre tricks for literal peanuts, and if you don't do what you're told, your trainer might just whack you on the head with a bullhook—a long, sharp-ended implement traditionally used to keep elephants under control.

While performing elephants were the main draw to America's three-ring circuses in the 19th and 20th centuries, circuses don't have much appeal anymore. Even the Ringling Bros, the "The Greatest Show on Earth," recently announced that its remaining cast of elephant performers will soon be sent into retirement. Their new home, as of May 1, will be a remote, 200-acre facility in Central Florida, where the elephants will live out their days feasting on hay and fruit and grazing in quiet fields.

Animal rights activists applauded the decision, but they aren't as stoked on this conservation facility, where the circus company will continue breeding its elephants, and also take blood samples from them for its cancer research program. According to a new report from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the site is little more than a glorified breeding compound where elephants spend hours chained up in barns, live under control of the bullhook, and deal with rampant foot injuries and tuberculosis outbreaks.

The Ringling Bros' Center for Elephant Conservation, which originally opened in 1995, currently houses 31 elephants. Recent news reports describe it as an idyllic place far away from cheering carnival crowds. They show retired elephants with giant tires to play with, bamboo and big piles of sand to romp on, and experienced handlers and veterinarians to care for them.

PETA's picture of the facility is significantly darker. The 13-page report, culled from court testimony, veterinary records, and medical research, offers accounts of bullhook abuse and examples of electric prods being used on elephants at the center. It argues that the center has been a "hotbed" for tuberculosis—according to medical documents cited in the report, 29 of Ringling Bros' elephants (most of them living at the center) had tested reactive to tuberculosis in 2011—a potentially deadly disease that's transmissible to humans.

The report also says that elephants at the center are chained in place by their legs every night and held in barns with hard concrete floors—conditions that, according to medical research and veterinarian testimony, make them "prone to arthritis, infection, and psychological stress."

Elephant calves are separated from their mothers and chained on barren concrete in the barns at the Center for Elephant Conservation. Photo via PETA

Stephen Payne, a spokesman for Feld Entertainment—the parent company for the Ringling Bros, which owns the conservation center in Florida—called PETA's latest allegations as "a complete work of fiction." Yes, the elephants sleep on concrete floors, and yes, they use bullhooks (Feld Entertainment insists the implements are harmless, akin to putting a leash on a dog; animal rights leaders disagree). But Payne says vets continually examine the elephants' feet to make sure they're healthy, and as for TB, only one elephant currently in their care has tested positive for the disease and is undergoing treatment. (Payne did not address the 29 elephants who reportedly had TB in 2011.) He argued that elephant-to-human transmission is "quite rare," though, and both the staff and elephants are tested regularly for everyone's safety.

All in all, he maintains that the Florida facility is a safe and healthy environment for the circus's herd of 42 Asian elephants, and its breeding program is a way to preserve the Asian elephants in North America.

"We are working to save an endangered species," Payne told me.

But other experts say forcing these elephants to breed in captivity misses the point. Susan Nance, a historian at the University of Guelph in Ontario and the author of two books on circus elephants in America, says public opinion on elephants shifted in the 1940s—first, with Disney's release of Dumbo, and later with the advent of wildlife documentaries. Nance said that these showed audiences that elephants were intrinsically valuable outside of our own self-serving interests. Now, people are more wary of forcing animals to do unnatural things for our personal benefit—but places like Feld Entertainment's facility show otherwise.

"It just shows, I still think, how they don't get what the public sentiment is," Nance said. "The whole premise of the Ringling point of view is that these animals are here for us to use."

Payne balked at the PETA-approved sanctuaries listed in the new report, which includes a 2,300-acre site in San Andreas, California, that's run by the animal welfare nonprofit Performing Animal Welfare Society, or PAWS. The sanctuary has green grass, ponds, large barns, and an indoor pool, and its staff relies on a hands-off approach known as "protected contact," in which they forego bullhooks in favor of safety barriers and let elephants basically do what they want.

"These quote 'sanctuaries' that PETA lauds so much praise on are managing the species to extinction," Payne said. "They're not conserving an endangered species. If we don't do what we do with the zoos and other conservation institutions, within a generation there won't be any Asian elephants in North America."

Ed Stewart, the president and co-founder of PAWS, told me lasting elephant preservation will not happen by making more elephant babies in North America. Instead, we need efforts to save elephants' natural habitats back home in Africa and Asia from encroachment and development. The very idea of captivity, even when it comes to his own sanctuary, makes him uncomfortable.

"I don't drive through our place and look at the elephants up on the hill eating grass and think, 'Gee, this is so great for them.' I look at the fence and think, 'They're going to go to the end and hit the fence.' I wish elephants weren't behind fences," Stewart said. "I think basically it's unethical to put an animal in a situation where you know they're going to be deprived their whole life."

Follow Peter Holslin on Twitter.

At this point, the only thing surprising about Donald Trump winning a Republican primary is the fact that we all—the media, the panicked liberal voters, the GOP Establishment—continue to be surprised. Almost immediately after voting ended in the chaotic Nevada caucuses Tuesday, the networks called the race for the Republican frontrunner, confirming what polls had long predicted in the Silver State. With 100 percent of precincts reporting, Trump won 46 percent of the vote, nearly double the total for Marco Rubio, whose second-place finish somehow didn't stop him from sounding triumphant in interviews.

The breakdown of the vote was similar to what it was in South Carolina days earlier, with Rubio barely edging out Ted Cruz, and Trump wiping the floor with both of them. According to CNN exit polling, Trump dominated across every demographic, even the ones he wasn't supposed to win. He won among young voters and educated ones, among evangelicals and ultra-conservatives—hell, he even won among Hispanics.

The explanation for this, as polling analysts have pointed out, is anger. This, of course, has been the driving force behind Trump's success across the country, but exit polls show that Nevada's Republican caucus voters weren't just run-of-the-mill angry—they were furious. According to data collected by ABC News , six in ten voters described themselves as angry at the way the federal government is run, compared to just four in ten who described themselves that way in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.

This isn't surprising. Nevada is in the West, and the regional strain of conservatism is a defiant one. The best contemporary example of this is Nevada's rogue rancher Cliven Bundy, who with his sons led a band of disaffected "militia men" in an armed uprising against the federal Bureau of Land Management. Bundy is now in jail, along with two of his sons, for their role in the bizarre occupation of a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon last month. But Bundy sympathizers remain a real constituency in their home state, where the federal government's management of land and natural resources has been an increasing source of frustration for conservatives.

City dwellers often need to be reminded that the federal government owns an astonishing amount of the rural West. Since the Bundy Ranch standoff, and even before then, there has been a growing movement in many Western states that calls for the feds to transfer ownership of the land back to states and counties, or into private hands.

This is a fairly complex issue that fires a few people up mightily, but it generally doesn't get much mainstream attention. The movement typically only shows up in the news when the guns come out. But not everyone who loves individual liberty and hates federal ownership of lands has the time or inclination to wage an insurgency against the federal government. The majority of people who hold these views are just regular voters just happen to have some unconventional beliefs about who actually owns the land in their state.

