Early in Lemonade, Beyoncé's much-anticipated new visual album that premiered Saturday as a secretive HBO special, we are shown a row of regal women perched on a rustic porch à la 1991's Daughters of the Dust. "I tried to make a home out of you," the singer laments in a quiet voiceover, "but doors lead to trap doors." The reference—autobiographical or not—to her much-publicized marriage to rapper mogul Jay Z sets up the film/album's powerfully realized themes of marital betrayal, rocky relationships, and triumphant rebirth.

Many of Beyoncé's haunting words in Lemonade are drawn from the work of 27-year-old British-Somali poet Warsan Shire, whose writing Bey adapted to serve as interludes between songs in the film. London's first Young Poet Laureate, Shire was the subject of a glowing profile in the New Yorker last year, which described her writing about African migration to Europe as "enthralling" and "remarkable." I devoured her 2011 chapbook Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth—an intimate meditation on loss, loneliness, war, and diasporic trauma, leading the reader through the generational upheaval of women in her family from Somalia to Britain. With lines such as "You can't make homes out of human beings/Someone should have already told you that,"Shire's poetry strikes an incisive yet deliberate tone whose influence resonates in Lemonade.

Like Shire's poetry, Beyoncé's new visual album ruminates on generational trauma through 11 chapters such as "Emptiness," "Forgiveness," and "Resurrection," reminiscent of the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. The audience is taken on the ride of ups and downs of recognition to rage, to reconciliation. Beyoncé's narrative delves into marital troubles, her strained relationship with her father, and her miscarriage, all couched between poetic interludes influenced by Shire. Whether she's celebrating the resilience of real love in the album-closing "All Night," or gleefully smashing up car windows while referencing her partner's infidelity in the reggae-influenced "Hold Up," Bey is keenly honest and vulnerable, fearless and ultimately victorious.

The influence of Shire's poems on love and betrayal can be heard from the beginning chapter titled "Intuition," as Beyoncé reflects while submerged underwater, "You remind me of my father, a magician—able to exist in two places at once. In the tradition of men in my blood, you come home at 3 AM and lie to me. What are you hiding?" Strains from Shire's "The Unbearable Weight of Staying" can heard in the interlude for "Anger": "My father's arms around my mother's neck. Fruit too ripe to eat." Weaving Shire's intimate memories with her own, Beyoncé effectively fuses the personal with issues familiar to so many other women.

Screenshot from 'Lemonade.' Courtesy of HBO/Tidal

In the interlude titled "Hope," Beyoncé takes from Shire's "Nail Technician as Palm Reader," retelling, "The nail technician pushes my cuticles back, turns my hand over, and says, 'I see your daughters, and their daughters.'" The mention of daughters is poignant—underlying Lemonade is the importance of the matrilineal connection between generations of black women. The album encompasses the diaspora with its purposeful, culturally compelling visuals steeped in black Southern Gothic imagery as well as nods to the Orisha deities of the Yoruba religious tradition. Beyoncé acts as a conjure woman, and the natural and spirit worlds, past, present, and future coexist in her narrative.

The Black Future serves as a metaphor, and is represented quite literally in the film by the appearances of a host of prominent young black women from across the globe: teenage actresses Amandla Stenberg, Quvenzhané Wallis, and Zendaya; musical duos Chloe x Halle and Ibeyi; 21-year-old model Winnie Harlow; 21-year-old ballet dancer Michaela DePrince; and, naturally, Beyoncé's four-year-old daughter Blue Ivy. These young women and girls have got next, and Beyoncé makes sure we recognize that.

The Black Future and the stars that represent it, notably Stenberg and Zendaya, have been diligent about not separating their politics from their public personas. Likewise Lemonade's narrative deliberately blurs the lines between the personal and the political. Beyoncé has been clear about her support for the Black Lives Matter movement, and it's not surprising that the mothers of Eric Garner, Mike Brown, and Trayvon Martin, all victims of police or policing-related violence, are featured. As Beyoncé notes in "Intuition," "The past and the future merge to meet us here."

The fusion of past and future is reminiscent of Beyoncé's anthemic Super Bowl performance of "Formation," where she and 30 female dancers rocked Black Panther-inspired regalia. Similarly, Lemonade is meant as an empowering love letter to black women from all walks of life, who are, in the words of Malcolm X, the most disrespected, unprotected, neglected people in America. The meaning of the album's title is made explicit when we are shown video from Jay Z's grandmother Hattie White's 90th birthday. As Ms. White herself relates, "When given lemons, I made lemonade." In turn, the entire film/album asks: What could be more triumphant than a black woman, given lemons, who in turn, makes lemonade?

With Lemonade Beyoncé is once again controlling her own narrative, offering a nuanced and highly consumable image of both her life, and black life writ large—one that simultaneously recognizes black pain and lifts up black joy.

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A screen from the still-very-much-in-development 'Project Arena.' Courtesy of CCP

Wii Sports is one of the greatest video games ever made. Shut up. Wii Sports is one of the greatest video games ever made. Beyond the amazing commercial performance of the Wii's killer app—it's the second highest selling game of all time, after Tetris—what it did was bring people to the medium who'd never considered enjoying it before. Out of their seats, into the moment—swinging and punching and laughing, be that alone or with friends. Its more passive events, like bowling, proved a hit in retirement homes, whereas there are fewer local multiplayer experiences in gaming quite so breathlessly stupid as stepping into the boxing ring beside a pleasantly pissed pal. Wii Sports appealed to every demographic, every age, every ability. Wii Sports was fucking genius.

Yeah, sure, it had its problems too. Nintendo's motion-control tech wasn't up to speed with its ambitions, for one thing. Nevertheless, its role in breaking movement-sensitive video gaming open to a huge audience was unprecedented. This was pre-VR VR, in a way—we turned on Wii Sports and willingly stepped into a reality that wasn't our own, yet bore recognizable similarities. We instinctively knew what to do, how to play these games. And to me, that's something that's largely been lacking from the virtual reality experiences we're seeing on today's raft of new hardware.

I've played my share of them, from the skin-crawling horror of Capcom's Kitchen to the thrilling spaceship dogfighting of CCP's EVE: Valkyrie and onto the puzzle-solving of ustwo's Land's End and the engrossing drama of nDreams' The Assembly. Each is, in its own way, magical; but equally, they all directly appeal to existing gamers, an audience with previous experience of adventures within comparable, albeit 2D, fantasies. But now I've played the VR title that has the potential to do for this generation of gaming what Wii Sports did the previous one, smashing down the barriers of entry, turning what looks like a very closed-off sector of this industry, this culture, into a for-everyone proposition. And I cannot praise it highly enough.

