On April 10, the day after he lost every Republican delegate in the state of Colorado to Texas Senator Ted Cruz, Donald Trump screamed across Twitter that "the people of Colorado had their vote taken away from them by the phony politicians." He clarified that claim last week, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, using his bitter defeat in Colorado to launch another attack on the political establishment, writing that "on every major issue affecting this country, the people are right and the governing elite are wrong."

Since then, the Trump campaign has continued to make plenty of hay out of the fairness—or lack thereof—in the Republican Party's delegate selection process. At a campaign rally in Indianapolis Wednesday, he brought up the issue once again: Pointing to the press pen, he declared, "the system's not working too well, and you know, even my enemies up there in the media agree with me in almost all cases." Naturally, this was a pretty big exaggeration.

To be fair, Trump does have a handful of political opinion-makers in his corner; in a piece last week, for example, Business Insider's Josh Barro defended Trump's outrage, agreeing with the candidate's assessment that the Republican nominating process is a "scam." But others have accused the billionaire populist of "whining like a child," pointing out that the rules have been in place for a while; Trump's campaign just never bothered to learn them.

The debate raises big questions about the fairness of the nation's democratic process—but it can also get a bit arcane, veering into the nitty-gritty of state party rules and convention procedures. To try to make sense of it, I got in touch with Richard Berg-Andersson, who runs the election tracking site The Green Papers, which follows state delegate selection procedures, and asked whether he thinks Trump has a point about the problems in the process. Below is our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity.

Let's get right to it: Are Donald Trump's complaints about the Republican delegate selection process justified?
Richard Berg-Andersson: I would say no, it's not justified. The rules have been in place since the fall of 2015, since the state and territorial GOPs were required to send in what they call Rule 16F filings.

And the national party makes sure those rules are fair?
The Republican National Committee theoretically approves them, but I think they more just take them, and sort of glance through them and say "OK that's fine."

But isn't Trump complaining about a larger problem with the system?
He knew what the rules were. Were they rigged in October as opposed to being rigged recently? I don't get the complaint. I think part of the problem is that this is someone who is running for office who is telling his own core supporters what they want to hear: the system is rigged against them, and the politicians are corrupt. Trump said earlier—although he's kinda calmed down as he's getting closer to the potential nomination—that the politicians are stupid or whatever. That's what he's telling them. But they're not rigged.

The system really does look like it could thwart Trump's massive grassroots support, and Cruz could win the nomination simply because he's gamed the minutiae of these state rules. How would you answer a complaint like that?
I would say it's the Republican Party. The Republican Party as a culture is dedicated to the concept of a Republic, where there's more indirect input from the people. Donald Trump chose to run as a Republican. So he chose to run for the Republican presidential nomination, and he has to deal with whatever the culture is of the party in which he's running.

Do you think the average Republican knows that this is the culture of the party? Or has the party been heading toward this kind of identity crisis for a long time?
That's exactly what's been happening. This has actually been building for a couple decades now. Once Romney on the first ballot—by basically being almost like a wedding crasher, crashing certain conventions at the county level.

Cruz is doing basically the same thing without having to "crash the party," so to speak. This is where Trump has a disadvantage as an outsider. Cruz—even though he's apparently not well-liked by most politicians in the Republican Party—is a politician. He's a senator. He's able to play the "game" in a way that Trump can't.

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US News

• America Turns Purple for Prince
  The life of Prince, who died yesterday at the age of 57, is being marked with purple-colored tributes across the country. Buildings including the Minnesota Twins stadium and Los Angeles city hall were turned purple in his honor, and thousands filled the streets of Minneapolis, singing his songs late into the night. President Obama said America had lost "a creative icon." —Minneapolis Star Tribune
• Uber to Pay Up to $100 Million to Settle Lawsuit
  Uber has agreed to pay drivers in California and Massachusetts up to $100 million to settle a class action lawsuit over their employment status. It allows Uber to continue to treat its drivers as independent contractors, a big win for a company as it tries to keep costs down. —USA Today
• US Suicide Rates Reach 30-Year High
  The suicide rate in the US has risen to its highest level in almost 30 years, according to the latest federal data. The overall rate surged 24 percent from 1994 to 2014, and the increase among middle-aged women was particularly sharp. Suicides among women aged 45 to 64 increased by 63 percent. —The New York Times
• FBI Paid Hackers Over $1.3 Million to Crack iPhone
  FBI Director James Comey has indicated the price the bureau paid to hack the iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino attackers. By confirming the payment was more than he will earn over the next seven years, Comey suggested the sum given to hackers was at least $1.3 million. —The Washington Post

International News

• Mexico Plans to Legalize Medical Marijuana
  Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto has proposed legalizing marijuana for medical purposes and easing controls for possession. "A new consensus is gradually emerging worldwide," he said. His bill will increase the amount of weed people can legally carry to one ounce. —VICE News
• Ethiopia's Army Enters South Sudan
  Ethiopian troops have crossed into South Sudan in search of more than 100 children abducted in a violent raid last week. The Ethiopian government said it has "a clear idea of where the children are" and has the approval of South Sudan to attack the Murle tribesmen blamed for the abductions. —Al Jazeera
• Venezuela to Cut Power for Four Hours Each Day
  The Venezuelan government will introduce power cuts of four hours a day from next week to manage the country's energy crisis. The blackout hours will be published daily in newspapers and websites. A severe drought has limited Venezuela's hydroelectric output, and the country has also been hit by a fall in oil prices. —Reuters
• Islamic State Pushed Out of Libyan City, Rivals Claim
  Militants from the Islamic State (IS) group have been pushed out of the eastern Libyan city of Derna, claims a rival Islamist group. The Derna Mujahideen Shura Council (DMSC), an umbrella group for local militias, said IS have "no presence here any more," but its claim has not been verified. —BBC News

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Everything Else

• Conor McGregor Says He Is Not Retiring
  Two days after saying he had "decided to retire young," UFC fighter Conor McGregor has issued a statement that begins: "I AM NOT RETIRED." McGregor said he is only sick of doing interviews "on the nobody gives a fuck morning show." —Rolling Stone
• Belgium Prisoners Get Porn Through PrisonCloud
  A digital entertainment system called PrisonCloud has been introduced in a prison in Antwerp, Belgium. It allows prisoners to access the internet and download movies and porn from the privacy of their cell. —BBC News
• Governor Doesn't Want to Save Lives of Heroin Addicts
  Governor Paul LePage vetoed a bill that would allow Maine pharmacists to dispense naloxone, a drug that reverses opioid overdoses. LePage said it does not save lives, "it merely extends them until the next overdose." —VICE News
• The Apple Getting Gold from iPhones Story Is Bullshit
  Reports that Apple recycled $40 million worth of gold from old iPhones last year are nonsense. Apple pays independent companies to recycle old electronics because it's required by law to do so, and it takes a loss in the process. —Motherboard

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Malaysian journalist Philip Golingai tweeted this picture allegedly taken by a student.

A small group of students started claiming they'd seen a "black figure" lurking around the school. It didn't take long before more students and then teachers said they'd seen the figure or felt a supernatural presence. One teacher said she felt a "heavy" presence hanging onto her. Another said a "black figure" was attempting to enter her body.

About 100 people, mostly students at the Malaysian school SKM Pengkalan Chepa 2, were affected in this mysterious incident. "Our students were possessed and disturbed ," a senior staff member told the BBC. "We are not sure why it happened. We don't know what it is that affected us. But the place is a bit old, and these children can be disobedient and sometimes throw their rubbish around the school grounds. Perhaps they hit some 'djinns' and offended the spirits," she added, using a local reference to ghosts.

Eventually, school authorities shut the school down, sending everyone home. They called in experts—including witch doctors to do prayer sessions and exorcisms. On Sunday, the school reopened and things have since gone back to normal. But there's still intense interest in what happened there from around the world. It's understandable. How can a hundred people see something supernatural, sparked from one initial sighting? Is it psychological? Is it truly an unpleasant spiritual experience? Are the students simply lying?

Mass hysteria, or mass psychogenic illness (MPI) as it's now called, is defined as the spontaneous and quick spread of false or exaggerated beliefs within a particular population. Sometimes it's more than just a belief. Lines blur when symptoms become physical and all the more confusing and terrifying.

Although the phenomenon in this Malaysian school is a rare one, it's by no means an isolated case. Incidents crop up across the world every week. Outbreaks were particularly prevalent in schools and factories in Malaysia and Singapore throughout the 1970s. In one outbreak in a school in 1979, 48 students went hysterical. According to a news report, "Some cried, shivered, and started eating the grass and empty glasses, others stared into empty space with open eyes while performing a Tai Chi type of dance movement called the Kuda Kepang, an ancient Malay wedding dance. Some were restrained from their violent fits by the teachers."

It's happened in the UK, too; in 1965, 85 girls passed out in two hours in a Blackburn school; just last year in Lancashire, 40 students were treated with nausea and dizziness and four fainted. Both of these incidents were treated as mass psychogenic illness.

Robert Bartholomew believes the recent Malaysian school haunting is a classic case of MPI in a country where it is common. Bartholomew is a sociologist who has written a book on MPI in schools. "It doesn't surprise me that this outbreak is in Kedah, one of the more conservative and devoutly religious states," he says."A typical day at one of these boarding schools reads like a page from 1984, where every aspect of living is rigidly controlled and people are treated like numbers. Frustration and anger build over weeks or months. Under these circumstances in the stricter schools, strange behaviors tend to emerge. What is so extraordinary is that these shy, seemingly naive and politically powerless schoolgirls usually get their way, with outbreaks of mass hysteria drawing attention to what they see as unjust rules and poor living conditions. Episodes give a voice to the voiceless as community leaders and government officers will press school officials to ease rules." But it's no manipulation. "I cannot stress enough that this is not a conscious process and the girls are not faking."

Once a need for relief from oppressive circumstances is established, the drama can unfold. It usually starts with one person subconsciously acting out or cracking under the pressure. In the case of this most recent incident, Bartholomew says that the nerves and neurons that send messages to the muscles and the brain began to malfunction. "The result is twitching, shaking, convulsions, screaming, and hallucinations which reflect their cultural beliefs. This does not happen overnight, but slowly builds up over time to the point where they cannot stand it. Typically, the sight of one girl 'going hysterical' is enough to send many of her classmates over the edge."

"The school is abuzz with talk of demons roaming the hallways. Anxiety rises further and more girls enter trances. Classmates react by screaming, crying, and eventually fainting as they get dizzy from over-breathing. What follows is a ritual of rebellion that is part hysteria, part melodrama—a subconscious bargaining between the possessing demons and school officials." As a result of cultural beliefs held by those involved, authorities then act by sending in a bomoh or local witchdoctor. Bartholomew says that inviting them legitimizes the supernatural aspects of the outbreak, which only serves to prolong it.

"I am not going to tell Malaysians that there are not spirits," says Bartholomew. "That is a personal belief. What I would tell them, however, is that what is happening at these schools is unrelated to either religion or the supernatural. It is a psychological phenomena that needs to be treated with psychology. The same types of outbreaks that are happening at the school have happened in schools across Africa and Asia where those affected have an array of different religious and spiritual beliefs."

Women suffering with 'hysteria'

The wide global reach of MPI proves this. There is always a trigger and it always begins with a singular person or small group. Most outbreaks in western countries do not follow the pattern seen in Malaysia, however. They usually involve the sudden perception of a harmful agent that is deemed to be an immediate threat, for example, the detection of an unfamiliar smell. The students become ill with the symptoms of anxiety—over-breathing, headache, dizziness—and usually recover with a few hours. This is what happened in Lancaster last year. The only way to stop the hysteria from spreading in every case—whether it be a perceived gas leak or poisoned food or seeing a black figure—is to reduce the anxiety. Once fired up, this could take days or even weeks. There is effectively no limit to how far hysteria can spread. There are historical accounts from the latter Middle Ages of it taking over whole European villages of hundreds of people.

Bartholomew says that although this is an unpopular point to make, hysteria almost always involves women. "Some may call me sexist," he says. "But in the over 800 cases I have gathered since 1566, 99 percent of cases are majority female. Why? That is open to debate, but social factors may play a role, such as the way women are socialized. But it is beyond dispute that most victims are female." You can trace MPI back to the 1600s and onwards when women were killed under suspicion of witchcraft because they were showing signs of mass hysteria. In a 2008 article, John Waller, associate professor of the history of medicine at Michigan State University and author of A Time to Dance, A Time to Die: The Extraordinary Story of the Dancing Plague of 1518, wrote: "Most experts now think that... girls and women are more likely to succumb due to the frustrations of living in families and societies dominated by men. Others argue that hysteria offers distressed women a legitimate reason to 'check out' from the indignities of daily life."

Le Roy Junior Senior High School

Could there be something more that hasn't been learned from hundreds of years of these episodes? Do we need to pay more attention? In Le Roy, New York in 2012, a group of cheerleaders developed tics, swinging their arms and twitching. No one could agree on what had started the outbreak. Some blamed an old spillage from a train crash in the 1970s; others were suspicious of the new HPV vaccine. Eventually, the New York state department decided it was a conversion disorder type of MPI. "Conversion disorder really refers to people who've developed symptoms like paralysis, or movement disorder, so some kind of neurological symptom," Dr. Jon Stone, a professor of neurology and expert on functional disorders, told VICE. "The dominant idea over the last century has been Freud's: that the patient has converted psychological distress into a physical symptom. And they're presenting the physical symptom, instead of the psychological distress." Hence the conversion. As Stone is keen to press, conversion disorder is usually something that happens to a singular person. The idea that one or two people had conversion disorder which was passed from one to another through a form of mass hysteria is rare and unusual.