When they're not dealing with some anti-government revolt among their ranks, sovereign state activists engage in run-of-the-mill politicking conducted by an assortment of state lawmakers and sheriffs and land transfer advocacy groups like the American Lands Council, Free the Lands, and the Koch brothers–backed Federalism in Action. Lawmakers in several states, including Nevada, have introduced bills to reclaim land from the feds; on Thursday, the US House National Resources Committee will vote on three bills that would cede some land back to states, or to private ownership. (These proposals have been criticized for potentially opening up protected wilderness areas to mining and logging.)

In theory, what we might call the Bundy constituency should have been a strong base of support for Cruz, a Texas senator who has staked his entire career on the kind of anti-government confrontation that Bundy sympathizers seem to love. In the lead-up to the Nevada caucuses, Cruz's campaign actively courted these voters, working the land use issue into his speeches, and putting out a campaign ad promising that, if elected president, he "will fight day and night to return full control of Nevada's lands to its rightful owners—its citizens."

In contrast, Trump, a champion of eminent domain, has been on what one would assume is the wrong side of the issue. "I don't like the idea because I want to keep the lands great," he said when asked about transferring control of federal land to the states by Field and Stream magazine last month. "You don't know what the state is going to do."

And yet it was Trump, not Cruz, who appeared to win the land use movement's votes in Nevada on Tuesday. While exit polls didn't ask about the issue specifically, Trump won definitively among voters who said they were angry or dissatisfied with the federal government. Among the six in ten Nevada Republicans who said they preferred a candidate from outside the system, Trump won by a whopping 71 percent. More tellingly, perhaps, he won among those who described themselves as "very conservative," beating Cruz 38 percent to 34 percent.

Cruz did manage to have picked up some support, including endorsements from some of the state's most prominent sovereign land advocates. County voting tallies shows that he won Elko County, a staunchly conservative area of the state with a strong Republican organization, as well as Lincoln County, home to just 5,000 people, and also to Area 51 and the "Extraterrestrial Highway." The latter has been the site of a heated opposition to the federal government's recent decision to designate a 1,100-square-mile national monument straddling the county.

But while Cruz may have the support of far-right state politicians—the sort of new Republican Establishment birthed by the Tea Party—Trump seems to have a solid lock on their rank-and-file. Obviously, this is a bad sign for Cruz, signaling that when conservatives are faced with the choice between him and Trump, they will continue to choose the candidate who's louder, brasher, and even more of a dick. And should Cruz drop out of the race, it's hard to imagine those ultra-conservatives deciding to embrace Rubio over Trump.

What Nevada demonstrated is what observers who've been dreading a Trump nomination haven't been willing to admit: Republican voters really love Donald Trump. From the Deep South to the Northeast to the West, voters are angry and have found someone who validates, reflects, and amplifies their anger. It doesn't particularly matter that he might not share their specific anger about land use rights or whatever.

Reporting contributed by Mike Pearl.

Follow Grace on Twitter.

If you took President Obama at his word, this was supposed to be a golden age for investigative journalism in America.

On his first day in office, the Commander in Chief penned a memo encouraging executive agencies to adopt a "presumption in favor of disclosure" when processing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. The White House later rolled out the details of an "unprecedented level of openness" it was determined to bring to Washington. In 2013, Obama famously said he's running the "most transparent administration in history."

It hasn't quite worked out that way.

In fact, Obama has a transparency record that ranges from disappointing to downright scary. His administration has aggressively prosecuted leakers, spied on the Associated Press, restricted access for photographers, and practiced "retroactive redaction" on court transcripts, among other eyebrow raisers. The list of news outlets to report on these and other shortcomings span the ideological spectrum, and include Slate, the Atlantic, Columbia Journalism Review, Democracy Now!, National Review, Bloomberg, Mother Jones, Reason, Politico, and the Washington Post.

Obama's lack of transparency is one of the few subjects on which the editorial boards of the Wall Street Journal and New York Times agree.

As for the Freedom of Information Act, last March, the AP reported the Obama administration had set a new record for withholding FOIA requests. And a recent House Oversight Committee report called "FOIA Is Broken" describes how, less than four months after Obama issued his "presumption of openness" memo in 2009, White House lawyers issued a second, non-public memo, "reminding all Executive Branch agencies... all documents and records that implicate the White House in any way...must receive an extra layer of review."

In other words, the administration was saying one thing and doing another.

I offer these sweeping claims as a prelude to my own story because, without it, I'm just a wild-eyed freelancer with a crazy tale. In the wider context of President Obama's treatment of the press, however, you might call me a poster boy for an era of darkness, delays, denials, and intimidation.

In 2009, I learned that one of my dad's med school classmates had been accused of dealing prescription drugs. The 35-page indictment claimed that Dr. Paul Volkman—whom my dad remembered as a nerdy, bespectacled chess enthusiast—had, over the course of more than four years, made millions distributing more than 1.5 million pain pills. The scheme caused the overdose deaths of "at least 14 people," prosecutors said. If true, this made him one of the most prolific and deadly prescription drug dealers in US history.

I was about to enroll in a Columbia University graduate writing program when I learned about the case, and got excited about the idea of making Volkman's story my first book. For the next three years, I went into reporting overdrive, crisscrossing the eastern half of the United States, interviewing doctors about pain, addiction, and opioid medications like Vicodin and OxyContin. I drove to Chicago to visit Volkman, who was eager to convince me of his innocence as he awaited trial. And I frequently shuttled to Portsmouth, Ohio, the burnt-out former industrial town on the Ohio River—"America's pill mill capital" and "ground zero in the pill explosion," according to former LA Times reporter Sam Quinones—where Volkman's alleged crimes took place.

It was during one of these trips to Southern Ohio, in 2010, that a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent approached me about my project. The agent somehow knew I had interviewed people on both sides of the case, and he named a person—the mother of one of Volkman's former patients—I had spoken with a few days earlier. He repeatedly asked me if I was aware of the potential for my journalism to do harm. Before handing me a business card and walking away, he mentioned the possibility that I could be charged with witness tampering.

Later that day, shit really got weird when I received a Facebook message from a former Volkman patient I had recently interviewed.

Seven months later, in March of 2011, the Volkman trial began in Cincinnati. And, as opening arguments took place, I was sitting in the courtroom, wearing a tie and scribbling furiously in a notebook. On day four of the trial, though, during a break in the proceedings, I was handed a subpoena in the hallway outside the courtroom. The document, filed by the prosecutor, commanded me to report to the courthouse the following morning "FOR TESTIMONY."

This didn't make much sense. No one had previously approached me about testifying and, since I had first learned about the case more than a year and a half after the indictment, I had no first-hand knowledge of Volkman's clinics. But I was now on the witness list, which prevented me from re-entering the courtroom.

The trial stretched for another two months, and my call to testify never came. I had been locked out, and without the backing of a major news organization, I didn't have the resources to fight the subpoena and regain a spot in the courtroom.

Still, I continued to work on the story.

After the trial ended with Volkman's conviction, in May, I did my best to reconstruct what I'd missed. I eventually got a hold of most of the trial transcripts, but the other half of the trial record—the toxicology reports, photographs, emails, and more than 200 other exhibits jurors had seen—proved much more difficult to get my hands on. My initial requests to court clerks, the prosecutor, and the judge were all denied. (The Sixth Amendment guarantees all citizens a public trial. Why wouldn't the evidence remain public when the trial ended, I wondered.) So on February 1, 2012, I filed a FOIA request for the materials the jury had seen. To avoid any confusion, I included the 16-page list of exhibits with my request.