"Being the breakthrough thing for VR right now is never the expectation, but it's certainly a hope, right?" So Adam Kraver tells me, during a break from watching people play his work. He's the architect programmer on Project Arena, a new suite of competitive VR games being developed at CCP's Atlanta studios. "A lot of people say that VR is an isolating experience; that it's closed off and whatnot. But when we started with VR, we were using version two Kinect cameras to incorporate full body integration, where you could bring people into the game with you. And all of a sudden it became this really social experience."

A "really social experience" is precisely what Project Arena, as it exists so far, is to me. At 2016's EVE Fanfest in Iceland, where hardcore players of CCP's sci-fi MMO come together to talk massive spaceships, interstellar coup d'etats and such like, two Project Arena experiences are on show, playable by press and average Joes alike. The feedback from all who step into both 'Volley'—a tennis-like game played using a circular net—and 'Brawl'—a Tron-recalling game in which two players throw points-scoring discs at one another while deflecting incoming ones from their rival with a gradually depleting energy shield—is unanimous: people are wild for this. I play both and don't stop smiling for three days; every reminder of my face-offs with another journalist brings a feeling of warm happiness bubbling up from the pit of my otherwise blackly cynical soul. I can't be skeptical about this, like I am so much VR. Project Arena works. CCP is sitting on a goddamn goldmine.

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Related: Watch VICE talk recreating 'The Jungle Book' with filmmaker John Favreau

"We brought 'Brawl' here last year, to Fanfest, and people loved the hell out of it," Krave continues. "We new then that we had something great, and we knew that once we had the (Oculus Rift) Touch controllers, we would be able to get something that felt like you were throwing it. Having a shield just feels fantastic—it links back to playing swords and shields when you were a kid, with a trashcan lid and a stick.

"Wii Sports and those Wii things were never an inspiration, because we came at this from another perspective. But the fact that people are having that kind of connection with it, and that resonance, is absolutely amazing."

Project Arena doesn't strike me as a home-based proposition. For one thing, its Vive set-up requires a lot of space, for the body-tracking tech to really work—and that needs doubling to go up against someone else in the same physical space. This is something that needs to live in places where people, lots of them, congregate. Leisure centers and theaters; shopping malls and universities; airports and, naturally, arcades. As soon as you see this thing, you get it—this one is pretty much tennis, albeit with a glowing disc that you strike with a light paddle on the back of your forearm, arcing around a central "net"; that one is a corridor-set face-off where aggression and defense require careful balance. Both necessitate a degree of agility on the part of the participant—expect to sweat—but there's no reason why Project Arena can't expand its roster of playable options for less mobile people, just as Wii Sports offered.

This augmented video shows what it's like to play 'Brawl' in 'Project Arena'

"All of the design decisions revolve around the fact that we want this to be social, and that extends to being able to watch it and immediately know what's going on," Krave says. "We've done a lot of experiments on the game modes—we've made several iterations of 'Brawl.' At the beginning, we had two incentives, or goals. One, it had to play great, and be fun to play; but also, two, when watching it, spectating, it had to make sense, and create drama. And that's what's exciting here—seeing two people in the game, with the fluid motion, ricocheting the disc, and then looking at the people outside the game watching on the big screen and recognizing when there's likely to be a scoring moment. There are shouts, hoots, and hollers.

"We've received no mandate or anything saying that this has to fit the EVE universe. Really, our original mandate was to find out what the next thing in VR was, and then the thing after that. It was never: 'Go build us an EVE IP product.' But it's up to the powers at CCP as to whether or not they want to fit this into EVE. It might just be its own thing."

I hope that it is. Skinning Project Arena to match the aesthetic of EVE, to plug directly into its universe, its 13-years-established lore, could put people off checking it out. I know I've never been tempted to try CCP's long-running multiplayer epic, and attending Fanfest doesn't change that feeling. Seeing those same uniforms, that same fantastical aesthetic, applied to what demands to be an incredibly inclusive product, could immediately alienate the curious coming from a non-gaming background. Wii Sports was simple to read and respond to, to move with, and as it stands Project Arena's two VR experiences are much the same: see projectile spinning before you, swipe it away with a sliced backhand, score a point.

More is needed between now and Project Arena reaching commercial availability, but one of those things isn't a cack-handed insertion into a world that already has enough spin-offs. Fingers crossed that CCP sees the value in stepping beyond what's made its name, forged its reputation, and cashes in on what is simply a fantastic advertisement for both the present power of VR, and its future potential.

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Primary voters waiting in line. Image via Getty

Few political issues have drawn as much starkly partisan rancor in recent years as the subject of voting rights. Since the Supreme Court's historic 2013 ruling disabling key sections of the Voting Rights Act, Democrats have accused conservatives of pursing a nationwide strategy to implement ballot restrictions that effectively block minorities from the polls. Of these new measures, perhaps the most controversial are new state voter-ID laws, which Republican lawmakers have aggressively pushed under the guise of preventing election fraud.

While most of these laws have been passed in places where Republicans hold strong majorities in the state government, there is one state that has bucked that trend. Rhode Island, a Democrat-controlled state which hosts its 2016 primary election on Tuesday, has been a rare exception in the partisan divide over voter ID laws, passing a law in July 2011 that requires residents to show photo identification before casting a regular ballot. The law, which was approved by amajority of Democrats in the state legislature, ran afoul of the national narrative about voter ID laws, and has since been trumpeted by conservatives as proof that such measures are simply good-government policy.

To outsiders, the circumstances surrounding Rhode Island's unusual voter ID law remain opaque, and even political observers in the state don't agree on exactly why local Democrats broke rank with the national party on the issue.

"I don't think there is one answer to this," said Steven Brown, executive director of the Rhode Island chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, which has actively opposed the state's voter ID law. "While Rhode Island is a consistently blue state in presidential elections and in our congressional delegation," Brown explained, local Democrats tend to lean more conservative, taking positions that would be associated with Republicans in other states. "The party label doesn't mean the same thing here that it does elsewhere," he added.

Even with Republicans largely on the sidelines, Rhode Island has not been shielded from the usual animosity surrounding voter restrictions. Some activists have claimed, for instance, that the law is an effort to disenfranchise Rhode Island's large and growing Latino population; with demographic shifts threatening to upend the balance of power in the state, according to this narrative, conservative-leaning Democrats forged an alliance with black lawmakers to pass a law that would keep Hispanic voters away from the polls. The activists voicing this concern have asserted that the state had seen no confirmed instances of in-person voter fraud and that the law followed years of increasing tensions between the state's black population and the more recent Latino entrants. They say that this confluence of factors may have pushed a diverse group of legislators to enact a law over the concerns of some in the state's Latino community.

"That's all bullshit," said former Rhode Island Representative Jon Brien, a self-described conservative Democrat who sponsored—and staunchly supported—the state's voter ID law. In an email, Brien emphasized that the bill was sponsored and supported by both black and Latino legislators. "Was it supported by the Latino community? No," Brien said. "But that's because they felt it was a move by the black community to suppress their vote. Which was a joke. I didn't give a shit about any of that."