Interestingly, women are considerably far more likely to have conversion disorder, as well as have had MPI. Later reports on the Le Roy case claimed that the girls were under considerable stress at school and home.

In addition to this, any form of media coverage—as with the whirlwind around the Le Roy case—seems to exacerbate the symptoms. When kids at the school were discussing the girls and their symptoms and who was faking and who wasn't on Facebook, again, symptoms got worse.

Bartholomew has pressed the importance of understanding the mechanisms of MPI. He warns for the "potential for a far greater or wider global episode unless we quickly understand how social media is acting as the primary vector for conversion disorder. It's just a matter of time before we see outbreaks that are not just confined to a single school or factory or even region." In a world where Snapchatting footage of what may or may not be mysterious figure or a victim having a fit of tics would now be the norm, a school playground or singular village is no longer the limit.

Follow Hannah Ewens on Twitter.

Thumbnail photo by Bibliothèque de Toulouse from Toulouse, France (Bâillement hystérique) , via Wikimedia Commons

This article originally appeared on VICE Spain

Mankind is so obsessed with the concept of beauty that we're constantly committing utter atrocities in order to keep ourselves flawless and eternally youthful. Men and women alike shave, wipe, anoint, moisturize, foam, scrub, fill, inject, color, and suck the ugly away. Meanwhile, the high priestess of the unholy beauty rituals is undoubtedly Kim Kardashian, whose Instagram is a testament to how far humans can take their desire to be beautiful.

A while back, I rinsed my hair with vinegar. It's not something I usually do, but my grandma always tells me that back in the day, when there wasn't any shampoo or conditioner available, she'd use vinegar or lemon to rinse her hair. And my grandmother's not alone: Scarlett Johansson also uses vinegar to beautify. Talking about it with my colleagues in the office, it seemed that everyone had their own homemade beauty tip—yogurt with sugar to get rid of cellulite, avocado for dry skin, frozen spoons to get rid of under-eye bags. The tip that took the cake came from my colleague Alvaro Piñero, online editor of i-D Spain, who applies hot sauce on his lips to make them "nicely red and plump" without any lip balm. I liked this idea, so I decided to try it out.

I went down to the supermarket near the office to get some Sriracha sauce, and I put it on my lips. They were a bit chapped, so it stung a lot more than I thought it would. Straight away, I noticed them swelling up. I thought that was a lot easier and tastier than the legendary #kyliejennerchallenge, which saw teens post videos on social media of themselves trying to get Kylie Jenner's full lips by suctioning a shot glass to their lips.

While I won't be doing that last thing, what follows is a personal investigation into the world of celebrity beauty treatments—because if any group of people should know, it's the people making a living out of looking hot. I rubbed some placenta on me, had snails take a hike on my face, bathed in vinegar and lemon juice, whitened my teeth by rubbing them with strawberries, put hemorrhoid cream on the bags under my eyes, and underwent Platelet-Rich Plasma therapy—which basically means I had blood injected in my face.

PLACENTA ON MY FACE

Apparently placenta—human or animal—is very beneficial for stimulating collagen in the skin. The idea of having a bloody afterbirth on me made me want to retch, but if it's good enough for Kim Kardashian, Harry Styles, and Victoria Beckham, it's good enough for me. Even Madonna has tried it, although she used placenta-based creams. I preferred to get hold of the raw material directly—if I was doing it, I wanted to do it right.

It was pretty difficult to get hold of a placenta. I called up a number of vets, but I quickly learned that asking a stranger for placenta is asking to get hung up on. I got lucky when I called a horse-breeding center in the area that has stallions, mares, and foals hopping about. No question there would be heaps of placentas in their stables. When I called them up, it didn't even surprise them that much that I was asking for a placenta. They were very sweet about it and invited me to go and collect one during a birth that was going to take place that very day.

When I got there, the foal was a few hours old and she was enormous. They explained to me that the mare was called Divina and that her baby didn't have a name yet. Apparently, they baptize their foals with names starting with a different letter of the alphabet each year, and this year, they were using the letter O. Then, the sweetest thing happened: They asked me whether I wanted to be the godmother of the young mare and name her. The tiny giant deserved a name as divine as her mother's, so I decided to name her Olympia. That was it, nothing more to it.

Divina's placenta was kept in a tub and I brought it home quickly, so I could put it in the fridge. It stayed there for a night, together with some soy shakes, radishes, and carrots. When we took it out of the tub the next day, it already smelt like death—really one of the most unpleasant smells I've come across in my entire life. But there was no getting out of this. With the help of my friend Gonzalo I cut a piece of placenta that would be the bit I'd have on my face. It wasn't easy to pick a bit but we did in the end.

It rested on my face for a couple of minutes, while I tried not to think about how much it stank. It was moist and sticky and nightmarish.

I struggled with it for a few minutes, until I couldn't take it anymore. I ran to the bathroom with my bloody face, about to throw up. Luckily, I didn't. I didn't look any younger, either. All I had for the rest of the day was a weird smell lingering in my nose and a blood-stained fridge. In order to calm myself down and to be sure that it hadn't been in vain, I called up Dr. Marisa Manzano, plastic surgeon of the Anti-aging Group Barcelona and a specialist in aesthetic plastic surgery.

Her response was quite depressing: "Creams with animal and vegetable stem cells are a scam. It's not scientifically proven that they work. Think of lizards—when you cut off their tail it grows back again. We have a much more complex system than animals and rely on a much richer immune system. Putting animal placenta on your face has no effect whatsoever, because our tissues do not absorb the benefits of an animal placenta," she explained.

SNAILS ON MY FACE

That last comment was a bit of a setback given that I wanted to test what snail slime would do to my face. I decided to not let myself be influenced by Dr. Manzano's opinions, because for every doctor saying something can't work, there's a pretty celebrity saying it does.

It proved pretty difficult to find a living snail to hang out on my face—especially after days without rain. I asked in food shops, because I know that there are people who buy and cook them. I've never tried eating a snail but I have this idea that they taste like chewing gum. Supermarket chain Carrefour sells pre-cooked snails in a sauce and frozen. I bought the frozen ones because I didn't think the sauce would do much for my face. Katie Holmes is said to have happily used snail slime cream for her skin, and it makes sense: Snails can make reparations on their own shell. But rubbing frozen snails on my face sadly did nothing for me. I had to try this with living snails.

When it finally started to rain, I found a couple of snails lurking on the landing of the stairs to my house. I invited them over to my place to freely wander over my face. That's what they did.

One made his way mostly over my forehead, while the other one preferred my chin. We spent some time like this, with me putting the snails back into position every time they nearly fell off. When I decided that it was finally enough, my face was all sticky and felt like cardboard. After I washed with water, my face really did feel cleaner and smooth—though a little slimy, too. I do wonder if there was some wishful thinking there, given the fact that I had just had a horse's placenta and live snails on my face, but all I can say is that my face felt good after the snails.

ACID BATH WITH VINEGAR AND LEMON JUICE

The next day, I decided to purify myself further by filling a bathtub with water, vinegar, and lemon, for an acid bath. Vinegar and lemon are age-old beauty secrets, and their glories have recently been sung by people like Karolina Kurkova, Scarlett Johansson, and Hilary Duff. Vinegar and lemons are commonly used to disinfect all kinds of surfaces, and lemon contains ascorbic acid – a form of Vitamin C that is good for everything.

I was worried the acid would start to sting as soon as I got into the bathtub. I'm prone to eczema so I expected the worst: small spots, rashes, and burns. None of that happened. I smelt like salad for three days after the bath, but my hair and skin were smooth. I was very happy to learn I could just find something that works in the fridge, instead of having to look for it in a horse's uterus.

BRUSHING MY TEETH WITH STRAWBERRIES

I couldn't wait to try out Catherine Zeta-Jones's fave beauty regimen: Cleaning teeth with strawberries. I ate strawberries for a full week, chewing on them and allowing them to rest on top of my teeth—all of this with the intention of whitening my tooth enamel. Apparently the acid in the strawberries removes stains and whitens teeth.

It was mostly delicious, but my teeth were none the whiter. What I did learn was that there are some mutant strawberries around that have seeds so large they get stuck in your teeth, and there's nothing you can do to avoid that. And there are many, many strawberries that taste of nothing, and others that taste like cork. I should change grocery stores.

HEMORRHOID CREAM UNDER MY EYES

Of course I had to try hemorrhoid cream under my eyes. No one in their right mind would put something under their eyes that's meant to go on their bum but Sandra Bullock does, so I did, too. When I went to buy Hemoal I asked the pharmacist if I could use the cream to camouflage my under-eye bags and, like any good saleswoman, she started to recite the many benefits of the product—including its vasoconstrictive properties reducing burns, irritation, and inflammation. The same pharmacist told me that although many people use it under their eyes and it works well, its effect on my bags would be questionable, as they were more blue than puffy.

I put Hemoal under my eyes every night for a week and although it felt refreshing, it didn't look like I was taking care of my skin. Maybe I just wasn't psychologically prepared to lather my face in bum cream.

INJECTING MY OWN BLOOD INTO MY FACE

I called Dr. Marisa Manzano again, and although she confirmed that Hemoal does work under your eyes, she said that my skin could really benefit from a regeneration therapy with Platelet-Rich Plasma. The concept therapy is used medically for things like bone repair, nerve injuries, and oral surgeries but her clinic offers the service for facial rejuvenation.

The procedure is as follows: They take some of your blood, put it through a centrifuge that separates platelet-poor plasma and red blood cells, and add a serum that's rich in platelets. After that, they inject your own plasma into you. It makes sense—when you have a wound, the platelets get there first to help regenerate the skin. The aim of injecting them is to increase the production of collagen and vitamins in the areas that have been pricked.

Kim Kardashian once posed on Instagram with a mask of her own blood, and although she looks mortally wounded, she also still looks hot. I had to try this.

Entering the clinic, I was under the impression this was going to be something like an exfoliation treatment. I didn't expect it to actually be more similar to a botox treatment. When I saw the stretcher, the centrifuge, and the needles I started to feel a bit queasy, but before I knew it I found myself with a numb face and with three test tubes filled with my blood. There was no going back.

The first prick came right in the middle of my under-eye bag. My eye tried to look away but it failed. "You'll have a bruise here!" Dr Manzano warned me. She wasn't lying: It's days later, and the bruise is still there.

When I left the clinic, I felt disfigured. Days later, when the bruises had turned brown, I started seeing the difference. Smoother and shinier skin, especially under my eye lids. There are people paying between $360 to $790 to have their own blood injected in their face, so it would have been very awkward if I hadn't noticed anything.

To sum up: I've learned that filling your face with your own blood works, but it's painful and expensive. Hemorrhoid cream isn't as effective but it is less painful and also more immediate. Strawberries can be tasty but don't do anything for your teeth and the snails are less tasty and about as ineffective. If you can deal with the burn, the hot sauce isn't too bad and the bath with vinegar reeks, but works quite well.

Finally, however desperate about your looks you might get, please never put a placenta on your face. It'll never be worth it.

When Game of Thrones debuted on HBO in 2011, it was strictly understood to be an adaptation of A Song of Ice and Fire, a suburban sprawl of a fantasy series by a permanently deadline-haunted writer named George R. R. Martin who looked vaguely like the sea captain on a cereal box and whose previous ventures into television included the 80s Twilight Zone revival and star-crossed, sewer-world romance Beauty and the Beast.

Now, in 2016, he is the last surviving George Martin of note and an unlikely bulwark against prestige television's usurpation of the novel as our culture's dominant storytelling form. That's because, as the show grew increasingly distinct from its source material, Game of Thrones begat a Quadrophenia-like rivalry between those content to consume the saga at a rate of ten episodes a year and devout book-readers, who had some thousands of pages of spoilers to parcel out to the show's 18.6 million fans while kvetching about seemingly every composite character, casting choice, and departure from the text.

Even during its controversial fifth season, during which showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss became particularly cavalier about killing off characters thought to be under the protection of Martin's written record and speeding up some subplots and character arcs while writing out others, the series was, at least nominally, still based on the books

But that's all over now. When the sixth season of GoT premieres this Sunday, April 24, it will be as its own creature, one that has finally outpaced the material covered in the five-book-so-far cycle and, in a Borgesian twist, wrested the most profitable and politically astute epic of our time from the grasp of its author. What happens next is anyone's guess, as the fate of the seven kingdoms is no longer the provenance of any but the old gods and the new. Still, some review of the recent history of the great houses may be in order, both because it may contain some clues as to who will walk away from Game of Thrones with control of the board, and because those who do not learn from the past are, if past seasons are any indication, doomed to pay the iron price for their ignorance.

Needless to say: Unless you're caught up through Season 5, many, many spoilers are ahead. There's also a healthy amount of speculation about Season 6.

