Montreal's alleys and buildings have been her canvas for years, but don't call MissMe a street artist. "Artful vandal" is the nomenclature she prefers, a term she feels better describes the feminist wheatpastes she's been plastering across the globe for the last few years.

Her collections include tributes to famous trailblazers Simone de Beauvoir and Malala Yusafzai and effigies of musical greats Amy Winehouse and Nina Simone, to name but a few (plus she draws a mean Tupac). The former ad woman is also the artist behind the striking "Pussy Illuminati" stickers and bus shelter hijacks that have been popping up (mostly in Montreal) over the last few years.

Her most popular piece, however, is the semi-eponymous, pseudo self-portrait "Vandal," a drawing of a naked woman wearing a Mickey Mouse-eared balaclava.

All images via MissMe Art

For her latest exhibit at Montreal culture hub Phi Centre, MissMe was invited to plaster the gallery's walls with a few dozen larger-than-life renditions of her famous image. She then celebrated the end of the exhibit with the launch of a new video for which she recruited a group of women to bring her Vandals to life.

We met with the artist to talk about this "Army of Vandals" and to ask what it's like to do a whole day video shoot with a bunch of naked women you've just met (spoiler: it's amazing).

VICE: What does the Vandal represent?
MissMe: They're all different, well most of them are different, and they're basically here as a power army, as women that are unapologetic about their bodies, their sexualities and won't take any crap from anyone socially or mentally.

So you've been putting her up on the streets for years, and now you've brought her to life. Tell me about this video.
It's a very exciting project. I brought her to life when it comes to human form, because she's been living in my head, and in the streets, but it was just to make that transition. It's like in Mary Poppins, she had that little magic powder—it's like if you put that magic powder on my Vandals all over the world all over the streets and you just gave them a point to come and rally. It's basically just to show that the Vandal isn't just a piece of art, it's actually an idea that resonates with a lot of women across cultures, across languages, across countries, and that is a way to show it. Because it's very different to see an image that's drawn and painted and someone that is naked with a mask that's just looking at you and saying "What?"

This is a naked woman, but it's not sexual, is it?
Well, it can be sexual if the woman chooses it to be, but it doesn't intend to seduce. It's not using the power of her body to seduce in order to get someone to like her or to have an opinion on her or to feel the value of herself through the eyes of someone else. It's basically just trying to say that when you're born with a woman's body, automatically, sexually, you have the burden of what society puts on you. Society is very unresolved when it comes to sex and usually it falls upon the woman to carry that burden just because she's born with a woman's body, and I feel that is wrong. , women are blamed or women have to change the way they are or explain themselves, which makes no sense. So this is just a soldier claiming her body as just that—her body. Not an object of desire, not something to prove her worth.

There's a lot of power and a bit of rage in this video. What were you hoping to convey and how did the women feel, taking part in this?
It's not a video that's against anything—it's about taking possession of ourselves, but in a more aggressive way, against this oppressive mentality. It's a crazy video, completely out there.

It's 30 women from different backgrounds and cultures and shapes and ethnicities, who willingly took part. We asked people to participate without really explaining anything and in two days we got flooded with emails from people who said, "I want to be part of your army, I want to get involved."

The experience of filming the video was amazing. I can't find proper words, it was like a spiritual awakening through womanhood. We all felt so connected. And I didn't know most of these girls, because they replied to a call on Instagram—it's mostly people that follow me that I have never met. Everybody was so happy, everybody was so willing and, I mean, I asked these girls to get naked and to do ridiculous crazy stuff, and because it was such a lovely, self-accepting environment, everybody felt so empowered. I had so many girls come to me to say how amazing it was, how important it was. We finished filming at 11 at night and no one wanted to leave, and we had filmed for like ten hours.

It's crazy for me to realize how many people are following this, how much this affects people. One girl came up to me with tears in her eyes and she said this was really important for her to have been there. She said 'No you don't understand, it's the first time in my life that I am naked in front of anyone other than myself.' And she told me it was extraordinary, that she felt beautiful, womanly, good. It was insane for me, completely crazy. One girl got her period in the middle, and I was like, "It's no big deal! We'll put paint on it!" It was really just about accepting who we were, and all the shame we can associate with our bodies vanished during the shoot.

So do you feel like your army of Vandals, which has now come to life, is becoming a movement?
I don't know if it's a movement, I like the idea that it could be a movement. It definitely represents something that speaks to a lot of people that is very real, it definitely talks about subjects that a lot of people are talking about, but in a different way, in a way I think that a lot of women feel is more relevant to them because it has less fancy words. It's less patronizing, less cute and girly. Because it's more real, more raw and caters to a lot of types of more raw women that are a little less cute, a little less fitting into those girly boxes. But it says the same thing: Empower yourself and empower other women, because we're not there yet and it's a beautiful thing to do.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Follow Brigitte Noël on Twitter.

Illustrations by Polly Williams

The door was barricaded, and I was drunk. After some promising foreplay and a few singular thrusts, it was clear that would be the sum of it. My dress was pushed up around my hips; I mentally shrugged. He was propped up, lying half on top of me. His blinking eyes had a sheen of elation, like he was seeing his surroundings—my messy room, me, the world—after a lifetime of being blind.

"That was actually the first time I've done that," he said. I laughed at first—then came the uncertainty, then the confusion, then a horrible cold feeling washed over my body.

After that night, I would inadvertently take the virginity of a number of grown men. Men in their early 20s, their late 20s, and their early 30s. One guy from work, someone off Tinder, grown men with real jobs and large friend groups. It was never someone you'd look at and think, He's a certifiable 30-year-old virgin.

That's the crux of this dynamic: No one knows who is a virgin and who isn't. The person you sit next to at work could be a virgin. The person you made out with on Saturday night could be one. You could very well be a virgin. And that's fine—people lose their virginity when it's the right time for them. But it's weird when, as the virginity-taker, you don't know what you've done until it's over.

On each occasion, the night would be fumbling along. I'd be told after the act itself—over coffee in the morning or a week later in a drunken outpouring of emotion. Upon finding out, I'd feel various things, none of which make me sound like a nice person. I'd been lied to, first and foremost. I'd been tricked into a role of responsibility. It's understandably hard for a virginal man, gay or straight, living in a hyper-sexualized society where male promiscuity is lauded, to admit that he hasn't yet had sex—but, really, letting someone know that you're about to take his or her virginity is, obviously, the decent thing to do.

When I told my friends about it, they'd tell me I was lucky. I will always be the first person for that guy, they'd sigh. Partners would come and go, but I'd be right there at the beginning of their timeline. I didn't share their opinion.

I'm over my curse, thank God, but I'm not alone in accidentally taking men's virginities. Here are some other women talking about this strange experience.

A VERY UNROMANTIC DEFLOWERING

It was a beautiful summer and the last one I'd be spending in London before moving away. I started hanging out with this guy through mutual friends. We went on a date, and afterward, I asked him back to my apartment. On the bus, he said that he didn't usually do stuff like that. I told him that was fine, thinking he meant hooking up on a first date.

We got back to mine and had sex, and afterwards he said he'd never actually done it before. It wasn't terrible or anything, and I don't think I'd have realized he was a virgin if he hadn't told me. He wasn't particularly embarrassed, but he seemed to think it was a pretty big deal, understandably.

He asked whether I thought he should have told me beforehand or not, but I didn't really mind either way. All I could think about was that it was bound to be a bigger experience for him than it would be for me. I definitely wished it could have been special for him. I didn't do anything special, like put candles or music on. The following week I found out that all his friends had been waiting for him to lose his virginity, so it was a big deal for them too. I don't think about it much any more, but it's a nice memory.

Anoushka, 26

THE INTOXICATING POWER OF THE PUSSY

I was at a guy's house party and we kissed in the backyard after polishing off the last of the Strongbow, before going up to his room. There were some clues that he was a complete novice—he'd clearly never encountered a bra before, and his kisses sent saliva pouring down my chin. We ended up having good, old fashioned missionary sex, but it still took him ages to find the right hole. Seconds later, it was over.