Not all of the Democrats who voted for the voter-ID law were right-leaning like Brien. The year after the law passed, the New Republic spoke with black and Latino legislators who strongly supported the bill. Brien added that, in an effort to make Rhode Island's voter-ID law more palatable, its supporters opted for a less strict version than the ones passed in states like Texas, Wisconsin, and Indiana. Under Rhode Island's law, voters who cannot provide a regular ID can cast a "provisional ballot," which is counted if an election official decides the signature matches the one on the voter's registration.

But Brien also seemed to relish in the state's deviation from the standard Democratic Party line. "Without question, it screwed up the [Democratic National Committee]'s narrative about who's passing voter ID, and that's the part of it I love," Brien said. "I was not always known to be the best Democrat in the world, and that's okay."

Echoing conservatives elsewhere in the country, Brien accused other Democrats of demonizing voter-ID laws in an effort to mobilize its liberal base. "The idea that's its hard to get an ID card is bullshit and everyone knows that," he said. "Voter ID is not a restriction. I'd like for someone to point out to me one person who doesn't have an ID. In 2016, you need an ID for everything."

Research by voting rights organizations has shown that minority voters disproportionately lack government-issued identification cards, in comparison to their white counterparts. In Rhode Island, the state's voter-ID law has already resulted in issues: According to the Rhode Island ACLU, when the law first went into practice, during the 2014 primaries, some poll workers attempted to block residents from voting, claiming they could only cast provisional ballots with a proper ID card. Responding to criticism over the incidents, the state's elections office suggested the problem may have stemmed from poorly trained poll workers, and pledged to make sure the problems did not resurface in future elections.

But Myrna Pérez, director of the Voting Rights and Elections Project at the Brennan Center, said last week that she is not fully convinced Rhode Island elections officials have made the best effort to address potential misunderstandings surrounding the law.

"This is not not Texas and it's not Wisconsin," Pérez said of Rhode Island's voter-ID law. "The legislation is different, but when you look at some of the materials that are being distributed, you can see that some people could be really confused by it."

Pérez is referring to informational fliers that Rhode Island has distributed to educate residents about the voter-ID law, which highlight in large text that each voter must present an ID and, in relative fine print, notify voters of the provisional ballot option.

"This is evidence that what is being emphasized is the suppressive part of the law," she said, "not the part that tries to find accommodation."

Ahead of Tuesday's vote, Common Cause Rhode Island, a progressive advocacy group, raised concerns regarding the state's decision to open only a third of its polling places for primary voting—potentially too few, the group's executive director said for a state still settling into its voter ID law in an primary cycle that has often seen high turnout. The Rhode Island ACLU and Common Cause Rhode Island, which also opposes the voter-ID law, told VICE that they will send poll watchers to polling locations to make sure that this primary election goes smoother than that of 2014.

"We both witnessed and received complaints from voters about unfairly being denied the ballot for not having an ID," said Brown of the ACLU. "This is not some made-up concern."

All photos courtesy of Nathan Drillot and Jeff Petry

Watching world champion Robert Gagno play South Park pinball is like zoning out to a really intricate fireworks display, only with fart noises. He guides multiple balls to the far corners, occasionally nudging the machine to float them back to his flipper for an impossibly soft landing. This makes Terrance and Phillip dance and defecate on a flashing dot matrix screen.

Toronto's Chinatown district. All photos by author

Most people who live near Toronto's Chinatown neighbourhood are quite familiar with the smell of fried rice and the sight of duck on a skewer. For broke students and struggling adults, it's comforting to know that, at any time, you can walk a block and grab a plate of cheap, delicious food and watch a crew of chefs and servers turn out dishes like clockwork. However, there's also a part that reeks dangerously of ethnic tourism—paying for food that would be way more expensive from a European restaurant, and enjoying a culture which many of us only seem to be interested in when our stomach rumbles. For many broke Canadians, it's a rite of passage, but that doesn't make it right.

Yesterday, a large study looking at Toronto's Chinese restaurant employees found that over half of them are underpaid, overworked, and treated unfairly by their employers. While the hustle and bustle of Chinatown makes it a hotspot for terrible labor conditions and illegal work, the numbers themselves are quite unsettling. Most employees surveyed were found to be working 44 to 60 hours a week with no overtime pay or vacation days, and many were paid half in cash, half by cheque—allowing employers to dodge taxes and screw over their employees with unaccounted hours.

But numbers only tell part of the story. To see what it's really like for the employees of Toronto's Chinese restaurants, I stopped by Chinatown for a few hours and asked the people who experience it on a day-to-day basis about their side of the data.

Names have been changed to protect identities.

Su, 28
VICE: How long have you been here for in Toronto for?
Su: Two years. My family moved here from Beijing because my dad had a work opportunity, but it didn't work out.

What happened?
He works as a computer technician but doesn't speak English well and the person who promised him a job over here actually ended up on a list of other people. He waited a long time but eventually decided to start his own shop. It put our family in debt.

You work in Chinatown—what is your job like?
I am a server but I do a lot. I clean and sometimes pick up deliveries when things get busy. I work I don't see my sister as much as I'd like to and I want to go to school soon.

Do you get paid less than you should be?
Well, I get paid a Visa and I don't go to school. I don't have options like many others and it's not easy to get a job here with not great English.

Is that what stops you from going to a fairer work environment—the language barrier?
Yes, but it is also very to be around other Chinese people. I'm not totally accustomed to working beside so many different types of people. I don't think I could work in a Starbucks or a McDonald's.

Jon, 24
VICE: As a cook, do you feel your job is easier or harder than servers?
Jon: Harder. Much harder. We all , but it is part of the job. I don't complain.

Do you feel like Canadians who were born here have it easier?
Yes. Many of you don't have to work, uh, most days of the week, late into on my sheet, but I actually worked 55, or 56. I don't say anything because that's how it works. Anyone could replace me.

What kind of things do you do outside of your job?
I like working out and I find that before that. I am going to keep working until then.

Does your work interfere with your outside life?
I sleep much of the time I am not at work and I drink more than I used to. I don't think it's a problem, but, some of the men here, I think they have problems. I don't want to be like that.

Chelsea, 21, and Li, 19
Why do you work in a restaurant right now?
C: It was an easy job to get and it helps me pay for my school stuff. I want to quit soon.
Li: I knew a few friends who worked around here so it's kind of a group thing.

Do you enjoy your job?
C: No, it's a very stressful so I can feel stronger.

What's the worst part of working at the restaurant?
C: The kitchen is not easy to work in. People yell a lot and I am not good with criticism, especially when there's so much of it. We are all very stressed out and we don't like to talk more than is necessary, so it can feel, I don't know, lonely? I don't know if that's the right .

Are your tips bad, Li?
Li: Yes, but I don't keep them. I give them to my boss.