House Stark

Much of the drama of GoT comes from the upending of audience expectations regarding its presumed heroes, the Starks, the only family to practice old-fashioned notions of chivalry in the face of the worldly realpolitik, which has consistently made the North a backwoods and the Starks a liability. Expect the tempest-tossed survivors to be scuffed of any notion of fair play if they are to pose a coherent threat to the treacherous Boltons and advancing White Walkers, let alone become credible heirs to the Iron Throne.

Favorite Sons and Daughters: Sansa Stark, Arya Stark, Bran Stark, Rickon Stark

The Dead: Lyanna Stark, Brandon Stark, Ned Stark, Benjen Stark (MIA), Robb Stark, Talisa Stark, Catelyn Stark, Jon Snow (but not really, see The Night's Watch)

Season 5: Youngest sons Bran and Rickon spent last season offscreen as Arya flunked murderbot training school at the House of Black and White in Braavos by carrying out a bloody personal vendetta on pederast Ser Meryn Trant. Meanwhile, Sansa (oldest surviving Stark) returned to her native Winterfell, where she was forced to marry Malcolm McDowell-impersonator/young Hitler Ramsay Bolton. After a wedding night that gave the series its most controversial sequence, a season of physical and psychological tortures, and two botched escape attempts, she leapt from the parapets with the emasculated Theon Greyjoy/Reek and is now at large somewhere behind enemy lines.

What to Expect: Bran will return from his Jedi training with the Three-Eyed Raven; Rickon seems a likely hostage and potential casualty to the Stark/Bolton battle for the North, and a now-sightless Arya will go deep cover with an actor's troupe in order to get right with the Many-Faced God, live up to her assassin aspirations, and assume her ultimate destiny as a plot device. But Sansa is the Starkling of the hour. In a series full of strong female characters, Sansa's power comes from her nuanced understanding of herself as valuable property in the eyes of the patriarchy, a conception she could be in a good position to exploit as she completes her transformation into a queen who has been the object of enough cruelty and power games to have taken copious notes on how to divide political foes and capitalize on a valuable bloodline.

Season 6 will also give us flashbacks—reportedly in the form of visions from Bran—to the salad days of Lyanna and Ned during Robert's Rebellion, meaning that the Stark's signature man-bun will back in all its manly bunliness. Of course, the big return will be that of Ned Stark's bastard, Jon Snow, the boy who died so that the man—Jon Stark—may live...

House Lannister

If the early seasons were about the dissemination of Starks, the last two have been about the decline of Westeros's wealthy patrician house. Long the motivating power behind the realm's dynastic rulers, House Lannister is looking at a costly rupture after Cersei's mismanagement, with her brother/lover Jaime likely to be caught in the middle. A Lannister always pays his debts, and this season nearly every other house will be calling to collect, not to mention the spurned Tyrion Lannister masterminding an invasion from across the Narrow Sea.

Favorite Sons and Daughters: Cersei Lannister, Jaime Lannister, Tyrion Lannister, Kevan Lannister, Lancel Lannister, King Tommen Baratheon (illegitimate)

The Dead: Tywin Lannister, Joanna Lannister, Martyn Lannister, Willem Lannister, Joffrey Baratheon (illegitimate), Myrcella Baratheon (illegitimate)

Season 5: After dispatching patriarch Tywin, Tyrion fled the continent, outfoxed a cabal of penis-thieves, and landed an interview with Daenerys Targaryen, the Diana-like people's princess, though his true foe remained a crippling case of dipsomania. Jaime was dispatched to Dorne to save Myrcella, the daughter of his incestuous relationship with Cersei, from a superfluous Scooby-Doo plot and failed. Unwilling to compete with Margaery Tyrell for control of sweet-tempered Tommen, queen mother Cersei embarked on a foolhardy gambit to use the fundamentalist Faith Militant to enforce her will and wound up naked and ashamed and in the arms of a reanimated 400-pound monsterman with his own brand of bottled water.

What to Expect: The swift and terrible revenge of Cersei spells maximum pwnage for old-guard establishment figure Kevan and born-again evangelical Lancel, totally plausible as early casualties in Mountain-stein's tenure as Facecrusher General. Returning home with their slain daughter, Jaime will be charged with rounding up the remaining Stark-Tully rabble in the Riverlands (where one hopes he'll be reunited with the side-questing Brienne of Tarth, as the unsexualized, mutual respect between the Kingslayer and "I'm no Lady" Brienne is unheard-of in most gendered television pairings). Tyrion will take over for the missing Daenerys in Meereen, which means a lot of talking, usually Peter Dinklage's strong suit. King "Butters" Tommen has proven incapable of acting outside the authority of his mother or child-husband booty call Margaery and will live or die depending on their machinations and whether it's convenient to have a vacant seat of power at this stage of the story, before there's any obvious candidate on hand to seize it.

House Targaryen

Outside of aged monk Aemon, this has only meant Daenerys since the first season, but the princess's rise to power and eventual return to Westeros has been the saga's premier subplot from the beginning. So far, she's marshaled a barbarian horse-lord, a merchant prince, a ruggedly handsome noble-in-exile, an army of eunuchs, and three dragons to her banner, so who are we to protest?

Favorite Sons and Daughters: Daenerys "Mother of Dragons, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea" Targaryen

The Dead: Aerys II "The Mad King," Rhaella Targaryen, Rhaegar Targaryen, Elia Martell, Viserys Targaryen, Khal Drogo, Rhaego Stillborn, Maester Aemon Targaryen

Season 5: This one was a total heartbreaker. Revanchist, KKK-analogue Sons of the Harpy claimed the life of Targaryen loyalist Barristan Selmy, the dishonored (and perpetually friend-zoned) Jorah Mormont became a "Stone Man" leper while trying to prove his devotion to his Khaleesi, and trophy husband Hizdahr zo Loraq got stabbed to death—all so that Daenerys could say, "Haters gonna hate," and fly away on her dragon and wind up the captive of Dothraki tribal warriors. Again.

What to Expect: A do-over of the first season as farce. I realize the idea here is a "back-to-the-basics" plot, where we see whether Daenerys can win over a kingdom on pure messianic charisma, but her lessons in statecraft were finally beginning to become interesting: In contrast to the scheming for power that typified every other storyline, the Meereen scenes showed us how actual day-to-day governance wore on somebody who already had it. Now we're back in familiarly Orientalist territory, the rescue of a white woman from the feral indigenous. At least Jorah Mormont and Birkenstock-brand heartthrob Daario Naharis will give us all the buddy comedy missing from The Searchers.

House Baratheon

The Baratheons have been the ruling family of Westeros from Episode 1 to the present, which is a funny thing because there aren't any left, unless you count illegitimate Tommen and Gendry the blacksmith—a composite of the books' ponderous litany of Baratheon bastards—last seen rowing away from Dragonstone in Season 3 and unlikely to return any time soon.

Favorite Sons and Daughters: Dead, all dead.

The Dead: Robert Baratheon, Joffrey Baratheon (illegitimate), Myrcella Baratheon (illegitimate), Renly Baratheon, Shireen Baratheon, Selyse Baratheon, Stannis Baratheon

Season 5: The obscene charade of Jon Snow's "death" in the finale did a lot to overshadow the Lear-ian undoing of Stannis, last legit claimant to the throne, which registered precisely because there were no dramatic reversals or last-minute enchantments to save the Mannis from himself. Rather, he ignored his best advisor, fed his family to the Lord of Light, and indulged in some magical thinking in the lead-up to the doomed siege of the Bolton-held Winterfell, a defeat that was surprisingly poignant for being completely logical. Stannis's time at Castle Black allowed him to seemingly recognize an equal in Jon Snow—which will be relevant since Jon Snow is looking to inherit Stannis's surviving retainers Melisandre and Davos Seaworth, as well as the destiny Stannis pursued so blindly.

What to Expect: Nothing, we are fresh out of heroes.

House Bolton

In a show that likes to pretend to the moral ambiguity of its characters, I'm pretty sure the bad guys are the dudes who skin their victims alive, come from a place called the Dreadfort, fly a banner featuring a flayed man, and still hold the record for most Starks killed in a single setting. Ramsay may be a cackling, big-eyed, cartoon villain played by history's Welshest person, but his father Roose feels like the character with the best handle on the virtues GoT tends to reward: pitiless, mercenary, mistrustful, and unfettered by the slightest moral intrusion.

Favorite Sons and Daughters: Roose Bolton, Walda Frey, Ramsay Bolton

The Dead: None, full deck.

Season 5: The Boltons had a great season, which sucked for everyone else. Roose accepted Littlefinger's gift of Sansa only to call him on his two-timing bullshit; Ramsay had a ball toying with poor Sansa and Reek; Walda announced her pregnancy; and the Boltons had some quality father and son time prior to decimating Stannis on the battlefield.

What to Expect: Watching the Boltons get fucked up is going to be one of the main pleasures of Season 6, as the loss of Sansa and the threat of a Bolton born in wedlock (and therefore ahead in the line of succession) could send Ramsay over the edge and put Roose and Walda on the chopping blo—er, inverted cross. House Bolton won't be able to hold Winterfell against threats internal and external and gracious diplomacy is not Ramsay's strong suit, so expect the showdown between him and his fellow bastard Jon Snow to be the season's most cathartic set piece.

House Frey

The Dickensian House Frey haven't had any screentime since carrying out the Red Wedding and there's no reason for them to return except to die at the hands of an ascendant Tully-Stark alliance, presumably in the absurdly graphic manner that characterizes the show's most deserved deaths.

Favorite Sons and Daughters: Walder Frey, Walda Frey, and about a million half-wit progeny.

The Dead: Walder's eighth wife (Catelyn's consolation kill after watching Robb and Talisa get slaughtered before her eyes).

Season 5: We haven't been to the Twins since Season 3, though the (actually quite genial-seeming) Walda Frey's presence in Winterfell served to remind us that should the Boltons lose their custodianship of the North, the otherwise friendless Freys will be vulnerable.

What to Expect: Hard as it is to care about people we haven't seen in two seasons, the return of the Tullys—Edmure and the Blackfish—means this house could get its overdue comeuppance.

House Greyjoy

Another bunch of fetid cranks we haven't seen lately, the Iron Islands look to be Season 6's Dorne—that is, a location we've seldom visited, filled with characters we've never met, rife with plots we're suddenly asked to care about. The Greyjoys at least have the advantage of having previously established figures like Theon and Yara and, you know, being fucking pirates.

Favorite Sons and Daughters: Balon Greyjoy, Theon Greyjoy/Reek, Yara Greyjoy, Euron Greyjoy

The Dead: Rodrik Greyjoy, Maron Greyjoy

Season 5: The usual response to Theon is contempt, pity, or a mixture of both, but the showrunners seem to have recognized in the once-and-future hostage a poignantly tragic figure who mistakes his own nature and winds up hated by everybody he ever sought to impress. True, last season mostly saw him sniveling in a kennel, but his single act of heroism in rescuing Sansa goes a long way toward reconstructing our faith in the living disappointment that is Theon. At this point, a redemptive death would be too clean and trite, but he won't be welcomed by either his adoptive Stark family nor his kin at Pyke, making his arc the potentially fascinating journey of someone who has burnt every bridge that might have received him and finds himself with nowhere to run.

What to Expect: If there's anything you've been meaning to say to crusty old Balon Greyjoy, now's the time: His death was prophesied back in Season 3 and his survival seems an oversight that new character Euron seems to have been cast to correct, as well as stencil the long-dormant Ironborn back onto the plot.

House Tyrell

The mercantile purse of the Seven Kingdoms, the opportunistic and matriarchal flower-people of House Tyrell have always been a great adversary for the Lannisters and the fact that last season ended with Margaery and Loras in chains, Lady Olenna royally pissed, and Mace freestyling at the Iron Bank means the rivalry between Westeros' two most bourgeois houses is about to go from a loaded drawing-room comedy to a balls-out War of the Roses.

Favorite Sons and Daughters: Olenna "Queen of Thorns" Tyrell, Queen Margaery Tyrell, Loras "Knight of the Flowers" Tyrell

The Dead: None.

Season 5: The looks the Queen of Thorns gave Cersei after the latter's transparent attempts at skullduggery made the season, as did Mace's cheerful obliviousness to the fact that everyone else considers him a complete tool. Loras, the Knight of the Flowers, was arrested by the Faith Militant on, like, sodomy charges and Margaery went from boning down with the adolescent king to telling Cersei to "Get out, you hateful bitch!" after being imprisoned beneath the Sept of Baelor.

What to Expect: A reversal of fortune. Fetching woodland creature Margaery will charm the High Sparrow just as she has every other citizen of King's Landing, even if it means (I fear) throwing Loras under the bus. The Tyrells will have some choice words for Cersei, but she won't be listening, and we'll meet Tyrell loyalists the Tarlys (Sam's folks), who would lead the charge in the event of an insurgency against the crown. We're sure to get more from Diana Rigg's Olenna, as hers is one of the choicest performances on the show and has a lot of audience goodwill built up from being the architect of Joffrey's demise. It's really hard to imagine anything bad happening to Margaery after being wed three times to three kings, but plebes said the same about Anne Boleyn.