Don't let the appointment of a new top cop in Chicago fool you: The city's epidemic of street violence and record number of homicides runs much deeper than one guy can fix.

Still, all eyes are on Eddie Johnson, the veteran cop named interim superintendent this week in a bold (some say slick) move by Mayor Rahm Emanuel. An African American who didn't even apply for the job, Johnson jumped the line in front of three other candidates recommended by the Chicago Police Board. But residents and advocates focused on the city's gun violence woes—38 people were shot over Easter weekend alone—know better than to get excited about new personnel.

"Sometimes we look to the police too much for solutions, and they get too much credit when violence is up or down," says Natalie Moore, author of the just-released The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation. "These issues are kind of beyond that. We have to be less concerned over some sort of magic number."

The police board has been holding public hearings throughout the city this year, which, in true Chicago style, Mayor Emanuel apparently saw fit to ignore. Chicagoans are used to such ham-fisted treatment, though: In 2003, then-Mayor Richard M. Daley bulldozed a downtown runway in the middle of the night with no advance warning—closing the airport known as Meigs Field forever.

The truth is street violence isn't determined by the police chief when you have a city with a high black and brown unemployment rate, according to the Rev. Jesse Jackson, founder of the RainbowPUSH Coalition, which is headquartered on the city's South Side. In 2015, the jobless rate in Illinois was 12 percent for African Americans and 7.2 percent for Hispanics.

Indeed, Zarriel Trotter, a 13-year-old Chicago boy who appeared in an award-winning anti-violence public service announcement, was struck by a stray bullet last Friday. And while the streets bleed for wont of opportunity, Jason Van Dyke, the cop behind McDonald's death, has been hired by the city's police union as a janitor since his firing and indictment. Someone actually created a jobs program for a man seen gunning down a child in the streets, but Chicago can't find the wherewithal to put antsy, disaffected young people to work year after year.

Until the city—and country—gets serious about treating Chicagoans with respect, all the personnel changes in the world won't be enough to get us out of this mess.

Follow Deborah on Twitter.

Rainboots for dogs, Hunter's April Fools gag for 2015

April Fools' Day used to be a fairly innocuous tradition that involved newspapers publishing one silly story somewhere near the bottom of the page in the "In Brief" section. Over the last few years, though, a blend of social media, viral culture, and Photoshop have swung April Fools' Day into more calculated territory, as global brands have attempted to hijack the banterwagon and transform it into dollar dollar bills.

Let's consider a selection of last year's branded pranks: celebrity boot company Hunter promoted a range of tiny wellies for dogs, Marmite announced a transparent spread named "Marmite Clear," ASOS pioneered a clip-on man bun, and Pizza Hut launched a Scratch-n-Sniff menu. None of the items were actually sold, but each had a different kind of financial value of another kind: making these brands seem fun.

We asked an expert in the form of Alex Holder, one half of advertising creative duo Oli and Alex, the award-winning executive creative directors and partners at ad agency Anomaly. Here's what she told us.

VICE: How do April Fools' Day stunts by brands work? Who makes this stuff up?
Alex: I've worked in advertising agencies for years, and I've seen many April Fools' Day briefs come to the agency. I guess the client says, "Hey, we need to be funny and culturally relevant on April 1, let's brief the agency!" Then the agency gets the brief, and everyone in the creative department gets excited because they're being asked to tell a joke rather than just sell a car.

What happens next? How do you come up with ideas?
Like any brief, creatives, normally in teams of two, write up a load of ideas. It's as clichéd as you'd imagine: notepad, pen, sit in front of a slightly snazzy mural in the corner of an open plan office in Soho. There'll be lots of ideas suggested, some completely missing the mark and some that could be lol. They'll be a big creative review, which is essentially a load of people sitting around a boardroom table reading out ideas to one another and trying to get a laugh out of the group. They'll be some decision-maker in the room, a creative director, and the best ideas will be polished, popped into a Keynote, and presented to the client. Hopefully the client likes one of the ideas and that gets made.

Why do you think April Fools' Day has become so important to brands?
Because it's a chance for them to prove to their customers that they can be funny and human. It's also the only time of a year some brands feel safe telling a joke. How sad is that? Waiting all year to be funny? It's like only telling your husband you love him on Valentine's Day.

Imagine the human that only tells a joke once a year. On April Fools' Day. No one would be friends with them. It's a shame some brands haven't realized that people want them to be constantly less uptight and corporate.

Samsung's phone that cuts vegetables

What's the worst attempt at a stunt by a brand that you've seen?
It's the ones where a lot of money and time has been spent on a very weak gag. There's a ridiculous myth in advertising that an ad only has to be "quite" funny. A mobile phone company pretending that you can use its phone to slice vegetables, or an ice-cream company saying that it's created new anti-freeze brain helmets, can't be the best use of a chance to make a load of people laugh. Even the best gags, even if they're made by a person, if they're made on April Fools' Day, it has to be fucking good for you to laugh.

And what about the best?
I love that Google often use April Fools' Day to release new technology. Not a joke, but a knowing nod to the day. Google is always in on the joke—I like that. The company feels like the smart person in the room. It's old, but the BBC's 2008 iPlayer advert Penguins ... It was at a time when we were still charmed by big media trying to pull off a gag. Also it was like grandpa telling a sweet joke—and no one can begrudge that.

In a world of satire, do you think we're now post-prank? Have we become too wise to be punked by brands?
No, but just choosing one for April Fools' Day is a bit of an eye-roll because everyone is doing it, like, Oh gosh, what's your April Fools' joke? Why do brands have to be stuffy, awkward, and boring most of the time and then once a year make a little weak gag? When a brand makes an April Fools' joke, it's like it's saying, "l know the rest of the year l'm a bore, but hey, l can let my hair down when l want to."

Follow Bryony on Twitter.

The dining table of the future. All photos were taken by Stefano Santangelo

This article originally appeared on VICE Italy.

"While recognizing that great deeds have been performed in the past by men badly or crudely nourished, we affirm this truth: that we think, dream, and act according to what we eat and drink."
—Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

A little over a century ago, in 1909, the Italian poet and art theorist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published The Futurist Manifesto. It became a seminal work, giving life to the homonymous artistic and cultural movement that's been one of the most avant-garde and absurd in history. After starting the movement, stating that "art can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice" and inspiring Mussolini and Italian fascism, Marinetti decided to dedicate himself to applying the Futurist principles to as many disciplines as possible—including gastronomy. That's how he ended up writing The Futurist Cookbook—an actual recipe book.

In practice, Futurist cooking was short-lived. Marinetti himself had a Futurist restaurant in Paris for some time, which he started with the help of French chef Jules Maincave. After that attempt, various restaurants opened under the "Futurist restaurant" moniker, but for the most part, it was more the décor that could be called Futurist, rather than the menu. Probably for the best, given that the guidelines for Futurist cooking are truly absurd.

First of all, Marinetti proposes to get rid of cutlery so as not to interfere with the possible "pre-labial tactile pleasure" that eating can give. He wanted to abolish traditional condiments in favor of having some smells waft through the air, and, in a more general sense, he wanted to remove "everyday mediocrity from the pleasures of the palate." Having dinner should, in Marinetti's mind, be an experimental journey through the senses. On top of that, he deemed it necessary to ban the "absurd Italian gastronomic religion" that is pasta, in order to free Italy from the weight of its wheat imports and to promote the local rice industry.

Marinetti invites his readers to invent new flavors through "pills, albuminoid compounds, synthetic fats, and vitamins" and hopes for the creation of "simultaneous and changing canapés which contain ten, 20 flavors." He writes: "In futurist cooking, these canapés have by analogy the same amplifying function that images have in literature. A given taste of something can sum up an entire area of life, the history of an amorous passion or an entire voyage to the Far East."