Are you being paid minimum wage?
Li: Uh, that's $10 ?
C: No, it's $11.

It's $11.25. Are you getting that?
C: Neither of us are. We get server wage.
Li: Yes, I get $9 an hour but I never get more than $800 a week,

Does that bother you?
Li: It does but I am also young so I don't feel like I've earned yet.

Michelle, 30
What do you feel when coming into work?
Michelle: I used to feel angry, or tired, I think. I was very sad because it took so much of my life. But I have been here long enough—I have

You are a mid-level manager. Do you feel you have to be tough on people under you?
No, most people who work here know what needs to be done, and people who make mistakes are embarrassed. They don't want to do it again. I am somewhat soft when it comes to that. The man who works beside me, he is the bad cop. We work with each other like that but when work is done, we both laugh about it.

Are you paid equally to your male counterpart?
I haven't asked, but I don't think so. I don't want to . She is Canadian. We met at the gym I go to. She makes more money than I do, but she doesn't work as much.

Is she also a manager like you are?
No, she is a greeter. I can tell that doesn't sound , but it's...a different culture.

Is there a difference between how non-Chinese customers and Chinese customers treat your staff?
English is an issue. We have numbers, so orders are rarely wrong, but a lot of customers are much better—people just don't see what we serve as worth a lot.

How does that make you feel—that Chinese food is treated like, for a lack of better word, fast food?
It doesn't make me happy, but what can be done? I don't expect in Chinatown, people want food for less.

Bruce, 45
How long have you been working in a restaurant for?
This one, I don't know, five, maybe six years. I have been working for 20 years.

Why did you start working at a restaurant?
It was given to me as a favour. I came here as a student but I flunked out. I did not know the value of work. I had an older friend I had at school whose brother owned a number of restaurants. He told me, "Come and work. Figure out what you ."

You're still doing it 20 years later. Why did you stay?
It is easy. I have a wife now, and I am good at what I do. I like cooking, and I like cleaning, and I think it for my sons. I like serving them food at home. My wife is a banker, she is amazing at what she does. I am happy here.

Do you work a lot?
Everyday. I never miss a day of work. It would—I don't like or not coming.

Seven days a week? Do you see your family much?
At night, I do. When I get home, we have a late dinner and tea. I also take a vacation with them. The study you mentioned, I think that's true, but I also am too old to mind. I was not paid well when I was young. I am a boss now.

What about your younger employees? Do you feel bad for them?
No, I was once there. They can do it, no? This generation is , I cannot lie. I cannot know what it is like for them now, but I don't understand it. I think you should work to get there.

If you were growing up again, and you really wanted to pursue something outside of work, wouldn't you want to be able to pursue that while still making a living?
I wanted to make shelves and frames before. In school, I loved carpentry and crafting, all the intricate details. I think if I could go back, I would do that. I don't know if this is a good place to work for young people, but those who are here...They are here. That's it.

Follow Jake Kivanç on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Carrie Stroud

Read: This Star High School Basketball Player Turned Out to Be a 30-Year-Old Man

An entrepreneurial third-grader sold lemonade last weekend to pay for his own adoption, the Springfield News-Leader reports.

After being abandoned at a homeless shelter at the age of five, Tristan Jacobson began living with guardians Donnie and Jim Davis. Now nine-years-old, he decided he was finally ready to make things official.

To help raise funds for the $5,000 adoption fee, he started selling lemonade for a dollar outside his Springfield, Missouri home Friday and continued through the weekend, serving up ice cold beverages at a yard sale he and his guardians hosted Saturday.

According to the News-Leader, the lemonade stand and online fundraiser on YouCaring.com raised a combined $14,000 by Sunday afternoon. Jacobson told the paper, "I'm happy because I have a new mom who loves me."

"There's not enough words to say 'thank you' to everyone who has shown support or given us donations," Donnie Davis told the paper. "Everyone has made this possible. We will make sure this child will forever be ours."

Well, that's definitely one option. Image via Wikimedia

Pakistan is an Islamic Republic with the highest porn-watching population in the world. That statement in and of itself signifies a particular aspect about Pakistani culture: we are horny and desperate for sex, but God forbid we actually engage in it. Sex in Pakistan is considered a taboo topic. Men generally aren't judged for it in our patriarchal society but if a woman from a middle-class family or underprivileged background is caught having premarital sex, serious shit goes down.

Women from poorer backgrounds could be victims to various forms of premarital punishment. Punishing women for premarital sex started with former President Zia-ul-Haq's dictatorship or "Islamization," which incorporated Zina (stoning to death), and Hudood (punishments such as whipping, amputation, honour killing) into Pakistani law. His government dismissed women's rape accusations, instead labelling them as fornicators and sending them to jail. These draconian forms of punishment are slowly dying out, but still linger in the mentalities of fundamentalists, imams and police officers. Shariah Law can also be blamed for many gender discriminatory policies in Muslim societies, such as the lack of support for freedom of speech, women's rights, and, ultimately, human rights.

Photo of the real Shia via Flickr user Tabercil

On Saturday, after dinner with friends, Mario Licato was headed to the subway when he was sucker-punched by a six-foot-tall guy built like a "frat boy," according to witnesses. The punch sent Licato tumbling down a flight of stairs in the subway station, and while he was falling backward he heard his assailant yell out, "This is because you look exactly like Shia LaBeouf!"

When Licato got up, his glasses were broken in half and he was bleeding, not unlike Shia himself on the set of Transformers 2. Helpful passersby got him to his feet, and a less-than-helpful crew of EMT were called to check on his injuries, telling the born and raised New Yorker, "welcome to New York, buddy."

Licato, an art director at an ad agency, told Gothamist he's been told frequently over the years that he looks like LaBeouf, and has even been stopped in the street by mistaken fans. Still, the surprise attack has left him befuddled and deeply unsettled.

"I wanna know what Shia LaBeouf did to him," Licato said. "What did Shia LaBeouf do to him that he punched somebody that looks like him?"

Licato has clearly never seen Shia's freestyle rap video.

This post has been updated.

Image by Carter Bird

On March 25, 2006, just before his 17th birthday, Arash Farhadi was stabbed to death at his school in Amersfoort, the Netherlands. Farhadi, whose name has been changed to protect his family's identity, was a Dutch citizen who had emigrated from Iran, and he had reportedly been bullied by classmates for his ethnicity and Muslim background.

"He had complained to his parents about these issues," Zohreh Mizrahi, the family's attorney, told me. "There was an argument at school, and this poor kid was stabbed by one of the school bullies who was part of the group that didn't appreciate his dark skin or different nationality."

After the murder, Farhadi's father organized a peace vigil in Amersfoort's central square, hoping to unite the community with a message of peace and forgiveness. But instead of sympathy, Mizrahi said, he received threats from some of his neighbors.