House Martell

After the debacle of last season's Dorne tangent, the Martells are not exactly fan favorites. That's too bad, because the prior seasons did so much to build up Dorne as the land of tits and wine, equal parts Jacobean stock-exotica and NorCal bohemia. The much-missed Oberyn Martell brought desperately needed wit and swagger to the show, so we had every reason to expect the same of his countrymen. What we got instead was puerile, awkward, and unnecessary.

Favorite Sons and Daughters: Doran Martell, Trystane Martell, Ellaria Sand, Obara Sand, Nymeria Sand, Tyene Sand

The Dead: Oberyn Martell, Elia Martell

Season 5: Nothing about the Dornish plot even made the most basic empirical sense. Why does Ellaria hold the Lannisters responsible for her lover Oberyn's death on his own terms during a trial by combat he volunteered for? Why did the Sand Snakes try to abduct/kill Myrcella in the castle garden, in full view of Princess Doran and Trystane, in broad daylight? Why did the treasonous schemes of House Martell culminate in an awkward family dinner (and that's leaving out Myrcella and Jaime talking about her incestuous origin in offensively reductionist "you love who you love" cant)?

What to Expect: Well, now that they're here, they're here, I guess; might as well make the most of that castle in Seville they've booked. Trystane was promised a seat on the small council, but that was before Myrcella succumbed to Ellaria's poison lipstick. Now he could be a hostage, a corpse, or a foothold for the Dornishmen in the event of full-on war with the crown. Whatever comes to pass, the Martells' existing role in the story will likely be as occasional diplomatic allies to whoever seems likely to prevail over the hamstrung Lannisters.

The Night's Watch

After the act of sedition that culminated in the murder of Jon Snow as a "traitor," it's a case of the pot calling the Castle Black for the once reassuringly martial bureaucracy known as the Night's Watch. With ice zombies in one corner, wildlings in the other, and a reborn Jon Snow bound to be peeved at having been left to bleed out, their watch could be ended as early as this season or, hell, the first episode.

Favorite Sons and Daughters: Alliser Thorne, Eddison Tollett, Olly, Samwell Tarly

The Dead: Will, Gared, Waymar Royce, Yoren, Qhorin Halfhand, Jeor Mormont, Janos Slynt, Locke, Pyp, Grenn, Karl, Rast, Maester Aemon Targaryen, Benjen Stark (MIA), Jon Snow (resurrection pending)

Season 5: Jon Snow's two-state solution made him an unpopular Lord Commander (though it gave us the miniature-painting wargamer's wet dream that was Hardhome). After a season of little Olly's resting bitch face, the Crows pulled a Caesar on the bastard of Winterfell. Not that he would have had much to do sticking around the Wall: Maester Aemon died of natural causes (!) and Samwell left for grad school at the Citadel with Gilly and her baby in tow.

What to Expect: I hated watching Alliser Thorne's characterization go from R. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket to a prolonged sneer, and his death will be a waste for the complexity we only got to glimpse in previous seasons. Samwell's trip to Oldtown could either be the solo spinoff adventure that finally takes him out from under Jon's shadow or be this season's Dorne. The producers' bizarre and transparent attempts to deny Jon Snow's resurrection means that yes, of course, Snow will rise again and by hook or crook we'll finally learn what we have always known ( possible spoiler!): Jon is the son of Lyanna Stark and Daenerys's slain brother Rhaegar, and anyone who doubts it should save the rest of us the trouble and jump out the moon door right this minute.

Petyr Baelish and Varys

They may have begun with no house of their own, but it's worth remembering that Littlefinger and the Spider are the axles on which the action turns, directly or indirectly responsible for everything from the death of Jon Arryn to the rise of Daenerys. They are also the viewer's stand-ins, fulfilling the fantasy of a life of passive control over a vast switchboard of political consequences, and the two-headed dragon of the fan base. Baelish wants to endlessly complicate the story and draw it out unreasonably with alliances that make no sense; Varys, on the other hand, wants order and resolution, justice for the innocent, a vile end for the guilty This matches the twin desires of anyone who's been tuning in: On one hand there's the desire for twists and shocking moments of death and/or nudity, and on the other there's a yearning for a show that stays faithful to the books, weaves a plot that's narratively and philosophically coherent, and comes to a timely end.

In the end, though, we all want the same thing: to extend our consumer experience of Game of Thrones, whether through book, TV show, or internet newsgroup, and find in its world all the operatic resonance and cause-and-effect intelligibility missing from ours. GoT is our designated contemporary myth of the ancient present and for us, winter cannot come soon enough.

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

All photos courtesy of HBO

Game of Thrones premieres on April 24 on HBO.

Katherine Anne Porter published her first collection of short stories in 1930, and her first novel wasn't published until 1965, 35 years later. David Means, one of our greatest living writers of short fiction, has taken "only" 25 years—but since we all know that 21st-century time is speeding up, I'd say he's Katherine Anne Porter squared.

Anyhow, the arrival of his debut novel Hystopia, for the readers like me who've been pounding the table with our silverware, is that kind of event. The book follows a young veteran's return to the States in an alternate reality where President Kennedy is still alive and the Vietnam War rages on. The novel is both phantasmagorical and dire; the characters are seared onto the pages; the lines glow. We're all lucky Means cares so damn much, and I was lucky to get to talk with him about it for you here.

VICE: I want to know a lot about your take on war and trauma—it seems to me we're living entrenched in a war society that doesn't know it, and that we have been at least since the World War II vets came home.
David Means: When you focus in on acute trauma, the kind of trauma you get in combat, or when you're involved in a shooting incident, or when you have a violently abusive husband, you touch on something that is primal and mythic, rooted in a common narrative of pure survival. That's the current standard take on it, at least by Dr. Jonathan Shay, who wrote two amazing books on Vietnam combat and myth.

The ironic thing is that war is horrific, and yet it often brings those in combat into deeply intimate contact with one another in ways that normal, everyday life simply can't. I have all kinds of crazy ideas about the connection between our society—seething in the mythos of violence, consumed by it—and our current war footing, but to put the pieces together, as a fiction writer, away from specific stories, feels ultimately impossible. The WWII vets came home, many of them, somehow able to compartmentalize and simply head into making lives, but they had this huge, national, societal structure to return to, and they did it slowly—on ships, lumbering across an ocean, playing cards, soothing each other, sharing stories, and then parades and VFW hall meetings and a booming post-war economy. Whereas in Vietnam, you were done with your tour, packed up, got on the plane, and were home the next day, unable to go through the ceremonial steps necessary to reenter, to return, and the world you got home to was in cultural upheaval, partly because of the war you just left.

Does that connect with our entrenched war society today?
I'll take a risk and say it has something to do with the nature of violence at some fundamental level: We no longer have a social sense of a common (good) will toward some common (good) goal, and yet we're also surrounded by violence, acute violence, and a mythos of violence. After Vietnam, war was repackaged—using lessons learned—so that it fit into the television screen, and now the computer screen, neatly, but, again, the actual nature of combat itself, the things soldiers go through, is the same.

In a sense yours is an inside-out historical X-ray of the way things really are, very much like Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle.
There's a reason The Man in the High Castle—beyond the fact that it's now a show, a series —is touching a nerve right now; wars always pose a counter-narrative: What would happen if we lost X. Part of that counter-narrative is the question: Are we better because we fought that war? Yes, we're better because we fought in and helped win World War II, but the part of us that was there before the war—and the part of the enemies—has been lost. No matter what, war transforms the culture, bends history.

I'd venture to say—and again it's just a wild guess—that we've created a counter-narrative to our loss in Vietnam, a culture that somehow validates small, pop-in, pop-out wars—drones, incursions—that can be kept to the side, along with school shootings and other outrageous incidences that would, for so many, take away too much if they were to be solved with reasonable social agreements. I guess what I'm saying—in all of this—is that our perpetual war footing is a cultural aftermath of each war we fight somehow, and it's just as cultural as it is military.

We're just in the early stages of trying to find the Iraq War counter-narrative, but we can't find it because the war really isn't over.

It almost sounds as if you're saying the Vietnam War isn't really over either. So, how can we land on a counter-narrative if we don't even know the narrative? Our world consists of political and social taffy; it hasn't so much advanced from the one I knew growing up (I was born in '64) as it has been stretched and distorted and deformed from that point.
I'd be really sorry if I thought I'd just written another alternate history.

I can promise you, you haven't. The problem with most alternate-history stories is their complacency—they presume that we understand a history, so that we can intelligibly and wittily rework it. As opposed to delving into the miasma of our real situation, we're traumatically embedded in a foggy realm where time ostensibly passes, a local outcropping known as "the present," from which we enjoy no privileged grasp or superior purview (cf. Faulkner: "The past isn't dead, it isn't even past"). I think Dick's Man in the High Castle exposes the game. No sooner does he conceive the historical reversal than he begins to use it to peel away the skin of our consensual reality. His treatment of history is rooted in a suspicion that our "victory" in WWII was so traumatic it defeated even any hope that history could resume where it left off, at least in any sort of coherent moral sense. Your use of the traumatic time-stoppage effect of both Vietnam and the Kennedy assassination seems to do the same thing. I think it's the opposite of alternate history; instead, it's an honest assault on the impossible—the impossible being "the historical novel," which conveys an unworkable lie in its fundamental premises.
As I see it, Eugene Allen, the vet who imagines the main hunk of narrative in Hystopia, is trying to understand his particular place in his particular history. We all carry our own personal sense of history and spend most of our time trying to rewrite it, retool it, to meet our sense of where we are, exactly, in the moment—and the bigger, wider historical stuff we tweak as necessary. For years, for example, I went around thinking that my sister—who was mentally ill, and is mentally ill—was devoured by Vietnam, by the late 60s and early 70s. But of course that was just a story—a bending of history—I told myself. We have the technology to really record historical moments—at least to get combat recorded; guys in Iraq could have worn GoPros and recorded everything. So the possibility now is that history could be curated, or at least we have a sense that it could be curated, which means our sense of its malleability is even more acute.

When I was researching—watching news film footage—I saw Morley Safer in the field with grunts taking tokes from a bong made out of a rifle. When I saw hours and hours of footage, I realized that so much of what I had thought was surreal, slightly bullshit reimagining—you know, by Oliver Stone and others—had really happened, at least there are images of it. Early in the war, the troops were crew-cut, spit-shinned, young men, and by the end they looked, a lot of them, like Jim Morrison, complete with love beads.

"Early in the war the troops were crew-cut, spit-shinned, young men, and by the end they looked, a lot of them, like Jim Morrison, complete with love beads."

Your book made me think of Mailer's Why Are We in Vietnam?—an undervalued novel, I think, but then what of Mailer's fiction isn't dismissed, by this point? Mailer turned to the home front even while the war was in progress, and sent his characters into a backwoods that recalls Faulkner's "The Bear"—it's probably rooted in Conrad, too—and forecasts things like Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers and Dickey's Deliverance and your own book. I guess Rambo is in there too, somewhere.
When it came out, I despised Rambo. I took that movie as a personal affront to the truth, to real history. It was just the beginning of a cartooning of history and violence—of making action supersede sense, so one guy could go in and finish out a war. But that was the big national delusion project, to turn back, to find some glorious sense of pure innocence as a nation—first Reagan and then Bush, and then we go and invade another country without full knowledge of its culture and history.

When the Iraq War was starting, my father-in-law got his Navy uniform on and went to a war protest—one of those roadside protests with signs and the pro-war folks on the other side of the street. Some enlisted guy came up to him and raged at him for wearing his uniform against regulations; my father-in-law, almost 80 years old, stood there with a guy screaming at him.

The thing about Mailer was that he was often a sexist, a blowhard of his day, a man who saw himself as going head to head with Hemingway, but he kept shooting at targets, kept struggling with the big contemporary issues—and when he located his exact, true subject, as he did in Why Are We in Vietnam? , or in Executioner's Song, he hit it hard and dead center, and it was a horrific and terrific sight. Like Faulkner's "The Bear," Why Are We in Vietnam? is trying to uncover how a certain primal American drive relates to the nature of raw, physical courage. But it's also—by cartooning out these American types—a political expose of the cultural/political surface texture of America. That texture hasn't changed all that much; the surface appearance of the cartoon types has shifted, but we still have FOX news on one side and MSNBC on the other.

In Hystopia, I wanted to go in there and tap whatever energy I could from my memory of the horrific turmoil of that time, as picked up by my young-man sensors. At the same time, I was also, when I started it, watching CBS News footage of Vietnam in the early days of the Iraq War and talking to vets of Vietnam and WWII vets. I was also trying to find a way into some extremely personal history—mostly having to do with my sister—and to create a story around it.

Sometimes the best way to go into the center of private trauma, familial trauma, is to use it as the quiet center of something larger, more allegorical or phantasmagorical. It grounds the conceit in something urgent and keeps it honest, and at the same time, it allows the personal material to hide in plain sight.
The entire point of writing fiction is to find something that can only be expressed in fiction itself, but of course, the impetus to create is rooted in the personal, and fiction is ultimately a form of self-expression. I went through a phase of blaming history—the Vietnam War, the era—for some trauma I went through as a kid that involved my family and my sister.