Since this all sounds amazing, I got hold of a copy of The Futurist Cookbook. It wasn't just its absurdity that sparked my interest, but also the knowledge that I would be one of the few people who has prepared and eaten these dishes in decades. I got my friend and colleague Federico involved, and one evening last week, we embarked on an adventure into hardly explored culinary territories.

A toast

We had to compile a menu from the cookbook, which wasn't easy—every recipe seemed very deserving to be made. We made a selection based on how inspired we felt by a dish, by how difficult it would be to prepare, and by the aesthetics and name of it. That meant that too complicated dishes like "Sculpted Meat" or not Futurist enough sounding dishes like "Divorced Eggs" ("Divide some hard boiled eggs in half and remove the yolks inside. Put the yolks on a mashed potatoes and then the whites") were off the table.

In the end, we decided on "Tummy Tickler," the "Excited Pig," and the "Black Shirt Snack" as starters. The main dish would have to be the "Fasces"—according to the recipe, its shape ought to bring to mind a fasces—a symbol of authority in the Roman Empire that later became the symbol of Italian Fascism. To accompany it all, we'd have a "polibibita" (poly-drink, the Futurist version of a cocktail) with the suggestive name "Devil in Black Key." It consisted of two quarters orange juice, one quarter grappa, one quarter liquid chocolate, and a floating hard-boiled egg yolk. Just to be safe, we also bought cheap beers.

We spent about an hour preparing it all, before we sat down at the table. We decided to start with a toast so that I could try the polibibita. Federico toasted with water.

The Devil in Black Key: "2/4 orange juice, 1/4 grappa, 1/4 liquid chocolate. Add a hardboiled egg yolk."

I don't know what Marinetti was thinking when he chose these ingredients, but the fact of the matter is that once we sat down to drink, the chocolate had sunk to the bottom of the glass. It looked like mud, it smelled terrible, and it tasted exactly like you'd expect—like grappa, with egg and orange juice and a slight aftertaste of chocolate. You can see how the tasting went for me in the GIF below.

After having a few sips, I put the polibibita aside and cracked open a beer.

The Tummy Tickler: "A disc of pineapple with sardines, tuna, and nuts"

Then we ate. Because of its name, we thought that it would be wise to start with the "Tummy Tickler." At first sight, this dish seems disgusting, but it turned out to be the most edible thing we prepared all night. Humanity doesn't necessarily consider pineapples and sardines to be complementary, but honestly, the combination isn't too bad. The extreme sweetness of the pineapple and the saltiness of the sardines turned out to be a sweet-and-sour bolus made quite doughy by the tuna. It seems strange at the beginning, but once you get used to it, it becomes totally edible. It's worth noting that the nuts add nothing to the whole experience.

The second dish was the "Excited Pig": A raw salami served without its skin in a bath of coffee and Eau-de-Cologne—we didn't have that, so we replaced it with standard men's perfume. For some reason, I was under the impression that this would have been the most inviting dish of the whole dinner, but instead, it was the only one we didn't even try. Besides worrying about getting tapeworm or salmonella, the idea of drinking perfume just wasn't tempting. The smell emanating from the plate made it even less enticing.

The Excited Pig: "A whole salami, skinned, is served upright on a dish containing some very hot black coffee mixed with a good deal of eau de cologne."

According to The Futurist Cookbook, the perfect meal cannot be achieved by simply following the recipes word for word. It is not the quality of the ingredients or the talent of the chef that makes a difference but how well one adheres to a certain etiquette when presenting or tasting the various dishes, too. For example, the Futurists thought music should not be played while you're eating but during intervals between the dishes, "so as not to distract the sensitivity of the tongue and palate but to help annul the last taste enjoyed by establishing gustatory virginity."

We followed this guideline with particular enthusiasm, pausing after each dish to play something on YouTube. Marinetti did not specify what kind of music should help establish gustatory virginity, so we tried a bit of everything, from chants from Italy's fascist era to Avril Lavigne.

The Black Shirt Snack: "A fish cutlet between two large discs of rennet apple—the whole doused in rum and set alight before serving"

By this point, the pineapple and sardines had tickled our tummy sufficiently to be very hungry, so we decided to move on to the "Black Shirt Snack," an apple cut in two with a battered cutlet of cod in between. The original recipe required the dish to be soaked in rum and served in flames, but we wanted to avoid setting the house on fire. So we opted to do it flambé—we put the dish in the sink and set fire to it in a controlled environment.

To be honest, if it hadn't been for that final part, it could have even been tasty. Apple and fish aren't bad together. The real problem here was the foul taste of the cheap rum we'd bought, which was so terrible it took a considerable effort to even light it.

After we'd devoured the fish and—with some effort—part of the apple, we were ready for the final monster of the evening. The "Fasces" is one of the most important Futurist dishes of Marinetti's manifesto—a composition of minced meat, celery stalks, and rice. It was the most difficult recipe of the lot, but we managed to follow it word for word. And I have to say that the result was baffling.

The Fasces—"Several stalks of cardoon or celery measuring 10 cm in length, when pre-cooked in water placed straight, so that they form an empty cylinder. These are fixed on top of a semisphere of white rice, with half a lemon on top. The interior of the cylinder is filled with minced meat, oil, pepper, and salt. The rice is decorated with a piece of cucumber, a piece of banana and a piece of beetroot."

Building the structure wasn't easy, but the final result was better than I could have hoped. The raw minced meat inside the cylinder of celery stalks, seasoned with oil, salt, and pepper, was basically a carpaccio. The rest was quite tasteless—especially the rice. At this point, I'd lost count of the number of beers we'd had, so I'm a bit vague on the details with this dish.

All in all, I have to say that some of the Futurist rules for cooking turned out to be less absurd than they seemed at first glance. Sure, some excesses are decisively revolting, but in general, I can say that these dishes aren't just culinary provocation.

After we had cleared the table, we did the dishes. From the window of the kitchen, we could see the Cimitero Monumentale—the cemetery where Marinetti is buried. He didn't seem to have turned in his grave.

(The translation for the Marinetti's quotes comes from the 2014 Penguin Modern Classics edition of The Futurist Cookbook)

All photos courtesy of Éditions de l'Œil.

This article was originally published on VICE France

Film director Gérard Kikoïne is considered to be one of the architects of French porn. Between 1974 and 1984, Kikoïne shot dozens of movies capturing the wild side of a generation that had just been liberated by the events of May '68, emancipated by the contraceptive pill and not yet wrecked by AIDS.

Late last year, Kikoïne published a photo book featuring hundreds of unreleased behind the scenes photographs from his movie sets – Le Kikobook. I talked to him about that golden age of French porn.

VICE: Hi Gérard. So were the 1970s the giant, 24-hour gangbang our generation imagines it was?
Gérard Kikoïne: Ah, the giant gangbang myth! No, not at all. When you arrive on set at nine in the morning, believe me, you are only there to work. And I never abused my position as director and producer. Many people in the business – and mostly in the traditional cinema industry – would sleep with the young actresses, but I didn't. We behaved better than the "real" cinema guys did.

What was the work like?
Well, the rolls of film were very expensive. And we had to shoot two versions for each movie – a softer one that would pass censorship and a hardcore one that would be shown in specific theatres. So we were far, very far from the giant gang bang fantasy. In fact, everything was well organised and well prepared. Even the hardcore scenes were almost never improvised, unless the actors felt very comfortable. Each set was carefully put together and the castings were coherent. The petrol pump attendant looked like a petrol pump attendant. The architect looked like an architect.

So it was all professional.
Everything was square. The art director was very strict on the lights or the accessories. I didn't budge when it came to details either. Especially because there was quite a lot of dialogue in my films. It might have something to do with my passion for German expressionism. I admired the openings of Mike Nichols, the lights of Stanley Kubrick or the subversion of Lindsay Anderson. Everyone I worked with loved cinema.