"It got so bad that someone threw a stone through the house window and graffitied the house," Mizrahi told me. "The father went to the police, but the cops said there was nothing they could do to help the family out."

The mayor of Amersfoort, who had been asked to speak at the vigil, canceled the event, claiming it would cause public disorder.

Terrified, heartbroken, and distraught that their government would not protect them, the Farhadis fled the Netherlands, first visiting a relative in California and then seeking asylum in the United States. The couple, who fought in court for years, eventually won their asylum case, joining what is perhaps the rarest breed of our nation's refugees: citizens of the European Union.

The United States almost never grants asylum to citizens of EU countries, according to multiple experts in global refugee issues who I interviewed. That's because, under the United Nations Refugee Convention guidelines, an individual seeking asylum must prove his home government will not or cannot protect him from persecution, and all EU countries guarantee their citizens equal protection under the law—regardless of race, religion, disability, age, gender, or sexual orientation.

"The western countries are the ones who drafted the Refugee Convention," said Paul O'Dwyer, a New York-based immigration attorney who has spent decades working on asylum cases. "It wasn't designed to overcome shortcomings in those countries' infrastructures or governments, which are what they view to be periodic shortcomings."

Only in exceptional circumstances have individuals received asylum from the EU, such as the Farhadis. The family first came to the Netherlands for safe haven in the 1990s, fleeing human rights abuses in their native Iran. The government, which had committed murders of political dissidents and intellectuals, targeted the father as he had served in the Air Force prior to the Iranian Revolution. The Netherlands offered the family asylum, and after several years, Arash and his parents became naturalized Dutch citizens.

But in an ironic twist, he family's citizen status in the EU nearly prevented them from winning protection in the US, according to Mizrahi.

"When someone is a citizen of another democratic country, the asylum request is supposed to be mandatorily denied," Mizrahi told me. And indeed, the Farhadi family's case was initially denied in the San Diego asylum office.

Mizrahi stepped in after two other attorneys had already refused to take on the family's case, which Mizrahi said was "draining" because the mother was too traumatized to speak. "She lost her only son. She was in absolute paralysis and under heavy-duty antidepressant medication, so she couldn't articulate her pain and loss." (The Farhadis declined to speak with me, and asked that their identities remain anonymous to protect them from potential threats in the United States.)

The challenge, which Mizrahi eventually met, was to show that the Netherlands would not have offered them protection equal to that in the US.

"It took me several years to get court records from the Netherlands to show they were not as vigilant as they should own people," and did not always protect people like the Farhadis, who were naturalized immigrants.

Watch: My Escape From Syria: Europe or Die

While cases like these are incredibly rare in the United States, I found four other instances where EU citizens were awarded asylum in the United States in the past few decades, all from Iranian natives. Immigration attorney Ally Bolour, who represented three of these cases, told me Iranians were particularly vulnerable in Europe in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Iranian officials often targeted Iranian refugees in Europe who were considered political dissidents. In fact, the Islamic Republic covertly assassinated dissidents around the continent, in what was dubbed a "global assassination campaign."

Because Iran had embassies in Europe, the country could fly individuals more easily into and out of the countries than it could to the US, to which had no diplomatic ties, Bolour explained. As a result, Iranian refugees were safer in the States.

One Iranian family, who fled persecution in Iran in the late 80s, lived happily in Sweden for years. "They were politically active against the Islamic Republic in Europe, holding demonstrations, so the Swedish government wasn't able to guarantee their safety," Bolour told me. Eventually, Islamic Republic members tracked the family down and attacked the father. They came to the States in the early 2000s and were eventually granted asylum.

"The United States government was aware of the threat these guys faced in Europe and corroborated their statements in court," Bolour said, noting that cases like this are extremely rare.

Though the Islamic Republic of Iran has not recently targeted Iranians in Europe, Neil Grungras, executive director of the Organization for Refugees, Asylum, and Migration, said the recent influx of Middle Eastern refugees to the European continent has created whole new levels of discrimination, which could prompt individuals to flee Europe.

"There have been 1,200 fires of Muslim refugee homes in Germany, and I have Muslim clients who have changed their names in Germany and in Sweden out of fear," Grungras said, who predicts that more Muslims will seek asylum outside of Europe as racial tensions come to a head. "The question will be what countries can give asylum—the asylum countries of the world are growing intolerant for any kind of refugee."

But Bolour said he could not imagine many individuals in Europe winning asylum claims in the United States, even as discrimination reaches a zenith.

"Whenever there's due process and rule of law in a court system, it's infinitely harder to argue asylum," Bolour said. "Getting asylum from a European country is like a unicorn: It just doesn't happen, except in incredibly rare circumstances."

Follow Meredith Hoffman on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Boston Public Library

Modernity hasn't been kind to avid beaters of children like Tennessee fundamentalist pastor (and my namesake) Michael Pearl, who claims that only corporal punishment can properly "train" a child. Activists like Thomas Meyers of The Child Center of New York are increasingly convinced that all spanking is abuse. But people like Pearl can fall back on the certainty that if nothing else, at least whacking the little bastards on their asses makes kids knock off whatever mischief they were up to, right?

According to a new study, the opposite appears to be the case. A meta-analysis of child development data by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Michigan concluded that kids act out more if they're spanked. In other words: moral judgments aside, spanking doesn't even work as advertised.

This work came from a team including Elizabeth Gershoff, human development associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Gershoff claimed in a UT Austin statement on Monday that rather than turning kids into obedient little soldiers, spanking is most closely associated with "unintended detrimental outcomes."

Past studies have already come to similar conclusions in the long term. For instance, a 2013 study from the University of New Hampshire Family Research Laboratory found that kids who were spanked grew up to be lawbreakers at greater rates than un-spanked children, even if those un-spanked children had otherwise shitty upbringings.

That study by sociologist Murray Strauss, which sought to eliminate variables like education level and cultural background, and looked at spanked and un-spanked children and adults in countries in Europe, North America, Asia, and the Middle East, to figure out the effects. It found increases in criminal records across the board for former spank recipients. Delinquency increased even when the household situations of kids who got spanked were otherwise stable and loving.

While that 2013 study might give you pause if you're concerned about things like your child's "long-term wellbeing," this new study suggests that even if you're some crummy, Al Bundy-style parent who only cares about getting some peace and quiet right now, spanking seems to be counterproductive.

The study, "Spanking and Child Outcomes: Old Controversies and New Meta-Analyses," is less the result of elimination of variables like the Strauss study, and instead crunches mass quantities of numbers. In her statement, Gershoff further built her case by pointing out that this analysis wasn't skewed by cases in which parents were clobbering or otherwise assaulting their kids, and instead focused entirely on "what most Americans would recognize as spanking."