It's funny, I always resist the suggestion that my writing might be "therapeutic"—art-for-art's-sake sentiment always rises up at the suggestion. But I know it often is. I suppose the difference is that I don't set out with that purpose.
The root of the word "therapeutic" is "to minster to," or "to tend to," something like that, and the thing about trauma, as it sits in memory, is that it's incredibly intimate, and you spend your life ministering to it one way or another. The urge to confess is huge and necessary and part of the healing process. But as Jonathan Shay points out, you want to confess to those who are listening, truly listening, honestly listening, at meetings where things are safe and communal, or to friends. The United States was never really ready to hear the individual stories of trauma from Vietnam—but they did listen when guys like Tim O'Brien transmuted them into fiction.

Jonathan Lethem is the author of nine novels, seven books of nonfiction, and five story collections. His most recent books are Dissident Gardens and Lucky Alan and Other Stories.

Hystopia by David Means is available in bookstores and online.

PA / PA Wire/Press Association Images

Prince is dead at 57, and that fucking sucks. So we asked people to write about their favorite moments from his insanely rich and varied career.

CONTROVERSY

"Controversy" was the first Prince song I fell in love with. I saw him live for the first and only time with my brother in Manchester two years ago. We'd spoken the entire way there, speculating what his setlist would be and otherwise spinning out over how dreamlike it was that we were both on our way to way to see Prince on a drizzly night in May. The one thing my brother kept telling me, him being the bigger fan of the two of us, was that he wouldn't play "Controversy." I shouldn't get my hopes up. He never plays it. By the time the "Purple Rain" had gushed to an end and Prince left the stage, I was more than contented with what was already the greatest live performance I'd ever seen. Then darkness descended in the arena again, he started to play "Controversy" and I briefly left my body. Angus Harrison, VICE/Thump

I WOULD DIE 4 U

My favorite Prince song is "I Would Die 4 U," the fourth single from Purple Rain. I feel in many ways, it's an under-appreciated track, and I'm not sure why it hasn't garnered the same fawning devotion as the others; it's just as deserving. Every time it's played in a club, every time some drab house party is fleetingly enlivened by it, every time I sit in my room and it blares tinnily from my shit laptop speakers, just every time I hear it, it is the best time I've heard it. It couldn't be more representative of all the good, the great, we can ever see or do in our lives. It is a perfect song. The air burns every time it's played. His life was an exhibition of magnificent sexual, stylistic, human power. It wasn't a crass collection of moments, it was a fog of pure delight, an opaque purple mist of perverse genius. What a fucking guy. Joe Bish, VICE

DARLING NIKKI

When I heard Prince had been found dead in his studio, it was the first time a celebrity death ever hit me in a real way. Disbelief followed by dread, nausea, and tears that wrung out of my body so forcefully it gave me stomach cramp. Seconds later I got a text from my mom asking if I was OK, which was a much faster response than she has been known to give for deaths within our own family. I cursed myself for having never seen him live, felt thankful for even existing within the same tiny blip on the universal timeline as him, and grieved for the loss of someone so beyond description that language suddenly feels like a dumb and unequipped device. Then I started thinking about sex.

"Darling Nikki"—the sonic sore thumb of Purple Rain, is a track so sexy it is literally the reason parental advisory stickers exist. Why was this song so notorious when pretty much every Prince song is a sex song? My guess is because it's aggressively about female sexual appetite—female sexuality as a weapon rather than the typically portrayed passive quality of "sexiness" that exists only at the behest of the male gaze.

Yeah, "Darling Nikki" is sort of a humblebrag about how much crazy sex Prince has probably had, but it's also a love letter to the power of female sexuality, sexual expression, and, frankly, the pleasures of doing it rough. So really there's no need to be sad, because pain or pleasure, death or sex, Prince is the explosive center of all opposing forces, and that's an energy that'll last a hell of a lot longer than any of us will. And if you do feel really blue right now, then at least Prince was nice enough to leave behind enough material to crywank to. Emma Garland, Noisey

SOMETIMES IT SNOWS IN APRIL

I was resisting writing anything about Prince right now because, honestly, my heart is so heavy that it didn't feel right. But I somehow can't help myself. His significance in my life was—is—so great. I bunked off school to watch Purple Rain on a well-worn VHS at my friend Nicole's house. I lined up for hours at Birmingham HMV with the other Prince geeks to get a copy of the Symbol album signed by Mayte and the New Power Generation. My aunty, Jemma, died at the age of 36 many many years ago, and I remember so vividly playing "Sometimes It Snows In April" (she died in January, but her birthday was April) over and over and over again, smoking my Embassy No.1s and drinking two-liter bottles of Strongbow. I got to see him perform the song a few years after Jemma's death, at the NIA in Birmingham. I cried a purple river.

Over the years, I've seen Prince play a good few times: in Manchester, at the O2, at Koko where he came up on the balcony with his guitar and played 2 ft from me while I shook, according to my friend Kathryn, like "an excited poodle humping a tree." One time he turned up to a weird party I was randomly at in South Kensington and sat behind a velvet rope sipping tea while we all stood staring at him which made me feel so so sad that I cried a bit.

Throughout my teenage years, my twenties, my thirties, to today, Prince has been a constant. A solid constant of memories, happy and sad, poignant and frivolous. I sat up until the early hours many a night with my old roommate Penny drinking wine and singing along to "Get Off," "Adore," "Scandalous," "I Will Die 4 U" at the top of our lungs. I really love U Prince. I miss U so much. All I ever wanted to do was to go to Paisley Park and get to see u play "Sometimes It Snows In April" at the piano. That never happened. That never will happen. It's snowing this April, and every April forever. Hattie Collins, i-D

PRINCE AND BEYONCÉ AT THE GRAMMYS

The first CD I ever owned was Dangerous by Michael Jackson. I realize he's not Prince, but bear with me. Prince was Michael Jackson's great rival in the made-up-in-my-head 80s superstar wars. My loyalty to Jackson meant I never really listened to Prince. I had never forgiven him for turning down the chance to duet with Jackson on "Bad" (pointing out the fact that the opening line of that song is "your butt is mine", Prince said: "Now I said 'who is singing that to whom? 'Cause you sure ain't singing that to me and I sure ain't singing that to you'."

Obviously at this point, Prince's biggest hits were engrained in my psyche whether I liked it or not. Secretly I was starting to fall a bit in love with him. "Raspberry Beret" was one of my mom's favourite songs and she'd often play his The Hits compilation when she was driving me to school, but it wasn't until another superstar obsession—Ms. Beyoncé Knowles—duetted with Prince at the Grammys in 2004 that I properly fell in love with his discography. That medley is a masterclass in how proper superstars effortlessly exist on another plane to most ordinary fuckwits with a microphone. There's a bit where it segues between "Baby I'm A Star" and "Crazy In Love" and if that doesn't make your stomach flip with joy then have a word with yourself. Michael Cragg, Popjustice

17 DAYS

Every element of "17 Days" is an immaculate conception, perfect proof of the power of art, a genuine testament to the notion of individual genius. That slouching bassline. That icy drip of a synth-hook. The staccato thud of the beat. Prince's faux-indifferent vocal.

Yes, this is an immaculately produced track, but all the studio trickery in the world can't disguise a mediocre hook, or a weak bridge, or a sloppy middle eight. "17 Days" would sound incredible played on a tub of Clover with some rubber bands. It's a battered, bruised, but still defiant declaration of independence. Josh Baines, Thump

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL GIRL IN THE WORLD

I used to dream as Prince. In a recurring sequence from when I was about eight years old, I'd look down to find myself in his body, shirt ruffles almost blocking the view of my guitar while I played an invented song that I'd inevitably forget when I woke up. He turned my mind inside out with his malleable take on gender, his emboldened blackness, his masculinity slippery like satin. "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World" remains my favorite video, with its powerful message on self-esteem and pride. Prince was the first musician who made me understand that you could be many things at once: an impish figure in a tightly cut red matador suit, cooing in a falsetto, then in the same breath one dropping to a velvet baritone while fluttering kohl-rimmed eyelids. Tonight, I hope to turn into him again. Tshepo Mokoena, VICE

Angus (left, and I suppose right) tries a Faceswap

On Wednesday, in a now clearly ill-advised move, Snapchat updated its ever-changing run of in-app effects to include a Bob Marley filter. The face-swap, released as a celebration of 420, was essentially ready-made blackface, altering the user's skin tone and giving them dreads. This pissed a lot of people off, but while some had an immediate and serious conversation about the racial politics of blackface, everyone seemed relaxed about the general idea of fusing their faces with the features of long-deceased public figure.

It's a regularly-tread idea that access to excessive pornography online has desensitized us to graphic sex, and similarly that 24-hour uncensored news cycles have desensitized us to graphic trauma. With that in mind, is it not also possible that internet culture, from face swaps to Pepe the Frog, have desensitized us to the surreal? Put simply: why don't we find anything weird anymore?

Snapchat filters, if you haven't seen or used them for whatever reason, are a series of lenses that map special effects onto your face in selfie mode. They range from mild eye bulges all the way through to 1920s Cabaret-style make-up and they've gone down a storm. Everyone from Rita Ora to Serena Williams is using them.

The filters have been welcomed as just the latest manifestation of lol-random culture. Yet because of this reputation, Snapchat—an app primarily used by teenagers—has been getting away with surrealist experiments in self-portraits completely unnoticed.

Because they're not just random. They're unsettling and subtle. The glazed anime-esque emotional excess of the crying effect, the haunting featureless character of the yellow smiley lens, or the sinister vogueing of the make-up filter all go above and beyond the realms of "goofy," bypassing what we'd normally perceive as the limits of our imaginations. They're a bizarre, surreal, and often sinister chain of self-modifications, taking as the starting point a constantly moving image of our own faces.

Sure there are some conventionally "funny" settings—handle-bar moustaches and aviators are basic dress-up by anyone's standards—but that doesn't account for the Dali-meets-Pixar limits of your eyes blown up to the size of tennis balls while you vomit a rainbow or the one where your mouth is stretched like a rubber-bands, with the eye sockets hollowed out, with dog-ears and huge wagging tongues. It doesn't account for a kaleidoscope of colors descending across your face like transcendental acid flash.

Picasso on Snapchat, as imagined by the author

If, like Kanye, we imagine a parallel with the career of Pablo Picasso, then straightforward selfie-taking is equivalent to his Rose period: honest, humble reflections on the actuality of the human form that, while still filtered to a point, treat their subjects as life-like. With this in mind, Snapchat's face-swap is the selfie entering its Cubist phase. No longer content with realistic portrayals we have developed a desire to contort our own forms.The face-swap, for example, doesn't just mutate our own identity, it allows us to trade ours with someone else, creating distinct, shared facial characters from these glitchy, flawed hybrids.

Yet, at most, you've probably just heard your mom describe it as "a bit weird" when her entire face is slapped onto your dad's bald head during a lazy Sunday afternoon back home. That's not to say we should expect everyone to immediately parallel face-swaps with the collagism of the Dadaists, or the wonky-stylings of Simon Quadrat, but it's fascinating just how unremarkable everybody thinks it is. Odd is the new normal, and the internet has created a safe-space for surrealist expression.

This legacy for mass avant-garde has been part of internet culture from the get-go. From the first flash animations on AlbinoBlacksheep.com, online media has gone hand in hand with perverse imagery and left-field humor (see: Salad Fingers). Yet, as the internet ceased to be the domain of bedroom-dwellers, and spread its reach across the world via social networks and smartphones, the borders of "the weird part of YouTube" grew wider and wider so that today, surrealism is for everyone.

We haven't just normalized the weird, we've turned into something basic. We now exist in a time where the most culturally unadventurous people on your timeline are expressing themselves with short videos of goats screaming; where your mom is trading faces with your dad and sending it to your aunty; where you can communicate embarrassment with a pictograph of a monkey covering his eyes and nobody will bat an eyelid.

You could write this all off as gross over-analysis of a few silly filters, but it's because we don't see Snapchat as intentionally avant-garde that we immediately let our guard down. It's another sign of how the sensory assault of the information age has blunted our capacity for shock. Every doctored Snapchat, and the flippancy of their distribution, proves just how comfortable with bizarre imagery we've become.

If sexting is the internet age allowing a generation to communicate the limits of their sexuality, and in the process lose touch with intimacy, perhaps Snapchat is doing the same to their imaginations.

Follow Angus Harrison on Twitter.

Early in season two of Silicon Valley, there's a scene where the hapless, usually tongue-tied protagonist Richard (Thomas Middleditch) tries to explain to his company's new CEO why his compression algorithm is so important. "Every mobile device on the face of the planet could be able to access their data as if they had a fiberoptic cable plugged into it," he says. "People in the desert, people in refugee camps, people who have nothing could suddenly have access to everything! Everybody in this industry, they say they want to make the world a better place, but we could actually do it."

The CEO, played by Stephen Tobolowsky with a jovial daddishness that can bubble into rage at any time, is having none of it. It's more important that the company appeal to investors—and anyway, he's got to get back to the matter at hand, which is watching his breeding mare get noisily inseminated by a stallion whose sperm is worth $150,000.

This being HBO, we get lots of money shots of full-on horse sex, but the bit also serves as a two-pronged business lesson: First, it doesn't matter that your heart is in the right place. Second, someone is always getting fucked.

The show, executive produced by the legendary Mike Judge and Alec Berg, has been a brutal, clear-eyed satire of the tech industry for two seasons; in its third, as the gang behind the startup Pied Piper find themselves turning into a real company, it's started to take on the business world in the vein of Judge's Office Space. And thank Christ it does, because it's been a long time since there was a high-quality show that didn't treat capitalism as serious business.