Who were your haters?
Well the MLF never came to stop one of our shoots, but that was hardly a surprise: My films glorified women. My actresses were at the centre of my plots. There was something very liberating for the women in it all. And no woman was forced to do a movie – nobody came on set with a pimp.

What were the actors you worked with like?
I worked with a generation of post-68 hedonists. They liked having fun and exposing themselves. And they loved sex. Brigitte Lahaie had enough family money; she was just in it for a laugh. Most of my muses acted in my movies because they wanted to, not because they needed to make ends meet. In the evenings, those who wanted could have a gang bang, but during the day we all worked.

Whether it likes it or not, French cinema tastes a bit like my dick. - Alban Ceray

Did a lot of people see your movies?
Yes! Between 1977 and 1982, my movies sold more than 4 million tickets. They did very well and were distributed in about 30 countries. We were everywhere. One day Alban said: "Whether it likes it or not, French cinema tastes a bit like my dick."

Well put.
And a percentage of ticket sales went to the CNC . Our money was very welcome. Porn money!

What did the traditional French cinema think of you?
I think the industry really had the worst opinion of us. When I stopped making porn, I was blacklisted. The Americans wanted me but nobody in France wanted to work with me.

Brigitte Lahaie in Parties Fines.

How do you feel about porn being everywhere these days?
Porn has always progressed through ruptures and shocks. I directed porn for movie theatres – you'd go to a theatre and see a full screen penis on a 4 meter wide screen. After that, you could see porn on VHS and TV. The first TV broadcast of a porn movie in France was in 1985. That was a shock, even for me. A couple of years earlier it had been completely unthinkable for TV to broadcast porn. The fact that porn has become so accessible through giant platforms like YouPorn definitely exposed a larger audience to the genre.

Today, people come to shake my hand when I go out to eat. That would never have happened 15 or 20 years ago. We're at a point where porn culture inspires the creative industry. But the complete accessibility of all pornographic content – the worst and the best – makes the individual works forgettable. Our movies will last, because we made them with laughter, vitality and love and respect for women.

Le Kikobook was published with Les Éditions de l'Œil.

Scroll down for more pictures:

Photo by Julian Master

Read: How Liberals Finally Started Winning the Minimum Wage Fight

Governor Andrew Cuomo and state legislators have agreed on a budget that will bring New York City's minimum wage to $15 before 2019, with the rest of the state slowly rising as well over the coming years, the New York Timesreports.

NYC small businesses—those with ten or fewer employees—get an extra year to raise wages from $9 to $15.

Upstate, the wage hike will roll out more gradually, aiming to hit $12.50 by the end of 2020. Cuomo expects it to continue towards $15, with state labor and budget analysts keeping tabs to make sure the raise isn't causing economic harm.

The budget comes just a few hours after the California legislature approved a historic statewide plan to bring minimum wage to $15 by 2022—and four years after fast-food workers in NYC started the Fight for $15. That nationwide push to raise wages and create awareness around minimum wage workers and working conditions has been injected into the presidential campaign, with Democratic insurgent Bernie Sanders often hitting the subject at his rallies.

WHAT A HARMLESS APRIL FOOL'S JOKE, WHAT COULD GO WRONG pic.twitter.com/Maw8a6VUSA
— Andy Baio (@waxpancake) April 1, 2016

Every year on April Fools' Day, Google rolls out a slew of gags. There was the robot hand that swipes your phone for you, Google Fiber's new dial-up mode, and some Pokemon thing on Google Maps. This year, though, Google's latest gag wound up doing some damage for unsuspecting Gmail users.

The joke feature, called "Send and Mic Drop," is supposed to be a kind of digital way to have the last word. When clicked, it sends the email and hides further replies from the sender from seeing any further replies. It also adds a .GIF of a Minion wearing a crown dropping the mic for good measure. That Minion thing aside, it wasn't very clear for users what the new joke button did, so things got pretty bad, pretty fast.

One user wrote in a Google forum post about sending an article he had been assigned to write to his editor while accidentally hitting Mic Drop, resulting in them getting an angry voicemail and losing their job. Other people reported similar stories of professional and important email chains shot to hell thanks to the button. (You could apparently find replies to Mic Drop'd messages in the "all mail" folder, but that wasn't clear to everyone.)

Chris Eubank Jr and Nick Blackwell at the weigh-in before their fight. Screen shot via

Almost a week after taking a beating from Chris Eubank Jr. during the British middleweight title bout, boxer Nick Blackwell remains in a medically-induced coma with a small bleed on the brain. His family is reportedly expecting him to come to in the next couple of days.

A bleed on brain is by no means a common injury in the sport, but this incident has got some asking how, in such a high-profile fight, something like this could have happened. The victor's father, Chris Eubank Sr., has stated that if he was refereeing he would have taken "the only decision a father could," by stopping the fight much sooner. The issue of same-day weigh-ins has also been raised, with promoter Kellie Maloney calling for it to be reintroduced "so fighters can't cheat on the weight."

A similar case happened back in 1991, when Chris Eubank Sr. ended the career of Michael Watson in that year's super-middleweight title fight, putting Watson in a 40-day coma. This incident changed the sport and led to a host of new safety measures being introduced. So how is it that nearly 25 years later the same thing has happened again?

To find out, I spoke to Dr. Mike Loosemore from the Institute of Sport Exercise and Health, and doctor to the British Boxing team.

VICE: Is what happened to Blackwell a typical injury in the sport?
Dr Mike Loosemore: It depends how you define "typical". It's a very rare injury—it happens very occasionally in many sports, including boxing.

Does this sort of thing tend to happen more in professional than amateur boxing?
It is more common in professional boxing than amateur—the professionals box more rounds and land more punches.

So the average blow to the head in an amateur boxing match, how much damage is that going to cause?
There's always a risk with any blow to the head, whether it's delivered by a boxing glove or a rugby player's knee. Any blow to the head always carries the risk of a problem. In reality, it's a very rare occurrence.

What measures have been taken in recent years to mitigate the kind of thing that happened to Blackwell last weekend?
The level of medical cover and the standard of medical care at ringside have generally been increased. So when this very unfortunate incident happened in the professional ranks, medically it was dealt with very well—the ringside doctors and paramedics knew what to do. There was obviously a plan in place, and the young man was taken to a local neurosurgical unit very rapidly, which gave him the best chance possible of having a good outcome from what is a very serious injury.

Is there any way of conditioning against this sort of thing in training?
Really, the fitter you are and the better condition you're in, the less likely it is that this will happen. Most injuries of this nature occur at the end of long, hard bouts, when people begin to get tired. So, obviously, the fitter you are, the better it is. But you can get caught with a sucker punch at any time, the same as you can get a knee to the head playing rugby.

Are injuries sustained in boxing similar those you'd see in rugby?
You'll see very similar injuries in rugby union and league, horse racing, cycling, ice-skating, ice hockey, Australian-rules football—anything where you have a chance of banging your head, really.

Do you think kids who box should wear padding up to a certain age?
Well, we do contact-free boxing up until 11, and then you can start contact. The rounds are shorter, and lengthen as you progress to a senior, where the longest we do in the amateurs is three three-minute rounds. It's a common sense way of progressing.

Do you see many kids with significant injuries?
No, it's virtually unheard of in kids.

What could be done to further reduce the risks?
Well, the risk is low anyway—what do you do to make it any lower? To stop boxers getting head injuries you need to match them properly so they're boxing the right person. You need an experienced referee who knows what they're doing; you need a corner man or a coach who will pull the boxer if they're at all concerned about their welfare. And if something does go wrong, you need a well-trained medical setup at ringside with a clear pathway to get the stricken boxer to the hospital as quickly as possible. All these things are currently in place. Add to that annual medicals for the boxers, including brain scans and a host of other testing.

Do you think any of those things were lacking in the Eubank Jr. and Blackwell fight?
No, I think all those things were in place at the time—hindsight is a wonderful thing.