In order to fully appreciate what happened next, you would have to stop here and wait three years—1,108 days, to be exact. That's how long it took President Obama's Department of Justice to answer my question, "May I see the evidence that sent a man to prison for four consecutive life terms?"

The first agency that received my request, the Executive Office for US Attorneys, held it for nine months before charging me a $154 "review fee," and transferring it to the DEA, which had investigated Volkman. The DEA then took another two years and two months to complete the request, often waiting months between sending packages of heavily-redacted pages. Thanks to a second FOIA request for the processing notes from my first request, I know that, at one point, my request was forwarded to the wrong DEA field office, where it was accidentally deleted.

By the time I filed a lawsuit against the DEA in March of 2015 (with the help of my state ACLU and two pro-bono attorneys, Neal McNamara and Jessica Jewell), the DEA had been processing my request for more than 800 days, withheld more than 85 percent of the pages it had processed, and "released" mostly useless documents, like blank patient-examination sheets and slideshow pages with all of the key information blocked out. The FOIA-focused news site MuckRock called my experience a "nightmare."

That nightmare still isn't over.

As I write this, the lawsuit remains unresolved. A recently issued motion-filing timeline for the case shows that a final ruling won't arrive until this summer, at the earliest—months after the fifth anniversary of the Volkman verdict. It's small consolation that my FOIA request has turned me into a minor celebrity in the government-transparency world. When the House Oversight Committee released that "FOIA Is Broken" report in January, I was the lone journalist quoted in the executive summary: "I often describe the handling of my FOIA request as the single most disillusioning experience of my life." (The DOJ, DEA, and White House did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)

I voted for Obama twice. I'm often inspired by his speeches. And as a freelancer, I'm hugely grateful for my Obamacare coverage. Despite all of my experiences, I still find the man hard to dislike.

But none of this changes what I've experienced over the last five and a half years.

I began reporting on the Volkman case not long after my first journalism internship. Back then, I didn't know a DEA agent would hint at the prosecutorial power of the federal government to get me to back off from reporting. I didn't know subpoenas could be used as courtroom-ejection devices. I didn't know a judge would recommend sending DEA or FBI agents to Columbia to confirm my enrollment (see page 89 of the trial transcript from the day I was subpoenaed), or, later, personally deny my request for evidence once the trial ended. I didn't know that, despite ample evidence to the contrary, a DOJ representative would testify before a Congressional committee about the agency's sparkling FOIA record—testimony that prompted the committee chair to tell her she lived in "la la land." I didn't know that that same DOJ, would, after years of FOIA stonewalling, continue to fight against the release of trial evidence in response to my FOIA lawsuit.

This administration's attitude toward journalism is summed up nicely in an exchange from the Volkman trial courtroom on the day I was subpoenaed: March 7, 2011. After the jury had been dismissed, the judge spoke with the prosecutor about the 25-year-old graduate student—which is to say me—who had been barred from re-entering the courtroom:

If you had shown me the prosecutor's peculiar "at this point" phrasing in 2008, I might not have thought much of it. Today, though, after seven years of so-called transparency, it sounds like a threat.

And it still scares me.

Follow Philip Eil on Twitter.

The author, pictured above, participates in a Black History Month panel on TVO. Screenshot via TVO

A couple of weeks ago, I sat on a Black History Month panel along with Supriya Dwivedi, Sylvia Maracle, and Nikki Clarke. It was a pretty awesome panel, and one wherein Ms. Clarke, president of the Ontario Black History Society gave us the priceless phrase "Black is the new Black." After we finished the recording, Nikki asked if I'd be interested in joining OBHS and helping to revitalize the organization. I'm not sure all of the words had left her mouth before I said yes.

Forget all those dumb paranormal chillers and torture-porn slashers—or worse, those fake "found-footage" thrillers in which fresh-faced idiots run around in the dark, inexplicably chronicling their own slaughter with shaky camcorders. As solemnly disturbing as it is wondrous, a fantastic new horror movie dubbed "a New England folktale" and set around the year 1630 is not only the most anxiety-producing creep-fest to come along in ages; it also happens to be one of 2016's first must-sees.

About the only thing The Witch (or as it's sometimes spelled, The VVitch ) has in common with those previously mentioned scare-flicks is that it focuses on a teenage girl in turmoil in the woods. After a stoic Puritan farmer (Ralph Ineson) and his devout family of six is exiled from their township, they settle in the bleak gray wilds of Massachusetts, where it's all downhill after the failing of their first corn crop. Through the eyes of eldest daughter Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), we witness the mysterious disappearance of the clan's baby son, abducted by an evil hag in the forest who uses his gory innards as an ointment. It only gets worse as these God-fearing folk worry that heretic magic is tearing them all apart. And why are the young fraternal twins spending so much time whispering secrets to that billy goat? (Better still, can we start the first non-human awards campaign for cloven scene-stealer Black Phillip?)

Written and directed by first-timer Robert Eggers, who won the best director award in the US narrative competition at Sundance, The Witch begins as a psychological drama about ordinary people falling apart before the tension escalates grimly and slowly into balls-out horror. Most unusual is the film's rigorously authentic atmosphere and especially its dialogue—inspired by historical court documents, diaries, and prayer manuals—which immerses viewers in the era with a vernacular that sounds alien today: "Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?"

I recently sat down with the New England-raised Eggers in his adopted home of Brooklyn to talk about his work—or if you'd rather, vvork.

VICE: I can't think of another period film in recent history that's as uniquely impressive as The Witch. What were the humble beginnings of your first directorial feature?
Robert Eggers: After I made my first short film that wasn't terrible, people were interested in potentially developing a feature with me. Every time I read a script, it was a bizarre, too-dark, genre-less thing that no one wanted to make. I realized that I needed to make something that was in an identifiable genre that was still really personal to me, and that I wouldn't be sacrificing who I am or my values.

So I was like, "All right, let me go back to New England." If you've been to a rural town there, you know there are these farmhouses all over the place and hidden graveyards in the middle of the woods. Witches were part of my imaginary childhood playground, so I wanted to make an archetypal fairytale about the mythic idea of what New England was to me as a kid.

Were there any witchy tales or images that inspired you from your childhood?
We made up stories about our own witches, like some creepy lady who was probably just a hoarder living in a dilapidated house. I went to Salem as many Halloweens as I possibly could. Witches were really scary to me as a kid. I mean, the Wicked Witch of the West herself was terrifying and in so many of my nightmares. But in contemporary culture, the witch is just a plastic Halloween decoration that's not very potent.

So how did you make witches frightening again?
I needed to understand what the witch was in the early modern period and where these tropes come from. The black cat was a demon witch's familiar that would be sucking on extra teats on the witch's labia—that was fascinating to learn. The real world and the fairytale world in the average person's mind was the same world. The little old lady down the lane they were accusing of being a witch? They thought she could be potentially stealing children, cutting them into pieces, and using their entrails for various things. I'm not saying the witch trials were right, but you can see why people were so afraid. I wanted to create a super authentic version of the 17th century, so that contemporary audiences could believe in the witch again, the same way that people in that period would have.