Her team pooled 50 years worth of scientifically controlled observations of "160,927 unique children" (which means no cloned children were allowed, I guess) and converted those into 111 sample instances. 78 of those showed a statistically significant "detrimental outcome," and only one of those spanking cases reflected significantly improved behavior.

Negative effects included aggressive and antisocial behavior, externalizing behavior problems, and "low moral internalization"—inability to learn right from wrong. In the worst cases, there were effects beyond behavior in childhood, including mental health problems and intellectual impairment.

Controlling to ensure experimental reliability was up to the scientists who performed the original experiments over the past half-century. The researchers' new, math-based approach meant some data had to be eliminated. The text of the study describes a dogged procedure for eliminating certain experiments from contention, based on qualitative attributes like whether or not a given study "assessed the associations of spanking with outcomes within a single group" which would have resulted in unreliable data.

But despite these controls, the authors are careful not to claim they've produced the definitive answer on whether a swat on the tushy necessarily transforms a kid into a vase-smashing demon. "he data are consistent with a conclusion that spanking is associated with undesirable outcomes," the study says.

That is to say: Gershoff won't say she's sure that striking your kids makes them misbehave, but she's pretty positive that kids who have been struck go on to misbehave more than kids who haven't.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Fort McMurray, Alberta (photo via Flickr user Dennis Haslam)

Few industries conjure up an image of raw masculinity in their workforce in quite the same way that fossil fuel exploration and extraction does. Perhaps it's an unfair assumption to make in 2016, but it does seem that the average person enticed by employment in oil and gas still tends to sit somewhere between that of brawny manual labourer and high-flying alpha finance dog; the intersection of two classic macho work environments. That's not to say women are excluded from all of this, but it does raise the question: What sort of culture is created when hyper-masculinity is the norm? And what happens in areas built around oil when the industry turns to shit?

While every commodity's worth fluctuates over time (he writes, with the confidence of a man who has taken not one economics class in his life to date), it's safe to say that petroleum is in a particularly bad place right now. In June 2014, the price of crude oil was roughly $105 per barrel. By January 2015 it had tumbled to $48, and in the first month of this year it stooped below $28: less than a third of what it was two years ago and the lowest it had been in well over a decade (it's since risen slightly to around $43). The crash brought with it inevitable job losses, and in provinces like Alberta where the economy is centred around fossil fuels, you might expect this to mean unemployment rates have soared. It's not quite that simple though.

Employment in Alberta has actually risen since the crash, but it's women who have driven this increase, taking on 22,800 new positions in the province between September 2014 and December 2015. By contrast, 16,000 Albertan men lost their jobs in this same period, which is not entirely surprising: Industrial labour and goods production—which happen to have firmly male-dominated workforces—are generally the first to suffer during a recession. And when a large portion of the male population in areas built around these industries find themselves out of work, the social implications can be profoundly damaging and not just for men.

In 2005, an article by Deborah Tetley in the Calgary Herald painted a brash picture of Alberta boomtown Fort McMurray's debauchery and crime, like a post-millennial update on Pottersville from It's A Wonderful Life. (The Herald has since deleted much of its online archives, but you can read it here.) Dealers roaming the streets offering coke, crack, meth; men arguing with sex workers; violence; links to the Hells Angels and other organized crime groups—Tetley's observation of Fort Mac is one of a young town with an immense cash flow and few inhibitions. 2010's Fubar 2 only helped cement that reputation.

"There are a lot of macho men with too much money," 26-year-old Fort Mac-based engineer Jay* tells me. "The strippers at the local are flown in from Montreal and they make an ungodly amount of money, you can get drugs delivered to your front door by your friendly neighbourhood dealer. My biggest gripe with the drug industry actually involves the employers in the area: I've seen many people who came here as marijuana users become cocaine addicts, because you can very easily fail a drug test for marijuana even after weeks, but cocaine is generally out of your system quickly. That means that workers risk their jobs by using a relatively mild substance to relax, and face no consequences from moving to much harder drugs."

There's no single factor to which the likes of Fort Mac's social problems can be attributed. In spite of the vast amount of wealth that exists in these areas thanks to oil, there's widespread reluctance from local government to invest in infrastructure such as healthcare, housing, transport, and law enforcement because boomtowns by their very nature are often short-lived. Their logic is roughly: "Why pump money into what may well be a ghost town just a few years later?" Suffice to say there's a plethora of reasons why places like Fort McMurray may, essentially, be doomed.

Photo via Flickr user Dennis Haslam

"Our last camp had a major drug problem, so bad that one young man overdosed and died out on the line. It is bad, but it seems some people use 'nothing else to do' as an excuse for this behaviour."

Travis Stacey is a 29-year-old pipeline worker based out of Kelowna, BC. He got into the industry roughly ten years ago and has worked his way from the ground up to the supervisory position he now holds. His reason for joining probably won't shock you: "I was broke! I needed quick cash, to be honest." It sort of goes without saying that oil money is incredibly alluring to young men—in 2013 the average salary for Canadian oil and gas workers was estimated to be $130,000—but it would be wrong to call it "easy cash." Those employed in this industry often do so stationed for lengthy spells in camps hundreds of miles from what you or I might deem to comprise "humanity." "Major sacrifices are made for long periods of time to make the coin," Stacey says. "Many fathers don't see their kids or wives for weeks on end, sometimes even eight months can go by before a guy can go home to his family."

There's also little in the way of entertainment aside from getting fucked up, and as a result substance abuse is a serious problem among oil workers. On top of that, the anti-social hours and locations are not conducive to a healthy lifestyle or maintaining stable personal relationships: "The minority of us try to stay healthy and focused: gym, healthy foods, and reading. But the majority socialize within each other's rooms all hours of the night with drink and drugs. A lot of people become loners and don't do anything, but most people reach out to each other by partying together."

Photo via Flickr user Dennis Haslam

Stacey says that while he doesn't believe the industry entirely deserves the reputation it has for drinking and drug-taking, he understands how and why these issues arise."It's definitely improved with kids that come up with a better head on their shoulders. Facilities—new camps—are adjusting better to the healthier lifestyle. When I was in my first camp there was no gym and no healthy foods, now it's mandatory to have such amenities. However, there are still people who will never buy into the other activities to keep their minds occupied and off the drinks and drugs, but I think these certain people might be behaving this way regardless of where they're living or working. The only reason is up here it's more mainstream and accepted with the young money."

A 2011 study conducted by the University of Regina examined Fort Mac's police force between the years of 1986 and 2009 and concluded that "young men with little stake in the community" placed "an inordinate pressure on the police," who were forced to respond to, among other things, higher levels of social and physical disorder, accidents, and crime. The report's author, Rick Ruddell, writes: "Boomtowns are not a new phenomenon. North American examples of resource-based population and economic booms include the California and Klondike gold rushes that date back to 1848 and 1897, respectively. Historical analyses show that rates of violence in US resource boomtowns, particularly homicide, were much higher than in other Western towns."