How would you evaluate the risk vs health benefits of boxing?
You always have to have risk-benefit discussions; I think that's really important. I'm involved in boxing because the benefits are massive. In amateur boxing, we reach a very difficult-to-reach group of young men and women who often never see a doctor, never get involved with any health advice, are often in communities that are isolated. It allows boxers from all different weights to get involved. The police say it reduces violence in some areas to a greater extent by building a boxing club than by building a police station—it has a profound effect on young people and can improve their behavior. It can allow them to progress by giving them self-esteem. To step into the ring you have to be brave.

Want to read more sport stories? Try VICE Sports—it's full of them.

Image by Lia Kantrowitz

Do you want to hear a joke? So do I. I can appreciate the artistry involved in an elaborate yarn or a sharp one-liner. I enjoy having my knocks knocked. After a childhood aversion, I've even come around on the beauty of a well-placed pratfall. Like most people, I think I have a pretty good sense of humor.

However, I do not like pranks.

I know this is an unpopular opinion, akin to saying you believe grandmas are overrated. Upon hearing it, well-meaning people barrage me with stories from middle school and clips of Nathan for You. Sometimes I'll even laugh, and they take that as proof that I do not truly dislike pranks. They're wrong. My issue is not that I don't think pranks work (though I do think that most pranks are unfunny); I just think pranks are bad. If someone were to force you to watch a stolen nudie vid of my sister, you may become aroused, but that doesn't necessarily mean you are in favor of stolen nudie vids.

Pranks exploit a balance of power. You might prank your co-worker, but you probably wouldn't prank your boss. Between friends, it's usually the dominant members of the group who play a trick on the weaker ones. Would a prank by any other name sound as harmless? Hazing is essentially a vicious form of pranking that results in multiple deaths per year.

I was recently told a story about a traveling college sports team who secretly stuck a Ziplock bag containing a bottle of lotion and a large double-sided dildo into their coach's luggage. At the airport, when asked if he was carrying any liquids, the coach said "no," forcing the TSA agent to rummage around in his bag and pull out the dildo-lotion bag and ask "Is this yours?" in full view of the security line, howling athletes included. I think it was also the coach's birthday.

I laughed, of course, but I was immediately plagued with uncomfortable questions. For starters, isn't this a gay joke? Maybe the players didn't mean it that way—they probably just spent ten seconds debating, "What's the funniest thing to put in Coach's luggage?" But why is a big double-sided dildo the go-to funniest thing to be caught with? There's nothing wrong with involving a big fake dick in your sex life. Isn't it plausible that someone in the vicinity might have seen this incident as just another instance of society mocking gay people? Might this person have felt personally wounded? But also: Maybe secretly having a giant penis statue in your duffel is just funny. Surely it's possible to acknowledge that some sex acts are humorous without saying that the people who like them are bad? In finding this troubling, am I being the kind of bore who compliments your new engagement ring by noting that I recently read an article about how there's no such thing as a non-blood diamond?

The point here is not to decide if this joke is OK, but to say that thoughts like these go through my head every time I witness a prank. They make me physically uncomfortable. Think about the infamous Jackass prank where a man leaves a car seat with a (fake) baby on top of his SUV and then starts to drive. You are supposed to laugh at Home Depot shoppers who desperately try to tell a man there's a kid on his car. Do we really want to live in a world where we worry about being punk'd before warning a stranger about their child's imminent death? Not to mention how weird it is that TV prank shows feature celebrities putting civilians into situations where they humiliate themselves so that we, the knowing audience, can mock them.

Ultimately, pranks ignore the fundamental truth that living can be hard, and most people are trying to do their best. Our lives are a series of relative victories and minor defeats, with occasional eruptions of love, life, and loss. It's impossible to know what someone's going through. So today, before you put up that irreverent lost pet dragon flyer, ask yourself how it might affect someone whose cat recently died. Before you put your co-worker's Jello-encased stapler back on her desk, consider that she might be going through a horrible breakup. What I'm saying is that, as a prank happens, this person with aspirations and bills is thrown into temporary crisis. Why would you want to add more bad moments to someone else's life?

There's a pretty simple way to tell if a joke is offensive: If the punchline is the victim, the joke is probably bad. Pranks take this one step further. They not only laugh at the victim, pranks create a victim for the sole purpose of laughing at them. If that's your idea of a good time, maybe you're the April Fool.

Follow Hanson on Twitter.

Piramida shopping mall. All photos by Lazara Marinković

This article originally appeared on VICE Serbia.

During the 1980s and 1990s, dozens of shopping malls were erected in the Serbian capital of Belgrade, representing a new, modern shopping experience in the formerly Communist city. They were built almost overnight, and seem to have been abandoned with the same swiftness. They smell of mildew and decay now—the shop windows plastered with newspaper sheets. People who used to come here now shop online, or have moved on to bigger, shinier, newer shopping malls where only international chains and rich local tycoons can afford to rent a space.

I went to visit some of them, to see the state they're in now. One of these malls is Staklenac (Glass house in Serbian)—a hideous glass makeshift construction built for temporary use, 27 years ago. It was, unsuccessfully so, built in the image of London's Crystal Palace. Only a couple of shops inside it are open now—some fast food places and newsstands, an internet cafe and a yoga place. There are days when nobody comes in.

Cumic, a tiny mall in the heart of Belgrade, is an exception. Most shops are as abandoned as in any other mall of its kind, but a collective of 20 Serbian designers is renting a wing of the building to sell its work. Still, one of the designers told me that although they now have a shop in the heart of Belgrade, they mostly sell online.

Photo via Flickr user Andy Nystrom

An integrated police force stationed on Parliament Hill confiscated more weapons and drugs, including random baggies of cocaine, in a recent six-and-a-half-month period than in all of 2013 and 2014.

The Parliamentary Protective Service, created last summer following the fatal October 2014 shooting on Parliament Hill, is comprised of members of the RCMP and security officers who guard the House and Senate.

Between June 2015 and the first two weeks of 2016, the force recorded 21 incidents of security breaches, such as drugs and weapons possession, according to information obtained by the CBC through an Access to Information Request.

The findings revealed a 9-mm Luger pistol and ammo was found at the visitor centre in the Centre Block last September; cops discarded the weapon. Four knives and some dog repellant were also confiscated on Canada Day—there were no weapons seizures reported in the previous two years, aside from the fatal shooting.

But the biggest spike has been in drugs found on the grounds. A handful of people have been busted smoking weed near the Supreme Court building or elsewhere and in some parking lot called The Pit, the CBC reports. On two occasions, people ditched bags of cocaine in the Centre Block (why not just burn a bunch of money?).

Politicians are also getting mailed free drugs, including diethyltryptamine oxalate, a hallucinogen that was sent to a Conservative MP, and weed sent by Vancouver activist Dana Larsen to several Liberal constituency offices.

Larsen told the media in January that he was going to send a gram to each of the 184 Liberal MPs, but the Parliamentary Protective Service only reported four seizures.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

All screenshots via Youtube

We live in divided times. Some of us watch Fox News while slowly eating a vat of fried meat; others snapchat about microdosing while riding hoverboards that don't actually hover. Some people say money is good; other people say money is fine, but they don't have enough of it. Some people think a very angry man should rule the world; other people say that he is the wrong kind of angry. A third kind of person says that anger is the wrong thing entirely. What are you to think, an ordinary user scrolling through your various feeds, just trying to figure out whether kale or coffee or vaccines are actually good or actually very bad?

I can't help you with any of that; I still have to google every time I want to find out how many ounces are in a cup. But I can tell you that this video of a man who is so excited about hating Donald Trump he calls a woman a fat bitch and then tries to do a backflip, failing miserably and smashing his face into the pavement, is the sort of thing that could unite America:

This video comes from a thing called Rebel Pundit, a site that puts up clips of left-wing protesters that make them look dumb. But forget the source for a second, and forget your feelings about Trump: This man delivers the performance of a lifetime, going from brave truth-teller to a garden-variety asshole to a humbled and humiliated failure in the span of about ten seconds.