In the past few years the most notable movies about Silicon Valley were The Social Networkand Steve Jobs, critic catnip biopics that may not have idolized their subjects but gave Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg the great-man-of-history treatment: Just imagine, without those two titans of industry, you wouldn't be scrolling through Facebook on your iPhone right now! The decade's most prominent TV show about business was Mad Men, a similarly hefty and award-winning entertainment product centered around a series of monologues about how to sell cigarettes or floor cleaner, and AMC has followed that up with Halt and Catch Fire, a drama set in the early days of the computer industry. Even that movie where Ashton Kutcher starred as Jobs was somehow a drama.

These films and series are fine (well, except for that Kutcher disaster) but they're also utterly unrealistic. Most companies are not helmed by troubled visionary antiheroes; most people's jobs, even important and high-paying jobs, consist of a series of pointless, absurd, and unconnected crises. Silicon Valley, like so much of Judge's work, gets at a core truth about humanity: Almost no one knows what they're doing.

Like any solid sitcom, the show's premise is simple. Richard is that rare Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has a piece of truly groundbreaking technology. He's trying to turn his invention into a major company, along the way trying to outwit investors and competitors who are all more street-smart and pragmatic than he is. It's like a story about an aspiring singer or writer who steps off the bus in New York or LA and has their dreams ground to dust by the machine, except in this case Richard has an algorithm instead of a song or a script.

Mostly, Silicon Valley's plot is just an excuse to roam around a landscape made absurd by the confluence of too much youth, money, and buzzwords. Season three gives us Erich (T.J. Miller) kicking the shit out of one of those weird deer-like robots, the gang getting lost inside a subterranean server farm, the meek Jared (Zach Woods) being forced out of his own apartment by his Airbnb guest, Martin Starr's perpetually chilled-out coder, Bertram, being sent hoverboards and Oculus Rifts as gifts from job recruiters, Dinesh (Kumail Nanjiani) playing computer solitaire with a Keyglove and several linked monitors. And that's just in the three episodes HBO made available to critics.

The show has been committed to realism since it began, but its setting means there's a bottomless well of tech-world strangeness to feature. Take writer Anna Wiener's recent look back at her tenure in Silicon Valley published in n+1, for instance, which includes stories about her going to a job interview where a company founder asked her to take the LSAT while he checks her phone, and a lucky programmer who wins half a million at a hackathon. What makes Silicon Valley funny isn't how bizarre it is, but how close to the truth it cuts.

It's also true-to-life in the way the Valley denizens depicted are overwhelmingly caucasian and male. That's disappointing in some ways, but it makes sense thematically—Judge's oeuvre is mostly concerned with white dudes, especially those who find themselves successful for no good reason. Think Luke Wilson's everyman transformed into a genius in a planet of morons in Idiocracy, or Ron Livingston's slacker in Office Space, who discovers that hard work has nothing to do with success, and that neither have anything to do with happiness.

Likewise, in the world of Silicon Valley people get millions of dollars for no reason, they stumble upon ultra-valuable pieces of code by accident, and the difference between being a loser taking bong hits in a startup "incubator" and a billionaire is a couple good meetings with VCs. If the show has a message, it's this: High-stakes capitalism here isn't a meritocracy where the talented great men rise to the top, but a dogpile where fools are parted from their money by only slightly smarter fools. It's fun to imagine the ship of industry is piloted by CEOs with pioneering instincts, but it seems more likely that no one knows what they're doing, and we're all just sort of blundering around, and some of us fail our way into achievement. You can't put that worldview on an inspirational poster, but I find it oddly comforting.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

A study cited by the American Psychiatric Association states that 85 percent of African Americans consider themselves "fairly religious" or "religious." Like many things concerning black life, this finding is rooted in history. The 60s Civil Rights Movement has closely been linked with religion: Malcolm Little didn't become Malcolm X and then el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz without Islam, and Martin Luther King Jr. often has "reverend" prefixed on his name. Churches have long been the black community's safe space in a Eurocentric nation, and even the Black American National Anthem—which, by virtue of being a "national anthem," is supposed to be a holistic proclamation of a population's hopes—has strong Christian overtones. So to most people, you're not black and religious, because to be black in America is to be religious. Black Nonbelievers, Inc. president and founder Mandisa Thomas puts it like this, "The question often isn't if I go to church—it's where."

So what happens if you're a black atheist? Are you still black? Well, yes. To disagree implies civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph and writer Ta-Nehisi Coates would be "less black," because they are also atheists.

But the States are still centered on Judeo-Christian beliefs, so black atheists face additional isolation. Being a black atheist gives white believers looking to discriminate another thing to hate, because "Christianity is American." Being a black atheist also makes them an anomaly to the black theist majority. And while the predominantly white atheist groups might welcome a black face, many black atheists feel their voices are obscured. Black atheist must find a way to navigate these issues while living in a country that isn't exactly inclusive towards them.

We talked to five black atheists about what it's like to be black in America and reject the the idea of a higher power. It's worth noting that although they do identify as atheists, the term only represents a fraction of their worldview. Some also refer to humanism, a wider encompassing belief that roots itself in the potential of human beings. Here's what they had to say.

Jamila Bey
Occupation: Journalist
Based In: Washington, D.C.

I didn't have a moment—I just had to admit that there was never evidence that I could point to. I tried through school, through college, to believe the stuff that everybody else did. But I just never saw any evidence there. So, for me, it was a matter of when I started telling people as opposed to when I recognized that I was.

Even if Jesus was a real human being at some point, the idea that he was literally, actually dead—no blood flow, no respiration— and his body was decomposing and then he popped up, showed himself to some people and then rose up into the are still so largely religiously identified. The church does tend to define our community as a whole, so it can be difficult to connect with other nonbelievers for that reason.

When it comes to a sense of what defines a black community and what black folks do, atheism is still seen as one of the things that we aren't or that we can't be, which of course is ridiculous. But unfortunately, when we mention atheism or we discuss it, it's almost like we're speaking a foreign language. Our numbers in the black community are increasing because there are a lot of black folks who express their dissent and dissatisfaction with religion. But there needs to be a bigger platform to also find that support among those who can specifically relate as it pertains to the black community and as a person of color.

Follow Brian Josephs on Twitter.

Illustration by Nick Gazin

I recently spoke to some reformed gangsters about how and why they left crime behind. In most cases, it was because they knew that being in and out of jail for the rest of their lives would suck. That a life behind bars is really no kind of life when you could be outside, eating decent food, enjoying swimming classes, or getting really into needlework blogs.

One slightly confusing revelation, however, came from former biker gang member John Lawson, who told me that a major factor in his decision to go straight was reading a story about himself in the paper and realizing that perhaps he wasn't the nicest of guys.

I couldn't help but think: Did it really take a damning article for a gangland debt collector to notice he wasn't leading a particularly ethical life? And, if so, how is it that criminals who carry out immoral acts day after day manage to convince themselves that they're actually upstanding people?

The only explanation I could come up with is that, to be a career criminal, you either have to be a master of self-deception, or genuinely just not give a fuck.

According to criminal psychology expert Shadd Maruna, studies indicate that the majority of criminals either make excuses for, or attempt to justify, their actions. There's little evidence that these justifications are made prior to committing the crimes, so it's possible—and somewhat likely—that they're thought up afterwards as a way to mitigate the guilt.

"Criminologists have interviewed every imaginable sample of individuals who break laws, and found remarkable consistency in the use of what we call 'techniques of neutralization,'" Maruna explained. "There have been studies of deer poachers, terrorists, rapists, shoplifters, cyber hackers, murderers—you name it. And yet the individuals involved tend to use a very consistent and discernible number of post-hoc rationalizations to account for what they did."

These "techniques of neutralization" form the basis of a concept known as "neutralization theory," which was posited by sociologists David Matza and Gresham Sykes in the 1950s. The theory holds that criminals are able to neutralize values that would otherwise prohibit them from carrying out certain acts by using one or up to five methods of justification: "denial of responsibility," "denial of injury," "denial of the victim," "condemnation of the condemners," and "appealing to higher loyalties."

"Denial of responsibility" is when an offender proposes that he or she was forced by the circumstances they were in to commit a crime; "denial of injury" means insisting that the crime was harmless; "denial of the victim" involves the belief that the person on the receiving end was asking for it; and "condemnation of the condemners" is when the criminal claims that those criticizing or dishing out punishment are doing so out of spite or to shift the blame from themselves. The final method, "appealing to higher loyalties," involves the perpetrator believing that the law needs to be broken for the good of a smaller section of society—for example, a gang or a group of friends.

I was curious to see how these theories worked outside of textbooks, so I got in touch with five reformed criminals and asked how they used to justify their actions to themselves.

A (slightly blurry) photo of Darren Armstrong

The first person I spoke to was former fraudster and violent street robber Darren Armstrong, who now runs a charity aimed at rehabilitating ex-offenders and addicts.

"With the fraud, I was robbing big catalogue firms and thinking, They won't miss the money," he said. "When I did street robberies, I'd usually be off my head on butane gas, see someone walking down the street with nice stuff on and think, Why should he have nice stuff when I've got nothing? I was homeless, full of hatred for society, and felt the system had let me down."

The idea that Armstrong was only stealing from people who could afford the loss seems to fit into the category of "denial of injury," and the fact he felt his victims were undeserving of their wealth because it was unfair they were richer than him suggests that "denial of the victim" was also at play.

Next, I spoke to Glaswegian former gangster Kevin Dooley, who was jailed for firearms offenses and attempted murder, but now works as an addiction recovery coach. He explained that his justifications were often to do with the perceived wrongdoing of the authorities. "I minimized, rationalized, and justified my wrongdoing to everyone, including myself," he said. "My justifications involved corrupt politicians, police, and society."

A classic case of "condemnation of the condemners." So far, so accurate. However, not everyone I spoke to fit neatly into one of the neutralization theory categories.

Mubarak Mohamud

Mubarak Mohamud was a leading figure in Camden's Time for Hustling gang, before turning his back on crime to run a clothing company. He now focuses on steering others away from lawbreaking. During his time as a gang member, he was able to minimize his feelings of guilt by convincing himself that the ends justified the means.

"I just thought, I've got to get that money," he said. "I was trying to justify the means I used to make money, so I kept telling myself that I was doing good and being successful, and repeated it so many times that I actually believed it."

Heith Copes, an expert in criminal decision-making, explained that treating crime as a skill can help offenders mitigate feelings of guilt, as—in their minds—it legitimizes the behavior. Mubarak was justifying what he was doing by viewing himself as a skilled entrepreneur rather than someone who made a living by committing immoral acts.

Next up was former armed robber Frank Prosper, now an actor, who said he purposefully avoided thinking about the rights and wrongs of what he was doing while he was an active criminal. He suggested that it would have been difficult to go through with a robbery if he'd spent too long agonizing over the morality of his chosen career.

According to Copes, willfully abstaining from considering the ethical implications of a crime is another documented technique that criminals use to prevent their guilty consciences from stopping them in their tracks. "Pushing thoughts out of their heads is a way to overcome the guilt," he said. "This is exemplified by saying or thinking phrases like 'fuck it' immediately before or after the crime."

The final person I spoke to was Marcus "Paradise" Dawes, who was jailed in the US for firearms offenses before moving back to the UK and becoming a mentor to young criminals. He mentioned that he saw himself as being involved in a "classic Robin Hood scenario" at the time, which suggests he could fall into the "appealing to higher loyalties" category. He claimed that the justifications he made to himself came after sentencing and were concerned with his belief that he was being punished too harshly. This ties in with the notion that neutralization doesn't necessarily take place at the time of offending, and can come into play afterwards.

Dawes also argued that "condemnation of the condemners" could be seen by some as a valid reason for breaking the law, rather than just an excuse after the fact. "The people who create the law, interpret it through the judicial system and enforce it through policing are seen as corrupt and as double-dealing as the system they've created," he said.

Some might read this as another spurious justification; others will look at the Panama Papers and the MPs' expenses scandal and probably see where he's coming from.

While some justifications could feasibly be argued as rational, it's clear that others are created solely to bypass guilt. So, does being able to convince yourself that what you're doing is right—given that it involves manipulating your own conscience to facilitate wrongdoing—make you a dangerous person?

According to Maruna, the opposite is actually true. "For the last 30 years or so, excuses have got a bad name, and personal responsibility has taken on a cult-like status as a societal panacea," he said. "Individuals in group treatment programs who give explanations for why they got involved in crime are said to be suffering from cognitive distortions or criminal thinking, and are told they're not allowed to make excuses and justifications, but have to accept complete responsibility for their crimes. The problem is that this leaves them only one self-narrative: I did it because I wanted to. If people genuinely believe this, they meet the criteria for what some label as 'psychopathy' and others call 'evil.' This hardly seems like it should be the aim of therapeutic interventions."

So it's not people like the John Lawson of the past—criminals who tell themselves that what they're doing is OK—who we should fear the most; it's those who don't make any attempts to see themselves in that light. Those who think, I don't give a fuck if I'm evil or not.

Follow Nick Chester on Twitter.