VICE Talks Film with 'The Witch' Director Robert Eggers:

It's hard to believe this is only your first feature film. Could you talk about making this career shift?
I have a background in designing and directing weird, low-budget theater. I was doing a street-theater Faust, and a more experienced director doing a show at La MaMa saw my piece and wanted me to design her sets and costumes. I realized, "Ah ha! This is how I can make a living while I'm trying to get my career of the ground." I was making my living as a designer, set carpenter, or whatever would pay the bills. It was great because, compared to a lot of first-time directors, I had a lot of experience being on set. I knew what putting dolly track in the woods entails and how miserable that actually is.

And how did that production background then inform your filmmaking?
In the four years I was trying to get funding to do The Witch, I would try to get any farm-y, woodsy, dirty, rusty, crusty, creepy job I could get to inform this film, and to have the skills to figure out how to pull this off on a budget. There came a time when I was like, "Man, I'm starting to turn into a designer who wants to be a director, instead of a director who's designing on the side for money." Which was discouraging. But all this needs to be in the service of telling the story. I don't believe accuracy is good for accuracy's sake. [Francis Ford Coppola's] Bram Stoker's Dracula isn't accurate at all, but it's one of the best-designed films. It's transportive, but this was a film where I felt authenticity was crucial to the concept.

In your research, what did you find most revealing about language in that era?
One thing is that New England was the most literate part of the Western world, because you had to teach your children how to read. It was the law because reading the Bible—and having the word of God as something close and personal to you—was crucial to these Calvinists. Less than a hundred years earlier, people were being burned at the stake for translating the Bible into English. This movie is not too long after the time of Shakespeare where, yeah, Queen Elizabeth and King James liked , but everyone did. Sermons on the street corner were popular entertainment, so sophisticated language is in people's ears. I would read a will from a farmer who could read but couldn't write and dictated his will, and it's beautiful and clunky and interesting. The Geneva Bible is a beautifully written book, and it's something they were obsessed with.

The sets and costumes are so rigorously designed, but this is a modestly budgeted indie, not a Hollywood mega-blockbuster. Were there any adjustments you regret having to make?
There are very few compromises, to be honest. I had really great investors and creative producers who believed in what I was doing. I mean, look, we couldn't afford all hand-woven cloth. Some of the cloth buttons are a little flatter than they should have been. With the animals, there were some shot adjustments. The goat was the most difficult thing I've ever had to deal with, ever. We were constantly tying the schedule in knots, much to the crew's dismay, to make sure it was always gloomy.

Similar to last year's Mad Max: Fury Road, with its strong female characters pushing back against the patriarchy and victimization, The Witch has been read as a sly feminist parable. Was that conscious in the writing?
Yeah. There's a young woman in Massachusetts named Elizabeth Knapp, who was possessed by the devil. She was a servant girl, the lowest possible place in the social totem pole there, and she started having fits. One easy contemporary explanation is hormones, but everyone was really concerned it was the devil. They bring in a minister, and she starts cursing at him in the vernacular, and he is completely terrified. Of course, she couldn't believe that she had the power to upset this powerful man, so it must be the devil.

There were women who believed they were evil witches in the cultural construct of the day, and that was interesting to me. The witch is a powerful archetype in that she embodied men's fears, ambivalences, and fantasies—positive and negative—about women, and women's own fears and ambivalences about female power and motherhood in that male-dominated society. You can't ignore that. You wouldn't have this mass persecution. You wouldn't have them inventing the idea that women are these anti-mother ogresses cutting up babies. I'm not a cultural anthropologist or a legitimate historian of comparative mythology, but given my limited views, I feel like primitive man must have been so intimidated by the idea that women were implicitly more powerful than them, that they spent thousands of years trying to contain that.

The Witch is anything but a traditional horror film, so whether it be in movies or in real life, what ultimately scares you?
You know, the darkness in human nature is terrifying. For me, satisfying horror actually confronts darkness instead of shining a flashlight on it quickly and running away giggling. I don't like a lot of horror movies. Like, there is the childhood part of me that loves Hammer horror and monster movies, but I don't fetishize bad movies. I think this movie embarrassingly reeks of The Shining , which was a movie that—until I watched it enough in my mid-20s to make it not scary anymore—was a really effective movie. I say all the time that Bergman is the best horror director because he actually confronts darkness.

With the early success of the film, do you have your next dream project lined up?
I'm working on a medieval knight movie right now, so I hope that will be made. Right now, I have no interest in doing anything contemporary. I got enough of that every day of my life.

Follow Aaron on Twitter.

The Witch is now playing in theaters nationwide.

Photo via Flickr user Gregg Tavares

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

US News

New iPhone Will be Harder to Hack
Apple is creating a new version of the iPhone with security features that make it even harder to hack into. Apple CEO Tim Cook refused to back down in the company's encryption fight with the FBI, saying he would take it to the Supreme Court if necessary.—The New York Times

IS Targets Facebook and Twitter
A video purported to be made by Islamic State (IS) militants threatens Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter's Jack Dorsey for agreeing to close terrorism accounts. The militants claim to have hacked 10,000 Facebook accounts and 5,000 Twitter profiles.—The Guardian

Republican Considered for Supreme Court
The Republican Governor of Nevada, Brian Sandoval, has been named by several news organizations as a potential Supreme Court nominee now being vetted by the White House. The White House press secretary Josh Earnest refused to confirm reports.—The Washington Post

Storms Kill Four in Virginia
The powerful storm system that swept across the East Coast on Wednesday has left four people dead in Virginia. Dozens more were injured, and power has been knocked out in tens of thousands of homes. Two men and a young boy were killed in Waverly when their mobile home was destroyed.—USA Today

International News

New North Korea Sanctions Agreed
The US and China have reached agreement over a UN resolution imposing tougher sanctions on North Korea following its recent nuclear test. A draft resolution has been circulated to other permanent council members—Russia, the UK, and France.—AP

France Demands $1.8 Billion From Google
French authorities have demanded Google pays $1.8 billion in unpaid taxes, but Google is expected to try to negotiate the sum downward. The company recently agreed to pay only $180 million in back taxes to the UK. —BBC News

NATO Agrees Aegean Mission
NATO allies have agreed to a plan for how ships will operate in the Aegean Sea to stop criminals smuggling refugees into Europe. Territorial disputes between Greece and Turkey have been resolved, said NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.—Reuters

Australian Vessel Stuck in Antarctica
Australia's flagship icebreaking vessel, the Aurora Australis, has run aground at Mawson Station in Antarctica. All 67 expedition members are safe and well, and they will be flown home as soon as blizzards ease to allow for a rescue mission.—The Sydney Morning Herald

Hoverboards like this have now been pulled from Amazon. Photo: Mike Pearl.