I don't know who he is. He looks, talks, and acts like Mac from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and he appears to have the sort of political opinions that conservatives think liberals have. He's not advocating against any particular Trump policy, or even pushing his own pet issue like immigration or climate change. No, he's out there in his bandana, colored sunglasses, and purple shirt like an American Hustle cosplayer just to piss people off and yell.

The video omits the beginning of what seems to be a pretty heated argument between him and a mostly-off-camera woman, so we don't know what match sparked this particularly douchey brushfire, but we can imagine, because we know what happens at Trump events, how people who hate one another jostle and bark until the odds of something bad happening become very, very good. Presumably he was yelling "Fuck Trump!" or another pithy line, someone else took exception, and now here we are, with him delivering a Trumpite march and going, "Yeah, yeah, yeah!"

Now, the video is only 41 seconds long, but that doesn't mean it lacks twists and turns. Maybe you are on this guy's side, shirt and all, when he is jeering at the Trump people. Then the woman asks him, "What are you smoking?" and he replies, "I'm smoking pot, that's what I'm smoking, lady! Smoking the greens, smoking the herb!"—and maybe you're like, Ha ha, yeah, pot. I like pot. This is fun. But then things take a turn when he continues: "Is that what you think, I'm on drugs because I hate this fascist prick? Fuck you, you fat bitch!"

Suddenly, our Mac-esque protagonist has revealed himself as a villain, not just an anti-Trump dude but an outright jerk. Here's a refresher of the rules: You don't need to show up to a Trump rally to make your views known, but if you do, you should try not to incite altercations with individual Trump fans. If you must get sucked into a debate, you should not go ad hominem, but if it happens in the heat of the moment, please, please do not start throwing around phrases like "fat bitch." It only hurts the other anti-Trump people there who do not need your "help."

Now comes Act III of our drama: Revealed as a cad, the angry young man starts literally jumping around, yelling "It's a fucking circus!" then decides to try to do a backflip. I've always assumed that people know whether or not they can do backflips, that it is a deeply ingrained part of your identity, that there are a couple of neurons that are always shooting signals back and forth that translate to I can do a backflip or I can't do a backflip to remind you of your status, backflip-wise. But this guy lacks these crucial cells, or maybe they were off-duty, because not for a second does it look like he is going to be able to land this sucker:

He must have realized that he was failing while in mid-air. He must have thought Oh shit I am about to fall on my face in front of half a dozen photographers plus this woman, my most hated rival. How am I going to salvage this? His solution—and this is, by far, the best bit of the video—is to spring up immediately from the ground and yell, "I did that on purpose! It's all a fucking joke!"

I don't like Trump. I worry, actually, that things will break exactly right—or wrong—and he'll be sitting in the White House someday making decisions far more serious than what sort of marble should go in a hotel lobby. But regardless of my views, or yours, I think we can all agree that watching a jackass call a woman a "fat bitch" then eating it, totally of his own volition, so badly that he has to yell "I did that on purpose!" and then immediately speed-walking away from the whole situation—well, I think all Americans everywhere can enjoy that, the way we can all enjoy a warm fire at the end of a long day or TV shows about desperate people trapped on an island. This man, whoever he is, has given us a gift, and we should all be grateful to him, whoever he is, wherever he got that shirt. Godspeed.

Follow Harry on Twitter.

Screenshot from 'Florence Has Left the Building'

As children, everything we did seemed amazing and life changing. You learned how to eat, speak, and walk, and everyone—if you're lucky—praised and loved you. So maybe it's fitting that when we grow old, everything flips: Unable to eat like we used to, we forget how to speak and our legs can barely move while everyone patronizes or "babies" us. What happens in between birth and death is sort of a mix of the two, but with sex and work thrown in. These ideas, when addressed in works of fiction, can sometimes carry a suffocating self-seriousness, but when tackled in a "it's all a cosmic joke" style, humor and pathos can bubble up and surprise you. Australian writer/director Mirrah Foulkes confronts these issues just right in her newest short film, Florence Has Left the Building.

Pent up in an old folks' home, the rebellious Florence has yet to consign herself to eating, sleeping, exercising, and socializing as scheduled. She's less an original character so much as a solidly engaging one, sassing her nurse and trying to bum smokes from visitors. Patronized by the staff, she struggles to feel like she exists, especially with so many of her friends dying around her. How do you feel alive again? Is there any way to experience adventure or reality as you once know it? The Marigold House Assisted Living Facility would tell you to watch its annual Christmas Eve Elvis impersonator perform, because all old people like Elvis, right? When it comes to light that the Marigold House has accidentally double-booked two Elvises, Florence sees her opportunity. Playing off the famous phrase "Elvis has left the building," Foulkes's film questions what "leaving the building" actually means, whether it's literal or metaphorical, freedom or death, or if it's all of those things. Check the film out below and decide for yourself.

Watch the VICE Shorts Exclusive: 'Florence Has Left the Building':

Mirrah Foulkes is no stranger to VICE. A few years ago we premiered her debut short film, Dumpy Goes to the Big Smoke, and she acted in another VICE Shorts premiere, Spider, directed by her fellow Australian and Blue Tongue Film Collective collaborator Nash Edgerton. (In the US, Foulkes might be best known for her work on Hawaii Five-0.) Having dipped her toes into the directing water a few times now, she continues to improve on her craft and is undoubtedly going to make a splash with her debut feature, which she's developing with VICE. I caught up with Foulkes over email to chat about her film, her love of weirdos, what it's like to be a film writer/director/actor, and what's she's working on next. Have at it below.

VICE: In both of your short films, your characters are outsiders of some sort. What is it about people on the fringes that interest you?
Mirrah Foulkes: I don't know exactly, but it is a reoccurring theme for me. I didn't really realize until I finished Florence that I was basically making a different version of my first film! I think I'm just drawn to those types of characters. It's certainly not reflective of me wanting to escape my own life... At least I don't think it is!

Where did the particular story for Florence Has Left the Building come from, then?
It kind of evolved from something quite different. Initially, I wanted to make a fictionalized film about old-age Alzheimer's and dementia with non-actors and shoot in a functioning aged-care facility (turned out that was going to be extremely difficult when it came to consent!). But the story sort of grew from there, and we ended up with someone much younger and more experienced than I imagined at the center of it, so I adapted the world of the film a little bit to make it work for Jacki .

Do you know any real-life Elvis impersonators or angry old people?
No Elvis impersonators, but lots of angry old people. I love angry old people. I'm pretty angry myself. I think once you get really old, you can be angry about whatever you want. You've earned that right.

There's such a bliss at the end, when the two characters just get to let go of all the other bullshit around them to sing and drink and be happy. What makes you scared, excited, bubbly or, more appropriately, what do you do to fill up your "big fucking bucket"?
Well, I guess I just try and fill it with stuff that makes me less angry and more joyful, like beer. Food and drink make me the happiest... And good movies. But it feels like there are less and less good movies, and that makes me scared. I love how open I feel when I'm traveling. I'm so much more inclined to see the good in people and have great human encounters when I'm in that mode. A friend said to me the other day that you should try and live always with the openness and sense of wonder you have when you're in a new city. I thought that was great advice. If I could sing, I would do karaoke every chance I had.

You've now made two critically acclaimed short films, but are still probably known as an actress, having appeared in The Gift, Animal Kingdom, Hawaii Five-O, and more. What draws you to both practices, and do you prefer one over the other?
I made my first film in between acting jobs because I had some time and wanted to do something new. I really had no intention of becoming a director. But I didn't expect to love it so much. I think, after all those years of being at the mercy of other people's tastes, I really wanted to be in control! I really love acting when the project is good. When the project isn't good or you're not on the same page as the director, it really sucks. It can be such a punishment because it's so revealing. But then I had no idea how revealing it would feel to be a writer. Hands down the most terrifying thing in the world for me is showing people my writing.