Friday nights aren't made for best laid plans. The original intention to be in a cab by 11:00 and inside a club by 12:00 fades as hours fall over each other. Before long it's 1:30, then 2:00. The clothes that three hours earlier smelled purposefully of laundry powder are now crippled by cigarette smoke and rings of sweat, and as you pull another bottle clinking from the fridge you quietly admit to yourself that tonight you're not going anywhere. In the front room slumped over the end of the sofa like a dead dog is a brother, a best friend, the fleshy incarnation of your worst and best memories. With a wobble you fall down next to him, pass a hand over his back and murmur something sentimental.

"Virile" by the Blaze dropped in January with little initial fanfare. Yet despite that, the song has since become a quiet phenomenon. The video for the track, released on the aptly named Bromance Records, is set in the bare cupboard of an empty high-rise flat overlooking a Parisian banlieue. Two young men spend an evening dancing alone to the track, all the while spinning out on a blunt. It's a soft-assault on the senses; part frank recollection of the long nights inside with drugs, part a portrait of friendship. If the video and track articulate one thing frighteningly well, it's the romance of fraternity, and especially its place in club culture. The coil the two characters find themselves in is a strain of male expression totally tied to the nighttime, to alcohol, drugs, and electronic dance music.

Nightclubs have long had an off-on relationship with the fraternal bond. The image of a group of male friends careering drunkenly through the party district with the intention of piling into a club isn't one that's overloaded with positive connotations.

A great deal of attention has focused of late on cultures of sexual harassment and intimidation in nightclubs, on the male mentalities that have made these spaces of inclusion uncomfortable and hostile to women. There are the nauseating archetypes known to anyone who's ever been clubbing: the leering loner, the shady dealer, the aged silverback raver, the ever-present bro. And yet while not many would admit to keeping the company of one of these stock types, according to RAINN, four in five sexual assaults are committed by someone known to the attacker. The threat of the male in nighttime goes further than just thuggish generalizations. An attacker could be anyone, dressed any way, with any eventual intention. As a result of this, the squad, the wolfpack, has become mythologized in the mainstream as something worse than just dicks on parade: booze, banter, and braggadocio tipping into something that transforms nightclubs into spaces of fear.

Between this mixture of stupidity and menace, it can be difficult to find any positive light in which to cast the male presence in clubland. Even fraternal friendship comes with its doubts. Friends tell friends they love each other on dance floors and in smoking areas and living rooms every weekend and often we're likely to dismiss such sentiments as the result of alcohol, lines, and aux cables. Yet there is something unsaid and under-represented that exists in this space. While the pathos displayed through "Virile" could be easily written off as a strain of fucked chat, the video in fact captures something important and neglected. "Virile" is a portrait of the true and valuable male bond that can be made in clubland. The one that transcends asshole dancing and punch-ups. There's a silent agreement you make when you get fucked with your best friend, a pact that says "if we both jump off the edge then we do it holding hands." If you're going to lower your guard, lower it enough to cough up secrets in cigarette smoke, then it has to be with someone you know will go down with you and be there to pull you back out. It has to be with someone you love.

It's this love that is the Blaze's ultimate victory. Masculinity is a strange shell to wear in the 21st century—especially in the cold stacks of a city. Of course, that's not to suggest being male is in any respect harder, but knowing what that identity stands for or how best to express it is something that is all too often lost in either silence or violence. Despite living so much of our experiences before the open gaze of the internet, we seldom talk about our problems as well as we should. Now, narcotics and late nights are not a legitimate answer to any anxiety, but communion of a friendship by night is a powerful outlet.

"Virile" treats clowning around with the utmost respect, appreciating the significance of strange jokes and wrestling matches to the rhythm of the nights that define us as people, fix us in time.

The night depicted in "Virile" captures every shade of this. It's inarguably romantic, with one of the two men practically serenading the other and the soft Parisian night light spread outside. Yet it's also a story of every time two friends have sat around—possibly in the build up to or aftermath of going out—smoking, drinking, and playing records together. It's not a ground-breaking concept on paper, but in execution it couldn't sing with more realness and power. The bareness of the floor, the self-serious nature of the dancing, the foreheads pressed together, the sporadic fits of laughter. It's this cartoonish commitment to each other, as the weed takes hold, that proves the point best. As the lyrics themselves capture, "We look so stupid first / Then we start to believe in something." "Virile" treats clowning around with the utmost respect, appreciating the significance of strange jokes and wrestling matches to the rhythm of the nights that define us as people, fix us in time.

Maybe the greatest single beat in the video arrives with a pivotal blowback, as a smoggy plume is passed from the mouth of one friend to another's. It's a moment that sends the rest of the visuals into a skittish whirl, as both men most likely splinter off into their own headspaces. Yet the exchange, the almost-kiss, best evokes their tryst. Two men, recognizing briefly how indebted they are to one another. "Oh, I need my loneliness / but I'm lost without you." A fitting tribute to the male friendship found and fostered above 4/4 kick-drums.

It would be futile and wrong to attempt to suggest that clubland is an exclusively masculine domain, a mistake that is all too often implicitly made. However, the vision "Virile" offers is a far more truthful account as to what the fraternal bond created in the dark of the nightclub is actually like. It would be impossible to chronicle a history of partiers cementing friendships over music and substances, but it's clearly something that has been happening since the dawn of it all.

Perhaps it's telling that the video appears to feature two actors of Middle Eastern descent—they speak a colloquial Arabic—and as such maybe the Blaze is drawing on different cultural references when it comes to fraternal intimacy (it isn't uncommon for men to hold hands in the Arab world, for example). Yet more likely it's just an honest portrayal of male friendship "under the influence." A portrayal that understands that friendships made in the nighttime are more likely to be linking arms than breaking them. That's not to vindicate any "Not All Men" bullshit, but "Virile" is a reminder that while clubs can prove a playground for the worst in macho posturing and predation, they can also play host to the most honest of connections.

It's this physical communication—tactile affection and gentle bruising—that is missing in the way we have come to characterise young men in nightclubs. We've been rightfully distracted by the bad news: the unsafe environments, the bros, the crime stats, and the douchebags, yet in this process we've perhaps forgotten that it's also under the low-lights of basements and dying lamps of fusty 4:00 AM living rooms that male friendships are often able to best communicate vulnerability, and are best equipped to know each other.

Follow Angus Harrison on Twitter.

Robert Costanzo. Photo courtesy Richmond County DA's office

Robert Costanzo worked at night. He dressed in all black, covering everything except for his eyes, and slipped into upscale homes with the aid of a ladder. Often, he robbed people as they slept, tip-toeing into their bedrooms and pocketing their valuables with a deftness that earned him a nickname: the "Ninja Burglar."

This month, the 46-year-old confessed to more than 100 burglaries around the tri-state area to the tune of $4 million. And while Staten Island District Attorney Michael E. McMahon took care to point out his"reign of terror" was finally over, what the prosecutor revealed about Costanzo during a Wednesday press conference was far more terrifying than mere thievery. Apparently, the man who's been lurking in people's houses since 2007, and has now struck a plea deal with authorities, is a real-life boogeyman and serial rapist.

"This is not the case of Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief," McMahon said in a press conference Wednesday.

Costanzo's first known crime was sexual assault. More specifically, when he was 19, he attacked a Staten Island grandmother at knifepoint before fleeing with her valuables. After that, he got a job near Orlando, Florida, as a Toyota salesman. During his flirtation with legitimate employment, which lasted about a year, he raped four more women during burglaries, the DA said. In one instance, he left enough physical evidence that a cop called his job asking questions, and he fled again––this time to New York.

He didn't exactly clean up his act there, according to the Daily Beast. In 1991, during a drug deal gone wrong, Costanzo got into a shootout with police. That's how he was busted for the rapes, although he was only convicted of one, because the confession he made was deemed largely inadmissible. He got lucky again when he was sentenced to a maximum of 19 years in prison but managed parole after just 12.

It was in 2007 that Constanzo started the streak that earned him his moniker. The man was suspected of 14 robberies before he met Phil Chiolo, the Staten Island resident who made him famous. The two had a confrontation mid-break-in, and Constanzo hit the man with nunchucks. The frightened homeowner struck back with a steak knife and lived to tell the tale. "The remarkable thing was that he did not display any physical pain," he told the Staten Island Register. "And the handle went all the way down."

From then on, residents of the wealthy enclaves of New York's outer borough were on edge, to say the least. Community meetings were held, security patrols set up, and cameras recorded cars going in and out of neighborhoods. Investigators in New York and New Jersey started to piece together the possibility that seemingly separate spates of crimes in their respective jurisdictions were the work of the same criminal.

But the Ninja Burglar never felt behind a single fingerprint or footprint that might help prove that theory. And typically, when the ever-cautious Costanzo saw a safe inside someone's house, he would come back later with the tools to open it. That is, until one night in April 2014, when he roused a 66-year-old Connecticut woman from her sleep and tried to get her to open a vault containing $75,000 worth of jewelry. At some point during the 20-minute ordeal, he made a crucial error in the form of a phone call. Police later checked nearby cell towers and tracked down a getaway driver who picked Costanzo up––and eventually gave him up to cops.

About six months later, police brought the burglar in on an unrelated charge of assaulting a police officer. They took his DNA sample and matched it to some evidence he'd left behind when robbing the Connecticut woman's safe. From there, Costanzo was turned over to authorities in New York, and the confessions started rolling out.

Just as he did with the rapes, Costanzo got lucky again. Despite his so-called reign of terror, he was charged with a mere three counts of second-degree burglary on Wednesday as part of a plea deal (and because of statutes of limitations).

At the time of his arrest, the man with a prolific history of raping and robbing was living the domestic high life on Staten Island with a woman and a kid. "I love you," Costanzo mouthed to three women and a man as he was leaving the courtroom after pleading guilty Thursday. He'll be sentenced on June 14 and faces 25 years in prison with five years of supervised release.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Photo of Boris Johnson via Flickr user BackBoris2012

Read: Why Boris Johnson Is Currently Britain's Most Evil Politician

London Mayor Boris Johnson has published a long, boring op-ed in British tabloid the Sun, airing as many personal and political grievances as possible with President Barack Obama, who's visiting his city this week.

At least a third of the goofy diatribe—which makes abundant plays on Obama's "Yes We Can!" 2008 campaign slogan—rehashes the weird myth about the outgoing US president removing a Winston Churchill bust from the Oval Office when he took power.

"Some said it was a snub to Britain," Johson writes. "Some said it was a symbol of the part-Kenyan president's ancestral dislike of the British empire—of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender."

Despite what the British tabloid columnist might have you believe, the reality is that the bust, loaned to George W. Bush in 2001, was scheduled to be returned before Obama took office, and its removal was not part of some angry revenge plot against his African ancestors' colonial overlords.

In fact, the real story here is that Johnson is super miffed about Obama's position on the "Brexit," or the prospect that Britain might leave the European Union. POTUS has been urging the UK to remain in the troubled confederation, arguing it's best for regional stability and economic growth. Johnson and some of his fellow conservatives, as well as third-party firebrand Nigel Farage, are done with the Eurozone and ready to move on, and don't like the Yankee telling them what's good.

But embracing a weird, vaguely colonialist (and arguably racially tinged) line of argument is unlikely to win the Brexit cause any new converts so much as piss off admirers of Obama on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Queen out and about in Windsor yesterday

Yesterday was the 90th birthday of Queen Elizabeth II. Her actual birthday, that is, not that confusing "official birthday" she has in June, where she presumably gets a second load of presents and another cake and a whole day where she can be as much of a dick as she wants and nobody can do or say anything because it's kind of her birthday.

Anyway, we went to Windsor yesterday to ask all the people who'd gathered there to celebrate the monarch's birthday one simple question: What does The Queen mean to you?

Donna Werner

I think she's an inspiration to everyone. She's an icon. She's a role model for the women of today. We don't have anything like this in the United States. Y'know, a woman to look up to that's been around for so many years and never made a wrong footstep anywhere. She's just—she's... I have no words.

Richard Daemon

She means an awful lot. I mean, she's been going for a very long time, y'know? She's been one of the longest-reigning monarchs of all time. On a different note, I feel sorry for what people have been saying about Prince William. He's not lazy. He does a lot for the country. An awful lot for the country. I wish them all the best.

Lord Tony Appleton

Oh, she means so much to me. I've been involved with the royal family for a number of years, but my claim to fame is introducing Prince George to the world—and Princess Charlotte.

Mohammed Ali

Well, she's a national treasure, obviously. The Queen is just important—I mean, the history involved in it all. Yeah, a really important figure in the country.

David Weeks

Everything. I think she's a fantastic person. She makes you proud to be British. I've always been a royalist through and through—I follow royalty all over the country. I've been to many occasions where the royalty has been there. When people say that it costs a lot of money, I disagree with them, as the royalty does bring a lot of money into the country. I think they bring more money in than they cost. That's my personal view.

Sandra Martin

I can't do interviews as i'm under contract, but I can say Happy Birthday to the Queen!

David Thomas Jones

The Queen means everything to me. She's like my mother. I'm 80 now—the big eight-oh. She's ten years older than me, but can I be a bit teary? I had no family as a child—I was a Barnardo's boy. I was at the orphanage. The Queen became my mother. My mother is the Queen, and today I'm happy for her. She's still around, she's fit, she's young; young at heart. I hope that my partner can get that cake to her—she cooked a Corgi cake just for the Queen. It's called Susan because the Queen's favorite Corgi was also called Susan.