Everything Else

Biden to Give Out Oscar
Joe Biden is expected to appear as a presenter at Sunday's Oscars, though it's not clear what category he'll present. Michelle Obama gave the best picture award to Argo back in 2013 via video.—Page Six

Amazon Pulls All Hoverboards
The online retail giant has removed hoverboards from its site after an official warning - from the US Consumer Product Safety Commission — that "consumers risk serious injury or death if their self-balancing scooters ignite and burn."—Buzzfeed

Africa Gets First Download Platform
Youssou N'dour and Baaba Maal are among 200 artists signed up by MusikBi, Africa's first home-grown platform for legal music downloads. Songs cost 50 cents and can by downloaded by text or PayPal.—Al Jazeera

Australia Legalizes Medical Weed
A bill passed in both Houses of Parliament paves the way for medicinal cannabis products to be grown and prescribed in Australia. The country's health minister thanked "tireless patient advocates" for making it happen.—VICE

Done with reading today? Watch our new video 'Hot Air in the Deep South'

The apparent accessories to crime (photos via Flickr users Calgary Reviews, Zack Middleton, and @joefoodie)

Given some of the crimes being carried out in Canada this week, you'd think that criminals have developed a food fetish. It's far from the first string of crimes associated with food—drug smugglers often enjoy trying to mask substances in various edibles. However, in the past week, there have been a series of assaults and robberies across Canada involving pizza, eggs, and various kinds of cured meats.

Like many other kids, my childhood dream was to explore outer space. I'm apparently lazy and don't pursue my dreams because I've never come close to a spaceship. Nor space camp. Nor zero gravity. Nonetheless, I've heard of those brave and less lazy people who make it their life goal to work at NASA or SpaceX. And I know there are those even less-lazy people who reallyexcel at NASA and are granted the privilege of space travel. I wonder if it's a cyclical thing, us holding up our best and brightest astronauts as examples to inspire our children and the best of those kids then becoming astronauts too, and so on.

Maybe it's the same with filmmakers? The best of them (minorities notwithstanding) are shown off each year at the Oscars for all children to see and aspire toward. There's really no other explanation for why a filmmaker telling a story about "two best friends who have dreamed since childhood of becoming astronauts" would find himself nominated for an Academy Award. I can't tell you if it's been filmmaker Konstantin Bronzit's dream to make an animated short and get nominated for it, but that's what happened with his 15-minute animation We Can't Live Without Cosmos.

The short superficially follows two best friends as they prepare for a journey into space. They study, train, practice, and study some more. Although the animation is playful and the friends are excited to be where they are, the film builds to something larger. Over time, we begin to understand our heroes' friendship as something at odds with the other almost robotic trainees and scientists. As the two friends excel, one begins to wonder what the real reason is behind their success. Friendship? Ambition? Mesomorphic athleticism? The wordless film offers little explanation, but I can tell you it is as much about the human condition as it is about space travel and animation.

Amazingly, through his simple premise and technique, Bronzit taps into something much deeper, the desire to escape loneliness. Through his two astronauts, Bronzit shows us what's possible through human connection. We can't live without cosmos as much as we can't live without each other. Maybe it's a bittersweet irony, then, that we send our best people deep into space, far away from the rest of us.

We Can't Live Without Cosmos is up for the best animated film Academy Award this Sunday, February 28, along with four other short animated films. See the rest of the nominees here.

Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

Peggy Guggenheim. Image courtesy of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection Archives, Venice

Two images define art collector, socialite, and muse Peggy Guggenheim for me: the headstone of the 14 beloved dogs she had buried beside her, and the enormous dollhouse she had as a child, full of mini bearskin rugs and ivory furniture, which she kept locked and allowed nobody to touch.

These images, put together in the new documentary Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict, show a woman overflowing with affection, which was often directed at the unexpected. She was a collector of the precious and the ridiculous almost from birth, a woman who imbued objects with almost more value than people, someone who would name a pet dog Pegeen and then be surprised that her daughter of the same name could be offended, a product of two of America's most wealthy families who served up cheap, tinned food at her legendary dinner parties, a flamboyant, eccentric, ambitious Jewish woman who pushed to the front of one of the male-dominated art world at a time when being both female and Jewish were, to say the least, challenging.

Peggy Guggenheim was the center of mid-century art world. She dragged together a collection of some of the most successful, weird, difficult, and progressive artists of her generation; Pollock, Mondrian, Beckett, Nash, Kandinsky and Picasso all showed at her galleries and contributed to her art collection. It's hard to image the art world today without her. She made modernism happen.

Roloff Beny / Courtesy of National Archives of Canada

Born in 1898 in New York City on East 69th Street, she was the daughter of businessman Benjamin Guggenheim, and niece of Solomon Guggenheim—founder of the famous New York museum. She was 13 when her father died on the Titanic, after which she describes being demoted to a "poor relative," moving to a "cheaper apartment" with "fewer servants." It's hardly poverty, but it did mark her out from the wealthy Jewish girls at her school. So she shaved off her eyebrows and planned her escape.

By 1921 she had moved to Paris where she played tennis with Ezra Pound and decided to "get rid of my virginity" with the writer and artist Laurence Vail. A son, Sinbad, followed who, according to most interpretations, she gave up in order to follow her new lover, the writer John Holmes.

"She was a single woman, a divorcee, with a reputation, traveling on her own, with an influence in London, Paris, New York, and Venice," says Lisa Immordino Vreeland, the director of Art Addict. "There aren't many figures in the art world in an influence in so many places. I'm not sure that she was even aware of it; this was just her life and she lived it in her own terms and her own terms were to just push forward and do it."

In 1938, just before the outbreak of war, she opened the Guggenheim Jeune gallery on Cork Street, London, exhibiting the work, among many others, of Jean Cocteau, Henry Moore, and Yves Tanguy, whose wife apparently once tried to throw a fish at her during dinner after finding out they'd been having an affair. At the time, they were all struggling artists whose work was misunderstood. But they survived thanks to her determination to foster them.

At the outbreak of war she decided to buy one picture a day, using the money she'd inherited upon her mother's death. During this spending binge, she bought up Picassos, Ernsts, Mirós, Magrittes, Man Rays, Dalís, and Klees. From 1941 to 1947, fueled by the art-hating Nazi regime, she shipped the lot to New York, to open the Art of This Century Gallery in 1942. The gallery was as much an artwork as the pieces it displayed—she hung paintings at strange angles on huge jutting poles, jumbled in with sculptures and vitrines, so visitors could walk right round the exhibits.

In 1941, she married her second husband, notorious painter Max Ernst, who she would divorce in 1946. One image that stands out from this period is that of him dressing up in her clothes. While cross-dressing in the art world is hardly revolutionary, it says much of Guggenheim's give-a-shit attitude that she discusses this in interviews featured in the documentary with the same matter-of-fact tone in which she describes her seven abortions and botched nose job. As Gore Vidal wrote in his foreword essay to her memoirs, "Although she gave parties and collected pictures and people there was—and is—something cool and impenetrable about Guggenheim. She does not fuss."

She may not have fussed, but Guggenheim certainly fucked. In Art Addict, we hear about the four days she spent in bed with Samuel Beckett, about her "wholly unsuccessful" sex with Jackson Pollock and her voracious sexual appetite well into her gray-haired years. "Her outlook was more progressive than the people, the men, around her," says Vreeland. "There were no rules attached to her life when not many people were living like that."

Courtesy of the Peggy Gugggenheim Collection Archives, Venice

Despite being mentored by Marcel Duchamp, she is perhaps an ambivalent feminist icon. In 1943, she put on an exhibition of 31 women exhibited an all-female collection including work by Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington, Xenia Cage, Guggenheim's own daughter Pegeen, and even a self-portrait by the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee.