Photo via Flickr user Dennis Haslam

Crime rate increases are a massive problem in current boomtowns south of the border too. In Sidney, Montana, located on the western edge of the Bakken oil fields, DUI and narcotics offences soared between 2010 and 2013. Felony assault alone rose 825 percent in those three years. About an hour northeast of Sidney lies Williston, North Dakota, whose oil industry has made it one of the fastest-growing cities in the United States. Last year the FBI announced it would be opening up an office in Williston to tackle a rise in crimes related to drugs, prostitution, and violence. Speaking to Al Jazeera in April 2014, Bob Ganaway, a farmer in the town said: "There's a lot more fighting amongst people here. When you start putting a lot of money out there, then jealousy starts. And pretty soon, it's neighbour against neighbour."

Physical violence is an inherently masculine trait. In every country where data is available, men are generally more than four times as likely as women to be the perpetrators of serious and violent crimes such as homicide and aggravated assault, and this has always been the case historically. With this in mind, it would be fair to assume that if boomtowns experience higher rates of violence, the industries they're built around are dominated not just by the male, but by a particular type of male.

Asked how his industry compares to the rest of society, Travis Stacey says: "It does feel more macho. You have to be a certain type of person to work out here. You don't survive being 'softer,' if you will—you'll get chewed up and spat out. I'm so used to it now I can't peg exactly what kind of culture it creates, but definitely a 'man up or get fired' type of attitude. Not much time for HR or sensitivity."

Photo via Flickr user Dennis Haslam

"What stands out for me is all the swearing used by certain groups–mostly male, but some women as well," says 60-year-old John van Engen, who works at Kearl Lake—located about 70 kilometres north of Fort McMurray. "If swearing is macho, then I guess working up here is macho. I personally don't work directly with any women, but at the camp they say 20 percent of the workers are women. Imperial hires most of them for office, training programs and even heavy haulers in the mine. Generally, if there is a woman in the group, the swearing will be minimal."

For all the problems such a hyper-masculine work environment creates, it breeds an almost admirable sentiment we might easily associate with a lost generation of working class men. For Stacey, the appeal of the job is completely understandable: "I love the 'get 'er done' mentality, the get-your-hands-dirty, problem-solving side of the job. You're in the bush and have to make whatever you have work. I love the hard challenges that we face every day, and the creative ways we have to conquer them. I love the money and financial freedom it gives me at the time. I like the brotherhood it creates between and within crews, and I like the rough and rugged nature of the business."

In spite of its reputation, Stacey says the gender gap is beginning to close: "It's slowly transitioning, there are a lot more women working in the industry currently than when I first started. Ten years ago there were maybe two women , now there can be anywhere from 20 to 60."

Photo via Flickr user Dennis Haslam

Jay agrees: "There are far more women working in highly skilled positions and decision-making positions than my experience growing up on the Canadian east coast."

One thing about his job Stacey seems to resent is that parts of it are plagued by immaturity in fellow workers ("Being surrounded by many uneducated people can be frustrating"), and by the sounds of things, he's a lot more grounded than many of his peers. In that University of Regina study, one of the key findings, Ruddell writes, is: "All other factors being equal, young single males are more likely to become involved in crime than their older and married counterparts."

Jay says that for all the downsides of working in an industry like his, things are improving for the people in these towns. "I don't dislike my job, but I certainly don't love it—like most people, I'm mainly here for the money. It definitely feels isolated at times, especially in the depths of winter when you may not see the sun depending on your shift schedule. However, the oil companies pay for large rec centres, and the people have knit together a relatively supportive community here. People get married and raise families here, it's not just a giant work camp anymore."

Photo via Flickr user Government of Alberta

I spent much of the last few months researching and writing a book on modern masculinity, with a particular focus on the evolution of men in the 20th Century in Britain, where I grew up. Of course, a lot happened in the past 100 years to shape the country's ideals of manliness, but I traced some of the most significant changes to the decline of the industrial working class in the 1970s and 80s, specifically in towns for which coal mining had been the lifeblood of generations upon generations of men. For more than a century, this labour gave men a real sense of purpose and pride and when the industry was decimated under Margaret Thatcher's watch, thousands of British men lost not only their jobs, but their sense of worth. Because their jobs were so closely linked to the very ideals of masculinity to which boys and men have historically been taught to aspire, the end of mining meant these men were left feeling, for want of a better word, emasculated, and in their desperate attempts to claw back some sense of manhood, a number of social issues arose.

In Western society we have tended to look at problems of violence, substance abuse and petty crimes such as vandalism as being an inevitable side effect of unemployment and poverty, and although there's little doubt that this is true, it's become clear to me that we also need to take into account the role that toxic masculinity plays in all of this. I wrote earlier that physical violence is an inherently male issue. Men fighting other men, for example, is a public demonstration of machismo, and—while I'm reluctant to ascribe any kind of meaning to a cruel, meaningless act—domestic violence is often used as a means of asserting dominance over one's partner or family. Reports of domestics skyrocket at times of economic uncertainty, something regularly attributed to increased stress on the part of abusers. However, I feel this is too narrow an explanation.

Photo via Flickr user Dennis Haslam

Not all abusers are men, nor are men themselves immune from becoming victims of domestic violence themselves, but the majority of cases of domestic violence reported each year are perpetrated by men towards women. Last year, one Calgary-based support group for abused women said calls had increased by 40 percent in 2014, which, given employment rates, would make sense. It's worth pointing out again, though, that for women, employment actually increased in this period, lending further cause to the idea that on some level this is an issue of fractured masculinity in Alberta wrought by the severe decline of oil.

Alberta already has a serious problem with domestic violence: The province has the second-highest rate of self-reported spousal violence in Canada, and a survey in 2012 found that one in ten Albertan men thought it was OK to hit women in certain situations. Now, there's even more cause for concern. The problems Deborah Tetley wrote about in 2005—violence, substance abuse, isolation—still exist, but today they're also at risk of being exacerbated by the stress and hopelessness of unemployment. This is perhaps the most clear example of how such a toxic form of masculinity affects women: they end up becoming the metaphorical and literal punching bags of men in these situations, and even when they're not being directly victimized by male violence, they are often expected to deal with the fallout of men's problems. The presence of women in the workforce appears to provide a calming effect, while at home they are relied upon for emotional and moral support; in the most masculine of environments they provide a necessary antidote and yet suffer the most for doing so. In some respects, women's lives are improving in these towns, but unfortunately as things stand with the state of the industry, there's not a great deal of hope going spare.

Living quarters at a Fort McMurray worker camp (photos via Flickr user Gord McKenna)

"The mood has become more conservative and more concerned about when the next project will be," Travis Stacey says. "Lots of uncertainty about new projects being shelved. Some people are aware there might not be a next job for a while, so there's nervousness about job security."