Has acting informed you as a director or vice versa?
Definitely both. I feel really lucky that I'm not scared of actors. I mean, I am sometimes but not often. It's amazing how many directors are terrified of actors. This is a generalization, but I think actors have fantastic ways of looking at the world and exploring human interaction and approaching text. Especially actors with a theater background, I think. And often they're really insecure, because it's terrifying what they're doing. But they just want to be helped and to help and for the work to feel good. I think every film school should have acting classes for directors, so they have a sense of what it feels like. When I'm on set as an actor, I think I'm so much more aware of making the director's life easier now—maybe to a fault. Sometimes I have to remind myself that my job isn't to just be accommodating. But I know how fucking hard it is now: It's really hard!

Do you have any advice for aspiring female writer/directors out there?
Try not to let the sexism within the industry distract you from your work. It can be tough, and depending on who you're working with, you will encounter things all the time that remind you you're a woman in an industry that has been dominated by men for a long time. But everyone is going to feel marginalized in some way at some point in their life, so don't let your gender define you as a filmmaker. Just make great work. Which is not to say you shouldn't call people on it when you feel someone's treating you badly. But the world is full of great people, so if you're working with someone who's not great, then dump him or her and find someone better. There is a real shift happening at the moment in the way people see female directors. It's an awesome time to be a woman making films, but things can take a long time to change. So in the meantime, just get on with the work.

So what are you working on now?
I'm finishing up another short, and I'm developing a feature with VICE actually, which I'm pretty damn excited about it, so watch this space!

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as a film curator. He's the senior curator forVimeo's On Demand platform. He has also programmed at Tribeca Film Festival, Rooftop Films, and the Hamptons International Film Festival.

Stills via 'Daily VICE'

In late 2011, when police moved in to evict Occupy protesters and their tents from financial districts and public parks around the world, Micah White was devastated. White had cofounded the original protest in New York City while working for Adbusters magazine, and as a lifelong activist he had dreamt of a new, defiant action that would spark a movement and go IRL viral. So when Occupy Wall Street hit the mainstream, picking up where the Arab Spring had left off, and spread around the world, it seemed the revolution was at hand. But while some protesters held on for several months, pushing their message of economic inequality, Occupy fizzled, and the status quo remained.

Follow Tomas Urbina on Twitter.

Black Lives Matter has been protesting outside of Toronto Police Headquarters for almost two weeks now. Photo by author.

The Toronto Police's explosive unit was called to the house of Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne Friday following a Black Lives Matter vigil on the property, though police say the call turned out to be a false alarm.

Full disclosure: sex ed was awful and inaccurate at my all-girls' school. I remember that our biology teacher said that when a man (and only a man) climaxed, it was called "achieving organism." As you'd expect from such a cryptic introduction to shagging, formative experiences went along the lines of downing two bottles of Lambrini and getting fingered in a phone box by a boy you'd bitterly slagged off 30 minutes earlier. Talking about sex and sexual intimacy is something that people from Germany, Scandinavia and possibly the west coast of the US do.

Anyway, forget about all that because over Easter weekend I opted for for an introductory session to Orgasmic Meditation: a US import that aims to help people achieve intimacy and connect with each other through a specific amount of clit touching. The all-day session, held in a studio in east London, is led by Rachel Tayeb, who has been OM-ing for a decade.

She spends an hour telling the punters—who have each paid £147 for the course—her personal story. She suffered from anorexia and was told by three doctors she would never be able to orgasm. A guy called Kapil from India tells the 60-strong audience of his crippling addiction to pornography. OM turned their lives around, they say, and the audience is rapt. I think this is when a guy on my row starts crying.

Let's back up. Orgasmic Meditation, we're told, is a practice that involves very focused, concentrated stroking of the clitoris, by either a man or woman, for a timed 15-minute session. There's no eye contact allowed and the stroker wears gloves, maintaining focus on the genitals only while asking yes or no questions such as: "would you like me to use a lighter stroke?" No chat, no penetration, and you can only refer to vaginas as "pussies." After 15 minutes, a timer goes off and the session is up. The stroker then presses the palms of their hands against the woman's vulva to bring down the swelling of her genitals.

After the explanations, a microphone is passed around the room and everyone has to say their name and what they're feeling. There are several pass-the-mic sessions during the day, where people say they're feeling curious, excited, trepidatious, hot. Several say they feel like they've "come home."

And then the demonstration starts. The day's headline act. I couldn't take a photographer in, but this is an example of what it looks like, as per some images that OneTaste—the company behind Orgasmic Meditation—sent.

A man and a woman come to the front of the class. She jumps up on a bed positioned in front of the chairs, knickerless underneath her dress. She plants her feet together with her knees apart and the man puts on his vinyl gloves, lubes up his finger, and begins to gently stroke her clitoris with precision. Within 15 seconds she seems to be orgasming wildly. The pressure in the room drops and the audience is captivated. The guy next to me, who I'd just had a lovely chat with, is making a low guttural noise. People in the room are calling out what they feel—tingling in their feet, a heavy clitoris, shooting in their calves. Someone says something about their perineum.

I speak to Dette, a wonderfully sunny certified OM consultant and former computer scientist from Mexico, who says that it took her three months to fully get into it—but then her life changed. A friend first recommended she try it out. "When he mentioned the word 'clitoris' to me, I felt itchy. I wanted him to stop saying it. I was just living in my brain, not my body," she says.

"At the beginning I was having heartbeats and sensations I'd never felt before. My scientist friends thought I needed to go to hospital," she says. She went in skeptical, unsure, and then embraced OM and said everything improved, from her sex life to her relationship with her family.

At the end of the day's course, people say this feels like the first chapter of the rest of their lives, and that they're finally accessing parts of themselves that they thought would be locked away forever. They say they feel part of a new community. I feel like a head in a jar and my knickers remain bone dry, but there we go. Some of what we've seen feels like anything you'd already know, if you've dated or shagged anyone committed to really working the clit.

But still, today has shown me that orgasm is possible outside the old 'penetrative straight sex with the one you love' scenario. People in the audience believe there's more out there—not just for their sex lives, but in other parts of their day-to-day existences. If OM helps people connect with others and learn to come, then I can't really argue with that.

VICE was the guest of TurnOn Britain

@helennianias

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These Weird Masturbation Techniques Could Change Your Life Forever

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We Asked a Few Women to Tell Us How They Masturbate

Original photo via Flickr user Zemlinki

Read: The New Curriculum: Teaching College Students How to Spy

After a routine training in Loudoun, Virginia, the CIA left some explosive material under the hood of a school bus, ABC reports.

The mishap occurred following an outing where dogs practiced detecting explosives, but no one realized the problem until Wednesday, which means that on Monday and Tuesday, students were zipping back to and from school, unaware that there was a bunch of explosive material just feet away from them.

The authorities say that those kids weren't in any danger, since the explosives were "incredibly stable" and required a specific device to detonate, according to the Loudoun County Sheriff's Department, but still, forgetfulness like that doesn't make the CIA look good. To its credit, the school district promptly issued a "sorry about the bomb bus" statement on its Facebook page.

Dean Boyd, director of the CIA's office of public affairs, told ABC that the "CIA is a part of the northern Virginia community. Many of our officers and their children live in the area. We will do whatever it takes to prevent this from happening again."

_{Photo by Eva O'Leary}

This weekend, the Yale School of Art will hold its annual open studios event. The public is invited to wander through the workspaces of up-and-coming artists to get a peek at the new work students are cooking up at school. Below is a preview of some pictures you might see if you were to tour the studios of current students in its photography department this Saturday and Sunday afternoons, from 12—6 PM.