When in 1948, she was invited to exhibit her collection in the disused Greek Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, she stayed on and in 1949 established her own gallery in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on the Grand Canal. She started to get grief for the sculpture at the entrance to the museum—a huge Marino Marini figure of a naked man on horseback with a huge boner—so made the penis detachable in order to unscrew it when cardinals and other puritans came to look round. Sara Carson, who worked at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, writes in an email to me: "Art was built in to every aspect of her life—she had so many paintings she had to stack them in her bathroom, where they got splattered with toothpaste."

Courtesy of the Peggy Gugggenheim Collection Archives, Venice

One of the later pictures taken of Guggenheim was her in the Palazzo, lying on her bed, below an enormous sculptural bedstead. Even in her last days and in her most intimate spaces, Guggenheim brought together sex and art to produce a powerful, lasting collection and impression. "She grew up in an environment with certain rules and she broke them all," argues Vreeland. "That speaks to a sort of courageousness."

An art lover who acted as muse and mentor to much of the modernist movement; a single, divorced, globe-trotting Jewish woman who built a collection during the era of Hitler and Moseley; Peggy Guggenheim was, as Gore Vidal puts it, "the last of Henry James' transatlantic heroines—Daisy Miller with rather more balls." More balls, perhaps, and also a detachable penis.

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Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict is out on DVD now.

Hugh and Monika Jo after their wedding. Photo courtesy of Monika Jo

In 1994, the news heralded the world's first "wedding in cyberspace," and my prepubescent imagination really went crazy. The future is now, and it's amazing, I thought, I never have to worry about touching a girl in real life. Never mind that the virtual reality of the time was nothing more than an exciting trip into a world of colored geometric shapes.

The so-called "Information Age" really was about to change our everyday lives in countless ways, but headset-based VR went into the trashcan in short order, and "cyberspace" came to mean "the place you go to via a modem so you can find porn." Then cyberspace became a dated cliche, and the internet became a utility, and a basic human right. The thought of a wedding in virtual reality became, in retrospect, a dorky detour along the highway of progress.

In case you haven't heard, VR is back. The consumer version of the Oculus Rift headset is due out next month, VR content is starting to proliferate, and the whole thing has suddenly become worth taking seriously again. It made me wonder if those people who got married in virtual reality were some kind of pioneers, or prophets.

So I tracked them down. Monika Jo is still married to her husband Hugh, and still an evangelist for VR. I asked her for her story, and she happily obliged. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

VICE: Hi Monika! How'd you get into the world of VR in the first place?
The company was called CyberMind, and they exclusively featured VR machines by a British company called Virtuality. They were the standard back then. I just wanted to be as close to VR as possible, and not being an engineer back then, I kind of gravitated towards a retail location.

VICE: What were those machines like?
You stepped up to the platform, and the attendant would lower the ring over your head and that was kind of how you were protected, so you don't wander off and hurt yourself.

The games back then weren't like the VR experiences we're seeing today. Was it hard to sell people on VR?
I think that posed a lot of challenges. In the popular media—TV and movies— VR was portrayed as something much more advanced. So we were sort of on the front line of fielding the public's questions about VR back then. They would say, "What am I going to see? Is it going to be like the holodeck?" They had imaginations that ran wild, but then they were immersed in this mostly primitive shape kind of world. It was a novelty but there was such a big gap between what they were seeing on TV and in the movies. It's escaping me what the sitcom is called with Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt...

Mad About You!
Yeah Mad About You!

Yeah, if people thought you could really do the stuff they did on that show—fondle Christie Brinkley or Andre Agassi—they were definitely going to be disappointed. So from there, how'd you end up getting married in Virtual Reality?
My fiancé and I were young and broke back then. We had told some of our friends that we were getting married but we had decided to elope. One of my friends very casually said "So why not have your wedding at the theme arcade?" It kind of made me pause. I started to think, What if we could create a VR experience to get married in as a demonstration of how you could use the technology? a price tag of a million dollars. It was kind of my dad's favorite joke, that he was only virtually broke.

An early design sketch of Monika and Hugh's VR wedding platforms

What kind of headset did you have to wear?
It was lighter than the gaming one from Virtuality. But they got hot really fast. That was one of their limitations: you couldn't be in there for an hour or even a half an hour, because it would just start feeling like it's frying right in front of your face.

Yikes! So that headset took you on an undersea journey to the Lost City of Atlantis?
This was pre-cataclysmic Atlantis, so we were above the water.

Excuse me. So what was it like in there, and how did the carousel horses fit in?
It was based on Plato's description of Atlantis, but with some artistic license. We decided on a chariot instead of horses that would need to move, and that was too complicated. We needed something more whimsical, so they were actually like carousel horses.

Right. Carousel horses don't have to move their legs. So then what happened?
We started on a carrousel ride. It was me by myself on the carousel—my virtual bride avatar—and then it took me towards a bridge where I met my husband's avatar. We move towards the palace on top of a hill. Jesus, this is really taking me back, talking about it in detail!

So at that point you were only side-by-side with the groom in virtual space, right?
Technically we were about 12 feet apart, but in the virtual space we were right next to each other for the chariot ride of course and then when we moved towards the palace, the virtual palace in Atlantis. Then we kind of moved and walked together towards the minister.

How much detail was there?
The modelers and the engineers asked us questions like, so you know, We're going to assume that palace has marble floors. What kind of shoes are you wearing? What kind of sound effects should we have? It takes a lot of everything to replicate the real world, and an imagined world is even more challenging. Then we did the standard Christian ceremony with the minister.

With a Christian minister wearing a VR headset?
Yes, we were definitely rejected a couple of times before we found someone who didn't have any kind of problem with it.

We did an interview with BBC radio—it was a live radio interview—and the reporter said "Don't you think this is immoral?" It really caught me off-guard on live radio, because it didn't even cross our minds really. It was one thing to sort of find someone who was willing to take on a short ceremony that was so different—someone just open to it. But there was nothing that I thought about performing the ceremony itself in cyberspace to be immoral.

Weddings are supposed to be this symbolic coming-together, and you're across a room from each other. I'm sure you got questions like that, right?
I don't think he went into this type of specificity, but if two people may be far away from each other, but maybe wanted to get married in cyberspace, could that be considered legally binding? Like, have you been entered in a marriage contract by putting on virtual rings?

How'd you get around those kinds of concerns?
We did re-create the exchanging of the rings and the kiss afterward. My mom wanted an entirely other separate, non-circus kind of wedding. I said I'm actually only getting married once because once is already chaotic and hard enough.

In that case, when you think back on your wedding, which kiss feels like your wedding kiss? The virtual one, or the real-life one?
I think equally both. In the virtual space when we kissed, the engineers coded—without telling us—a big fireworks display, which we couldn't have indoors. And because we did the virtual ceremony first that elicited a lot of clapping and cheering. So that felt as real as doing the kiss afterwards.

After the wedding, I know you were all over the media, because that's how I found out about you. But what happened to CyberMind?
They were eventually bought by a German company, which continued longer than the US division did. And then eventually they sold the name, and the assets and logos to another company in Europe. The US company closed down the various locations across the country. I left them before they closed down. I probably left them around '95 or '96.

A couple years later, virtual reality really fell out of favor. What was that like, given that you'd made it so central in your life?
It was tough. It went from being so significant and intriguing, to the punchlines of jokes, and that kind of hurt personally. We had our fifteen minutes of fame, and then it was kind of like OK I can't talk about VR anymore.