Terry Hutt

Everything. You haven't heard that one, have ya? I've been around for donkeys years, and as she's grown up I've grown with her. She does a fantastic job. She has problems like you and me at home, but she overcomes these. Can you imagine? She's looking after the whole world in between. All these castles need cleaning and sweeping out. She's working night and day. The Queen reaching 90 is a real special bonus to me. If you live to 90 that'll be good. I'm hoping to be around for when she gets to 100. For me to give her my special card, that would be really good. I'll be 91 and she'll be 100.

David Willis

What can I say? I reckon she's done a very good job over the years. I think she's important to our country. If we had never had a Queen we would have had a president. I'd sooner have the Queen and the royals.

Margaret Tyler

Oh, she means everything to me. I was eight years old when her father died, and nine when she was crowned Queen. Really, she's been there all my life. I just think we're so lucky in this country to have her. We have the most famous royal family in the world. The Queen is the most famous lady in the world. I mean, what's not to like about it? She also works so hard—every morning except her birthday and Christmas Day, she does those red boxes. She reads everything, she knows what's going on tomorrow, she's hosting President Obama. She's working all the time, but she doesn't make a big song and dance out of it—she's not jazz hands. She just gets on with it quietly, but she's got our interests at heart all of the time.

Jessica Swayne-Humphrey

The Queen is a representation of being English, really. It's always going to be a part of who we are. It especially means a lot to my dad. It's something that's passed down to all of us through our families so that we have a sense of where we come from, and the royal family helps us to define ourselves.

Katy Pycock

She's just really important. She's been here for such a long time and I just think she's really influential. She did so much for us during the war. She's always really gracious and really nice—she's influenced me in that sense.

Helena Taylor

I think she's amazing. I grew up with her my whole life and I think she's tireless in her duty, in her commitment—she symbolizes Britain, I think. The best of Britain.

John Loughrey

The Queen means an awful lot to me. First of all, this is a historic birthday—this is her 90th year. She goes back 2,000 years of knowledge—her ancestors go back that long. She's a mother, a wife, hand-in-hand with the Duke of Edinburgh. She's a grandmother, she's a great-grandmother, and also, she's done her work supremely well. I say God save the Queen.

Judith Tully

I just love her. I love all the royal family, but especially the Queen. She's 90, but she's still fabulous and working hard. As a member of the royal family she has been an inspiration to me—their standards and morals and everything else. Their kids may have been off the rails a bit, but not the Queen.

Thomas Reeves

She's a symbol of the country, and the history of the country that I'm very proud to serve. It's a bit of a privilege here, on her 90th birthday, to be a part of it.

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Photo via Flickr user Gage Skidmore

Read: I Lived on Trump Products for a Week to See if It Would Make Me Great Again

For the past few months, Donald Trump has been too busy presenting insane plans about funding his wall and confusing 9/11 with 7-Eleven to fork over the measly $5 necessary to register his private plane, and now the Trump jet is grounded, the New York Times reports.

Earlier in April, the Times reported the plane had been making the rounds with an expired registration since February 1. Because of failure to re-register—which only costs five bucks and lasts three years—the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) told the pilot of Trump's Cessna aircraft that he wouldn't be able to haul Donnie to more rallies until the jet is re-registered.

Laura J. Brown, a spokeswoman for the FAA, said in a statement that "the aircraft owner is currently working with the FAA's Aircraft Registry and will re-register the aircraft before further flight."

The maximum penalty for plebs—those who aren't Trump—for flying without registration is a civil fine of $27,500, a criminal fine up to $250,000, and a possible three-year stint in prison. Trump won't have to deal with any of this stuff, though. He'll just be back on the campaign trail as soon as his pilot plops down that fiver.

You said it brother. All memes courtesy of people from LinkedIn.

LinkedIn, the business-minded social networking site that seemingly runs entirely on data, sustainable synergy and exclamation points, reached 400 million users in January 2016. Currently, there are no statistics available for the number of people who actually enjoy using the site. It is a dull place, where members posture behind professional profile pics and look like they all work for the same real estate agency. But like many of its 400 million users, I joined LinkedIn because I'd been convinced that, just like writing a cover letter or trying to hide your criminal record, it was simply part of getting a job today.

While the professional merits of LinkedIn are real (I've found work through it), it's the way the site so desperately tries to be fun that makes it cringingly unappealing. It doesn't matter how many inconsequential notifications you're greeted with when you login, a place full of people conversing in the same tone they'd use for a job interview inherently can't be fun. It is a Facebook where everyone is uncomfortably holding in their farts, waiting desperately to land in another online portal where they can post a racially charged rant about Batman vs. Superman, change their profile picture back to Kid Rock flipping the bird, and just be themselves again.

Yet LinkedIn, and the thousands of businesses that actively use it, fail to accept this and are still perpetually trying to get in on the fun that the rest of the internet is having. This is tragically taking its toll on one of the most beloved online time wasters: the meme. This simple medium never wanted to be anything more than a Reddit post, or a hungover Slack DM, but in LinkedIn's world of e-handshakes and fast connections memes are transformed into creations so humorless that they finally succeeded in making Dilbert seem funny.

All photographs by Nathan Bajar.

The ways of mourning Prince, the inimitable superstar musician and sexiest MF to ever rock an assless yellow lace jumpsuit, are many. Just hours after his untimely passing at 57, the internet was flooded with initial shock and dismay, moving remembrances and tributes, hilariously left-field anecdotes, archival videos (his 1983 performance with James Brown and Michael Jackson is particularly spellbinding), and marathons of all kinds, from a block of MTV music videos to a nine-hour playlist on Minnesota Public Radio. Barack Obama even issued an official statement: "Nobody's spirit was stronger, bolder, or more creative."

In Brooklyn, Spike Lee thought the most fitting way to grieve would be to throw "Prince We Love You Shockadelica Joint," a block party in celebration of the Purple One's life and music. Over 1,000 New Yorkers, myself included, converged on his Fort Greene office, where the proceedings were documented by a horde of photographers, reporters, and cameramen.

"We're gonna show the world how much Brooklyn loves Prince," Lee called out at one point, not that that was in dispute. I even caught two police officers—a black woman and a white man—nodding along to the Morris Day and the Time's infectious, Prince-penned "Jungle Love."

Spike Lee at the Prince We Love You Shockadelica Joint

Elba Rosado, a 53-year-old social worker, danced in a silver-studded purple jacket, reminiscent of Prince's iconic look in Purple Rain. "I sacrificed my purple jacket for him," she said, pointing to her 23-year-old-son, Jordan Galan, a chef. Galan had wanted to be Prince last Halloween, but was having difficulty finding suitable outerwear in stores. So Rosado decided to help out by loaning her jacket and sewing on the studs herself.

"Music in general brings my family together," Galan said. "But me and my mom, especially on Prince. We'll debate back and forth about wardrobe, which looked better." His love of Prince was so well-known among his friends that "today, when everybody heard what happened, they were messaging me, as if I lost a relative."

It wasn't just Prince's singular music and unforgettable fashion that inspired fans, but also his smoldering charisma and sexual magnetism, the fierce way he made music about topics others wouldn't dare, realized in a manner that was as playful and funky as it was transgressive and uncompromising. And he could be quite political, too. Topics such as empowerment and equality weren't only made incredibly listenable and telegenic, but fun. Back when I used to DJ, Prince was always my not-so-secret weapon whenever the dance floor emptied or people got glum. Songs like "Do It All Night" or "I Wanna Be Your Lover" or "D.M.S.R." (or any number of his songs) never failed to get the party back on track.

"He's so many layers and levels of human sexuality," said Natia Simon, 37, an actress and New York government employee, who had donned bright purple lipstick for the occasion. "I used to say, 'All my babies are gonna be because of Prince.' You play 'Darling Nikki,' you play 'Scandalous,' you play 'Adore'? I mean, you getting in the drawers."

Just then, the opening chords of "Purple Rain" came on.

"It's crying time," remarked Simon, as she and nearly everyone around her began to sway along to the tune.

There was something touching about witnessing so many different ages and genders, ethnicities and orientations, all gathered 2 get through this thing called life. During the falsetto outro of "Purple Rain," the DJ stopped the music, and many held up their lit phones (as suggested by Lee) and carried the rest of the song a capella.

Natia Simon at the Prince We Love You Shockadelica Joint in Brooklyn

As they did, Mike Brown, 42, one of the orange-shirted volunteers from Peacekeepers Community Patrol, implored audience members to carry the sense of shared community into their daily lives. "Tomorrow, say hi to your neighbors! Say hi to the people at your subway stop!"

"It's a sad occasion, of course, but it's a good thing," he later told me. "Good music is universal. Music brings people together, it brings life, it consoles people."

Follow James on Twitter.

Scroll down for more photos from the tribute party.

Collage by Marta Parszeniew

Drugs being illegal is exactly what criminals want. Relinquish control of the narcotics market by just outright banning everything, rather than decriminalizing and regulating it, and undesirable individuals, gangs, and cartels swoop in, making mammoth profits and indiscriminately slaughtering vast numbers of people in the process.

Bizarrely, that system has been at play for decades now. You'd have thought there might already be some kind of multinational effort in place to disrupt the balance, but you'd be wrong. The last high-level debate about drugs was held at the UN in 1998, and the conclusion back then was to continue forging ahead with the War on Drugs: to create a "drug-free world."

How anyone genuinely believed that was achievable is hard to fathom. Were world leaders way more optimistic pre-Y2K? Had they paid literally no attention to what was going on in their countries? By 1998, there had already been tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of drug-related deaths in Colombia alone, which would have been pretty hard to miss.

So it seemed like good news when it was announced that a UN General Assembly Special Session on Drugs (UNGASS) would be taking place at the UN headquarters in New York this week. Reform campaigners hoped that world leaders may finally decide to take a progressive approach to the issue, in the knowledge that the status quo clearly isn't working.

However, the three-day summit wrapped up yesterday and doesn't seem to have made much of a difference at all. Hardliner countries stifled any kind of meaningful discussion, and everyone left in much the same place they'd started.

Here's a short rundown of the big points you might have missed.

DAY ONE: THE DEATH PENALTY

The problem, I suppose, with gathering loads of countries together for a chat is that lots of them will have wildly disparate views on how shit should be handled.

Sure enough, this immediately proved to be a problem. Debate over the actual commitments countries were going to make was mostly done in Vienna in March, resulting in an "outcome document" that was adopted on the first day of this week's summit. This document didn't include any criticism of the death penalty, instead stating that countries should ensure punishments are "proportionate" to the crimes committed.

This, unsurprisingly, prompted a fair bit of debate.

"Disproportional penalties create vicious cycles of marginalization and further crime," said Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto, with several other delegates making the point that capital punishment is a violation of human rights. "Norway intends to be a clear voice for a more progressive approach," said the nation's delegate.

Indonesia—one of the countries still using capital punishment for drug offenses—was booed for calling the death penalty an "important component" of its drug policy, before suggesting decisions about methods of punishment should be decided by individual states.

The physical and mental health implications associated with drug abuse were also touched upon, with UNODC figures revealing that there are an estimated 27 million people worldwide suffering from some form of drug disorder.

Photo by David Hudson

DAY TWO: DRUGGY ROUND-TABLES

Day two was all about round-table discussions, on topics ranging from synthetic drugs to heroin treatment.

First up: synthetics. The analogues of traditional drugs like coke, weed, and MDMA. Your Go-Caines, Spices, and Gee-Whizzes. An initial round-table discussion identified the challenges posed by the ever-evolving synthetic drug market, which is now affecting more than 100 countries. Much of what was said is stuff we already know: synthetic drugs are highly risky because of the wide variety available and the fact that the chemical compositions are often altered to swerve legislation. Multiple speakers voiced concern over the marketing of these kinds of drugs to a younger generation of internet users, who know how to navigate the dark web and the drug markets you'll find there. The question of regulation was raised, but nobody said anything particularly decisive.

Another discussion, about how to treat heroin addiction, was equally unproductive. The event, which was sponsored by the Russian Federation, started out with diplomats and scientists from around the world stating the important of evidence-based drug treatment. But then a doctor from the Russian Federation popped up and disagreed with everyone, arguing that cold turkey was the best way to go.

"It's too ironic for Russia to be the sponsor of the event," said Daniel Wolfe, director of the International Harm Reduction Program for the Open Society Foundations. "They're the world leader in denying the science."

DAY THREE: "CONCLUSION"

As Virgin boss and reform campaigner Richard Branson pointed out: "UNGASS was flawed from the start." An agreement had already been made, and that agreement was to continue with prohibitionist policies that ban drug use and criminalize users. Policies that, historically, have never worked—and realistically never will.

Ultimately, this UN summit did more to discredit the usefulness of the UN than anything else. In all likelihood, as Nick Clegg pointed in an interview with VICE ahead of UNGASS, "Because the hardliners have been allowed to hijack this process, reformers will think, 'To hell with the UN system, let's just get on with our own experiment.'"

While that might be a good thing for countries with progressive leaders, it's certainly no win for people whose governments are still taking an anachronistic approach to drugs.

Check out Tom's Tumblr.