_{Photo by John Edmonds}

_{Photo by Ye Weon Mary Kim}

_{Photo by Walker Olesen}

_{Photo by Monique Atherton}

_{Photo by Chau Tran-Vi}

_{Photo by Lance Brewer}

_{Photo by Harry Griffin}

_{Photo by Matthew Leifheit}

_{Photo by Danna Singer}

_{Photo by Cole Don Kelley}

_{Photo by Anna Shimshak}

_{Photos by Adam Pape}

^{Photo by Eli Durst}

_{Photo by Bek Andersen}

_{Photo by Res}

_{Photo by Farah Al Qasimi}

_{Photo by Sara Cwynar}

_{Photo by Robin Myers}

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Images courtesy of FSG Originals

As a kid, I always fantasized about booby-trapping my house with elaborate tripwires and swinging paint cans to outsmart potential thieves a la Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone. About ten years later, I'd empathize with the perspective of the hypothetical criminals as I'd try to sneak out of the house through a particularly noisy sliding glass door and imagine how much easier it'd be with one of those circular glass cutter/suction cup combos made famous by cartoon cat burglars. I never acted upon either fantasy, but in those moments, I was viewing my structural surroundings differently, almost criminally, focusing on the tactical aspects of architecture rather than its intended purposes.

Author Geoff Manaugh, who created the design website BLDGBLOG, lays out a similar scenario of a teenager trying to sneak out his family's house in a passage from his enlightening new book and responds: "Congrats: you were looking at a building the way a burglar would." His aim isn't to shame the reader, but rather to provide a relatable entryway to his book A Burglar's Guide to the City, out April 5 through FSG Originals. A Burglar's Guide takes a look at our everyday urban environments through the eyes of the criminals aiming to hack them, illuminating the spatially-specific tactics used to break in, escape, and stay hidden in today's surveillance-heavy metropolises. The goal, however, is not to be an actual handbook for the aspiring thief, but rather an alternative study of architecture and urban design.

Through interviews with former burglars, as well as law enforcement and security professionals, Manaugh explains how various features of cities and buildings lead to very specific types of burglaries. Los Angeles, with its sprawling highways, lends itself to quick bank robberies with easy escape routes. Chain businesses with identical layouts and employee schedules, such as McDonalds, invite repeat thieves who've previously robbed other locations. "If you look closely, from just the right angle," he writes, "every city implies the crimes that will one day take place there."

Throughout the text, Manaugh carefully organizes chapters focused on cities, buildings themselves, common burglary tools, and, finally, getaway strategies, bringing us along for the ride for an exhilarating, perspective-shifting read. Put simply, A Burglar's Guide to the City is a unique way to approach a text on city infrastructure and architecture.

For more on crime, watch our doc 'How to Sell Drugs':

VICE: While studying architecture and urban planning, was burglary always at the back of your mind?
Geoff Manaugh: I actually didn't formally study architecture. My background is really more in writing, anthropology, and art history. But what started happening was the more I listened to people try to recommend quote-unquote "architectural films," which inevitably meant a documentary about an architect, the more I kept noticing that every time you watch a heist movie, there's always going to be a scene where everybody starts talking about architecture. It's how to get from one building to another, or how to get from one room to the next, or some conversation where they're all pointing at floorpans or building little architectural models. I just felt like there's all this architecture hidden in plain sight, and it's in the guise of a burglary or a heist film. So I just started looking into that more in the real world and noticed that even if you read police reports or talk to burglars or the FBI about bank heists, all of it has this architectural angle. I decided that I wanted to show how burglary, at its heart, really is an architectural crime.

What do you mean by that?
The buildings we live in have always hidden these other ways of using them, and burglars come along and they reveal to us that we actually can use our buildings differently. We can go through the walls from one room to the next; we can ride on top of elevators to get between floors. reveal that the built environment is a puzzle we haven't been trying to solve, and that they've come up with this really interesting solution to it... I feel like burglars show us how to cheat buildings and bend the world to their will using shortcuts. There's something interesting in the abstract, conceptual side of burglary and how it undercuts all of the stuff we trust about architecture.

At one point you write that burglary "stands in for all the things people really want to do with the built environment." Do you think people all have a subconscious desire to commit crime, or rather just a desire to see convention turned on its head?
Well I think it's both, but it definitely is a lot of the latter part. What I think is pretty interesting is that at some point in everyone's life, you think like a burglar. It's when you're trying to sneak out of the house as a teenager, or you're trying to sneak downstairs to look at Christmas presents, or you're doing anything where you're trying not to get caught, sneaking in, out of, or through a building in any way. Everybody has a bit of that burglar thing in them, so I think that's part of it.

But more specifically to your question, do I think that everybody fantasizes about hitting banks and stuff? I don't think we live in a world where everyone's planning to hit the Manhattan Savings Institution, but I do think that everyone has some fantasy of what they would do if they showed up one day and they could get into the vaults and walk out a millionaire.

I decided that I wanted to show how burglary, at its heart, really is an architectural crime. — Geoff Manaugh

With that in mind, do you think burglary has been or has the potential to be romanticized more than other types of crime?
I do. That's actually one of the funny things that came up while doing research for the book. One of the I interviewed, to be completely honest, seemed depressed that burglary was on the wane and that there aren't as many burglars today as there used to be. He misses the fact that it used to be this romantic, dashing, George Clooney-like thing, and now it's just smash-and-grab jewelry break-ins or cybercrime, and it's just kind of boring.

Even before you tie up the morality question in the last chapter, the book seems to focus on nonviolent offenders who rob either businesses or the extremely wealthy. Was that your intent?
Definitely, in the sense that I didn't want to write about abductors or murderers or the instances you hear about where a family is held hostage in their home for twelve hours while burglars get all of their money out of the bank and then set fire to the house—stuff like that. Those are not the types of things that I wanted to write about, let alone celebrate. My intent wasn't to sugarcoat burglary, but to write about burglary as it is legally defined, which is this really strange use of architecture that doesn't by any means imply acts of violence against homeowners—or for that matter against burglars—because there are quite a few stories about people laying booby traps to kill burglars.

After attending an "urban escape and evasion" seminar, you remark how you began to see the world through the eyes of a burglar, for instance getting a little more nervous than usual when police entered a bank you were in. Did you experience similar perspective shifts after spending time shadowing law enforcement, or did you more often imagine yourself on the burglar's side?
There was definitely a constant shifting of perspective. When I went up in a helicopter with the air support division of the LAPD, entire parts of the city began to seem different to me. For example, the fact that criminals can use the streets around LAX as a place to hide because helicopters can't always approach the airport. That entire neighborhood still feels different to me, knowing that if you have to, you could abandon a car here, hop into another vehicle, drive out, and probably get away. To realize that there's an entire neighborhood that lets that happen is really interesting to me.

The buildings we live in have always hidden these other ways of using them, and burglars come along and they reveal to us that we actually can use our buildings differently

Over the course of your interviews with law enforcement and security officials, were any of them skeptical or even concerned about the intent of your book?
I definitely had to learn very carefully how to ask them to do an interview. I couldn't just say, Hey, I'm writing a book about burglary and architecture . First of all, people don't know what that means. But yeah, there were definitely people who didn't want to talk. The people who were the most close-lipped were those in the tactical equipment manufacturing industry. Many said, "I have clients who would be really pissed off if they even knew I spoke to the media." It was so difficult to get anyone in that field to talk to me. Even the air support division— when I first started flying with them, there were some pretty skeptical people there who would do anything possible to avoid answering questions like, "What's the best way for a criminal to get away from you?"

It also worked the other way around, talking to people who had a background in bank robbery, burglary, or lock-picking. There was a skepticism, like, "Wait a minute, what are you trying to say about me? Are you trying to paint me as this lifetime criminal who has no chance of rehabilitation? Or saying that lock-pickers are all burglars and we need to be surveilled by the NYPD?"

'A Burglar's Guide to the City' is out April 5 through FSG Originals. Pre-order it here.

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