Why not?
Because there was this thing called The Web, and the internet, and that was the shiny object, which of course was very significant also. But it hurt on a personal level because there was this technology that I really loved which then became kind of the butt of jokes.

How do you feel now that VR is popular again?
Last May, I curated a small pop-up VR museum. I kind of gathered and curated different artifacts from different luminaries in VR. So one of the things that was part of the pop-up museum was our wedding outfits, because our wedding attire in real life matched our avatars. I was proud to display those as a piece of VR history. Being there, and giving that pop-up museum as a gift back to the community, and talking to people during the conference, to me, that's what I would call kind of a personal turning point for me.

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Shock horror! Revolting scenes! A disgusting feast of filth for the LOONY left! These are just a few words from the mouths of delighted publications reacting to stagings of Sarah Kane's first play Blasted. The play—first performed in 1995—included scenes of rape, bombing, suicide, masturbation, and someone eating a dead baby. As the years passed and Kane's auteurship developed, critics began to regret their impulsive and unrestrained reaction to her work and hailed her instead as a unique voice.

Now, just over 20 years after that violent response to her work on its opening night, the National Theater in London is staging Kane's play Cleansed. As VICE wrote last month, this commitment can be seen as her ultimate acceptance into the British theater canon. Similar in style and NSFW content to Blasted, Cleansed is a political but abstract and experimental play about a man called Tinker who keeps people in a prison-like world for both body and mind. Each character has a warped ideal of love and goes his or her own way to acquire that affection.

The reaction to Cleansed has eerily mirrored Blasted's opening night. The Daily Mail's review by Quentin Letts gave it one star, saying that a couple hurried out of the theater, laughing that it was "the worst thing we've been to in years." As papers reported Wednesday, 40-ish theater-goers had walked out in the first six preview shows. If that weren't enough, five people have required medical attention after passing out. One blogger who had seen the show described the walkouts as "inevitable" and said she didn't even know what the production was about, even after watching the whole thing.

Let's consider this for a moment. If you've paid £35 to see a Kane play, you're aware of what you're strapping yourself in for. You're not expecting fat Russians sitting around drinking vodka or a well-to-do young woman choosing a life-partner between three unlikely suitors, with a few laughs along the way. In case the playwright's name means nothing to you, on the National Theater flyer and website it warns: "Contains graphic scenes of physical and sexual violence." If audience members are passing out, slumping in their padded seats, ushers shining their lights in faces, medics rushing through the aisle, then they should have done their research.

I'm not trying to be hard, but I've never passed out at a play, or film, or video game. I'm just the product of a demographic that grew up watching A Serbian Film stony-faced eating Haribo gummy bears at a sleepover and being passed a video of a horse fucking a woman on an iPhone screen in a classroom. The unwritten rules of art criticism state that salaciousness without a purpose or statement is unnecessary and constitutes a poor piece of work. And knowing the script and Kane's work, I doubt that's the case here. But in an effort to understand the response, I went along Wednesday night to see if I could stomach the squalid degradation.

As I sat down, the two girls next to me were talking about why they'd come. One had seen that it made people faint in the Daily Mail, so she had to get them both tickets immediately to see what the fuss was about. If the other woman hadn't come with her, she'd have come alone, she says. It's reminiscent of the way people had gone to Blasted after the first reviews were out, specifically to be offended, half-ready to walk out. That became the Sarah Kane experience. Whatever the artistic intention, it was overshadowed already by the challenge now proposed to the public.

The play starts. Within the first couple of minutes, Tinker, the doctor-cum-patriarchal overlord injects a young man named Graham in the eye with a lethal dose of heroin. This is a grim hospital-part-torture chamber, a literal translation of the micro-society Kane depicted. Immediately it's clear that, unlike the original production that was abstract and semi-stylized, director Katie Mitchell has gone for the visceral approach.

In this pursuit of love, everyone gets their junk out. Knobs are flopping out at every opportunity; Tinker masturbates to a dancing woman in a cell whom he later sleeps with, gay sex is simulated between lovers Carl and Rod, Grace has hetero sex with someone, people are humiliated by stripping naked frequently. At the beginning of play, once her brother Graham has been killed, Grace demands she get his clothes back. Tinker brings in a man wearing her brother's clothes. She orders the man to take them off, she strips completely naked and puts his suit and boxers half on in an effort to be closer to Graham and remains tits-out for the entire performance.

Actors being naked on stage is nothing new. Neither is simulating sex with very flaccid penises, so why the fuss? Likely because this exploration of love and sex happens while Tinker and his masked cronies torture everyone who is down there—seemingly without logic. For being gay, Carl gets a rod up his ass—admittedly that's a squeamish moment—and his hands and feet chiseled down by a machine. There's a sex change. There's a knife or pen that gets stabbed in a neck. None of this is remotely shocking if you've seen a grindcore film, if you've seen Saw or Hostel or even have read something slightly gory. These theatrical stunts are nothing if you have a fraction of imagination.

Katie Mitchell's production leaves the impression of an endless nightmare. Essentially, it's an interesting and valid interpretation of Cleansed that succeeds in being a less graphic Hostel for the stage. But the fainting audience members? The walking out? Nothing warranted it. It simply proves that we haven't evolved in 20 years. The demographic going to the theater is still the same as it was, cemented in upper-middle class bias with cuts to arts funding and fewer cheap tickets for young people floating around. The only ones likely to need medical help after a simulated stab to the neck or a gay sex scene are those old enough or entrenched enough in high culture to be unaccustomed to it. Last of all, the media response—"Is this the most shocking play ever staged?"; "The new National Theater play that is so gruesome it's making the audience FAINT"—is as tediously sensationalist as it was at the time, ensuring that people will flock to their seats expecting to be revolted. Everyone wants to engage in the theater of outrage. Cleansed is Blasted full-circle.

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The author in an orphanage in the Philippines

There was once a time in my life where faith offered me huge comfort. I prayed when my dad was ill, and I prayed just as hard for forgiveness right after I shoplifted a bath-bomb from the drug store. That feeling has dwindled into non-existence, but it has been replaced by unease at the policing of other people's faiths—Reddit atheists launching spectacularly unfunny attacks on the religious, or Ricky Gervais belittling believers from his iPhone.

I've never felt that sense of unease more intensely than when I became the awkward, lumbering guest of a teenage mom in Manila, in the small room where she lived with her baby, boyfriend, and several other family members.

We were in the Philippines to make a documentary about the underground abortion trade—a procedure forced underground because of the country's devout Catholicism—and we were filming with this young woman, who hadn't heard of contraception until she became pregnant. Because of this lack of sexual education, she now had a child to care for and was no longer able to study or find a job. None of the hot takes I had ready about abortion rights could prepare me for what I was supposed to be doing: challenging someone whose faith was trapping her in poverty but also providing an immeasurable amount of solace.

We started working on the film shortly after the Philippines passed the Reproductive Health Law, which, after a decade-long battle, promised to provide the country with sex education, maternal care, and universal access to contraceptives.

The inevitable filibustering of the law had included one opposition senator proclaiming that jerking off was "genocide." In retaliation, another demanded that Filipina women needed "satisfying sex," which could only be achieved with easy access to contraceptives. As colorful as the debates were, the bill's limp into law turned what should have been a moment of celebration for the Philippines into a reminder of the country's failings in reproductive health—not least its punitive abortion law and the proliferation of backstreet abortions which underpin it.

While Southeast Asia has a notoriously bleak reputation for access to safe abortions, the Philippines—the only predominantly Catholic country in the region—has long coupled this with tales of abject desperation. There have been reports of aborted fetuses being wrapped in plastic bags and volleyed into church courtyards or left in confessional booths, in a frantic attempt from the mothers to absolve themselves of sin. They are stories that are as absurd as they are heart-breaking, and they happen with alarming regularity.

However, last September, Pope Francis declared that 2016 would be a "year of mercy," where the power to absolve women who'd had abortions would be extended to all bishops. The declaration was in keeping with his comparatively progressive reign so far—one that continues to terrify conservative Catholics as he continues to break pope-protocol, ditching the papal Prada shoes and instead posting tweets about environmentalism.

In fact, just six months into his papacy, he thrilled the press and highlighted serious fractures within the Vatican, as he said the church had become "obsessed" with abortion, gay marriage, and contraception. So while Francis is not exactly flinging open the faith's doors to "sinners," his attempts to decentralize the church and become the "pope of the people" shows the quandary Catholicism is in today—where a fear of progression is at odds with the reality that, without modernization, Catholicism will continue its slow but steady decline.

Related: Watch the trailer for the new VICE documentary 'Year of Mercy'

Nowhere is this more marked than in the Philippines, where devotion is at constant loggerheads with the state's desire to modernize. A stronghold of the faith, the pope's 2015 visit to Manila ended with 6 million Filipinos attending his final mass, making it the largest ever event in papal history. However, this mammoth display of piety runs parallel to an increased softening in Filipino Catholicism. Over 72 percent of the public were in favor of the Reproductive Health Law, and when members of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines attacked the law, some members of local dioceses quietly opposed them, hinting at a battle between church officials behind closed doors.

This is a conflict within the church pointed out to us, with some relief, by Dr. Junice Melgar of Likhaan, a crucial NGO run from Manila that provides contraceptives and direct healthcare services to the most marginalized Filipina women.

Dr. Junice was personally targeted by Filipino pro-lifers, who sent her death threats and painted her as a kind of Dr. Robotnik-level end boss who had to be overcome in the fight to save Catholicism. Despite all this, she was instrumental in pushing the law into effect. Her long-term fight, of course, is for the Philippines to legalize abortion completely, and her line of argument on the matter is blunt: Abortions are a health necessity.

It's a debate that has taken center stage in international news recently, as the Zika virus continues to work its way through Latin America—a continent with many countries that have the same kind of punitive abortion laws as the Philippines. Laws that often don't allow for life-saving abortions, or abortion in cases of rape or incest.

In Brazil, where the Zika outbreak started, the government has been subject to international pressure—from the United Nations, alongside other organizations—to liberalize its law in a bid to help contain the virus. But a combination of an outspoken evangelical caucus in Brazil—again, like the Philippines—and a public not yet ready to talk about abortion, even as a health necessity, shuts down the conversation.

This is where Pope Francis's jamboree of progressiveness has hit a snag. In the wake of Zika, local bishops were left to flounder, offering contradictory advice while both the Vatican and the pope remained silent as the virus swept through these Catholic countries. That is, until last week, when Pope Francis cleared up his views on the matter, arguing that even therapeutic abortion is "what the mafia does... a crime, an absolute evil."

Though Pope Francis's 12-month forgiveness shindig is unraveling fast, it has at least provided vindication to the growing pro-choice campaigners in the Philippines to enlist one of the most powerful virtues of Catholicism. That is: to have compassion for one another, no matter what the perceived transgression. To have mercy on those who need it most.

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Photo by Jake Lewis

"It's like there's this warehouse of music, and we've all just been given the keys for the first time. And we can walk in, and there's just miles of music, heaps of it, going all the way to the back. But there's no map telling you where to go and what to listen to. So how are you going to find all the good stuff that's hidden out back? Or are you just going to spend your time listening to the stuff that's immediately in front of you?"

I'm on the phone with Ben Ratcliffe from his apartment in New York. As the New York Times music critic since 1996, Ratcliffe's spent the best part of two decades watching the music industry change beyond all recognition. We're talking about his book, Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen to Music Now, which suggests we should do away with conventional ideas of genres and become more flexible as listeners. Rather than categorizing music as jazz, or minimal, or techno, we should think about concepts that cut paths across genre—like "dense" music, for instance, or "sad" music.

Below is the rest of our chat about why Spotify is creepy and why genres suck.

VICE: You've been a music critic for 20 years. Have you always wanted to write this book?
Ben: The job I've had since the 90s involves listening to all types of music, apart from classical music, which forces you to think really broadly about music. I started thinking about writing this book five years ago—I was inspired by music appreciation books, which were really popular in the first half of the 20th century. Books like What to Listen for in Music, by Aaron Copeland. I started thinking, What would one of those books look like now?

The music industry has changed beyond recognition in the last 20 years, particularly with the advent of streaming services like Spotify. Do you think that abundance of choice has, in a way, made it harder for people to find music they like, because there's so much out there?
I hear that a lot from people—that they feel overwhelmed by choice. But I feel that idea is reinforced by the people who are trying to sell them music. These are the forces that are trying to define and limit our tastes—forces like Apple Music and Spotify. And it's going to be like this for the foreseeable future. So the question is: Are we going to let the three major record companies define us? Because that seems like a problem to me.

What's wrong with just finding all your music through Spotify?
Marketing works on fear. Somebody can sell to you better by making you feel anxious about something. And nowadays, many people find out about new music through recommendation engines, like Spotify's weekly playlist. I find this sort of stuff creepy, because it gets you right to a certain extent, but also doesn't get you right. It's very powerful being told by a sophisticated machine that it knows what you are like.

And you don't want to just end up relying on that machine to define your tastes for the rest of your life.
Yeah, it's easy to just fall down that hole and be comfortable forever, just listening to the music it recommends you. So I think we're at a crossroads now. We can either listen to what these data engines are telling us about our tastes, or we can seek out music with a little more vigor and curiosity. Listening to music is a more creative act than a lot of people think.

Your book suggests a new way of listening to music—rather than splitting sounds up by genre, you say, we should define it by qualities like "loudness" or "virtuosity." Is that not just going to get really confusing?
So when I listen to a piece of music—at home or out in a club, or whatever—I'm always looking for the key. Like, if I can just find the key for this piece of music and stick it in the door, then maybe I can find the essence of what this music is. That's what I set out to do in the book—to help people find that key.

What's your beef with genre?
I suspect that part of the reason we think so much about genre is that we've been trained to think that way by the people selling music to us. But what we should be doing is being more open to music.

Isn't it nice to be able to say you're into Detroit techno, or whatever, and just get really into that? You seem to be rejecting specialism.
Expertise is fantastic, and it's useful to listen to certain people who say, "You think you know about such and such, but let me play you the good stuff." But, I don't know, those people are useful, but are they more useful than casual listeners who just really like something? It's no fun if you have to understand the entire history of post-minimalism to understand where John Luther Adams is coming from. It's much more fun to just feel the shit, you know, and let it act upon you and tell you what it's trying to tell you.

Ben's book, Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen to Music, is available now.

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