But with a decade of experience under his belt and a certain level of seniority, Stacey finds no reason on a personal level to fear unemployment: "I don't worry, when you're in this industry, you have to ride the highs and lows. Even in 2009, the crash seemed worse than this, and it was still very busy for us. There are lots out of work or laid off from companies downsizing, but my direct circle hasn't been drastically affected. Yet. The more sought-after workers seem to stay busy, it's the average joes that struggle and seem to be out of work. The better guys in the industry that I know of are always working."

Photo via Flickr user Dennis Haslam

For John van Engen it's a matter of sticking around just a little longer. "Because I don't have a trade, I get moved around to where the work is. The future doesn't sound too promising for the industry in general due in part to the price of oil; as far as the industry is concerned, the belief is that the high-cost operations will lose ground or shut down completely, but there will always be oil produced due to the mobility of the product. I have five to seven years to build up enough money to retire and hope I can hang in there."

The problem, of course, is that it's not the men like Stacey and van Engen—stable, in long-term relationships, endeavouring to stay healthy—whose jobs are on the line; those most at risk are the ones whose coping mechanisms are the most destructive. And until either the oil economy picks up again or something is done to reach out to isolated young men on the fringes of the industry, things are only going to get worse for towns like Fort McMurray.

*Name has been changed to protect anonymity

Follow Jack Urwin on Twitter.

On Tuesday night, after losing four out of the day's five primaries, including in the critical battleground state of Pennsylvania, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders was on stage in West Virginia, talking about truth.

"Truth is not always pleasant. It's not always something you are happy to hear. But if we go forward as human beings, if we go forward as a nation, we cannot sweep the hard realities of our lives under the rug," Sanders told the crowd at the Big Sandy Superstore Arena, running through his usual stump speech. The media, he continued, does not deal with those realities, mostly because it is owned by large corporate interests "in a way that we need to be discussing."

What are those realities? According to Sanders, there's the crisis in Flint, Michigan, where the water is poisoned, and the one in nearby Detroit, "where the public school system is on the verge of collapse." The country's infrastructure is falling apart, he added, income inequality is rampant, and child poverty is worse in the US than in any other developed country. And despite a national unemployment rate of just 5 percent, many Americans are still suffering, including "right here in West Virginia."

"This state has the lowest labor participation rate in the country," Sanders pointed out. "In fact, only 54 percent of the working-age population in this state has a job."

What makes this particular performance noteworthy is that Sanders has only so many more stump speeches to give. With just a handful of primaries left in the Democratic presidential race, his rhetoric is running out of road. At this point, it seems safe to say he will never be president—he out-fundraised and outspent his only opponent, Hillary Clinton, in Tuesday's contests, and still lost decisively. He may still pick up delegates here and there, but California, where Clinton leads in the polls, looms on June 7; if he's not mathematically eliminated before then, the state's primary—the last of the 2016 election—will almost certainly be the final nail.

This is not to say Sanders doesn't have reasons to stay in the race, chief among them to force the Democratic Party to acknowledge that the support he commands is too powerful to be dismissed. Clinton, who knows she'll need his rabid fan base in the general election fight, went out of her way to praise her rival Tuesday night. Moreover, without Sanders in the race, it's hard to believe she would have floated the famously liberal Senator Elizabeth Warren as a potential vice-presidential pick.

In his West Virginia speech, Sanders pointed to a variety of reasons that he could still win the nomination, describing how his campaign had clawed its way to within a couple of percentage points of Clinton in national polls. And as he does in most speeches nowadays, he noted that most surveys show him performing better in increasingly hypothetical match-ups against Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.

This Trump-like focus on polling may play well with Sanders's passionate base, it's not really the Senator's strong suit. Sanders, a self-described socialist whose political career has been defined by his principled but unpopular positions on lefty issues like single-payer healthcare, is not a born winner. He's a denouncer of wrongs, a gloomy prophet—which is to say, not quite the messiah.

As Sanders's campaign slowly peters out, people will wonder why he couldn't beat Clinton, a candidate with a lot of "negatives"—pollster-speak for the fact that surveys suggest a lot of voters dislike her, distrust her, or both. Perhaps the problem was that he began this whole messy campaign with virtually no name recognition, or any political organization to speak of. Or maybe it was that the Democratic Party Machine lined up against him, or that he failed to connect with black voters, allowing Clinton to sweep states across the South.

Or maybe the problem was simply that basing a presidential bid around the claim that the economy is rigged, politics are corrupt, and America is a plutocracy was never a winning a strategy to begin with. Most modern presidents—think Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama—won elections by mixing righteousness and hope into their campaign messages. Even George W. Bush had his "compassionate conservatism." In 2016, Hillary Clinton seems to be following this lead, unafraid of pivoting to schmaltz in ads based around "love and kindness."

Sanders, on the other hand, has been out there telling the kids that they are fucked, in so many words. "Forty years ago, before the explosion of technology...before the global economy, it was possible in America for one person, one breadwinner, to earn enough money to take care of the entire family," began one of his riffs Tuesday. "Today, mom is out working, dad is out working, the kids are out working, and they have less disposable income than a one-breadwinner family had 40 years ago. Something is wrong with our economy."

That last line, believe it or not, brought on a massive applause break as Sanders sipped from a glass of water.

To quote The Big Lebowski, Sanders isn't wrong, but he is an asshole—he's abrasive, he's uncompromising, he'll never back down out of politeness. There's a place in politics for guys like that, and the American left—the one that, as you might remember, fielded pre-climate change Al Gore and John Kerry as back-to-back presidential candidates—could certainly use a dose of fiery populism. I don't know if Sanders would rather be right than be president, but it looks like he'll have to settle for the former anyway.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

Photo by Michael Vadon, via

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

US News

• Sanders Suggests the Race Is Over
  Bernie Sanders has hinted that his battle to win the Democratic nomination is over, after Hillary Clinton won four of the five northeastern primaries. Sanders, who won only Rhode Island, said he now wants "as many delegates as possible to fight for a progressive party platform." Donald Trump won all five Republican primaries and called himself "the presumptive nominee."—CBS News
• Millennials Do Not Like Capitalism, Poll Finds
  A Harvard University study found that 51 percent of young adults aged between 18 and 29 do not support capitalism. Just 42 percent said they supported it. It isn't clear if millennials would actively prefer an alternative system, however: only 33 percent said they supported socialism.—The Washington Post
• Apple Posts First Drop in iPhone Sales
  Apple Inc. has recorded its first year-on-year decline in iPhone sales, and its first overall decline in revenue since 2003. Quarterly profits dropped 22 percent, from $13.6 billion $10.5 billion. CEO Tim Cook said he remained optimistic about new markets: Apple opens five stores in China in the coming months.—USA Today
• US Tightens Rules Over Espionage
  The Justice Department has issued new rules that give prosecutors in Washington greater powers over national security cases. It follows the collapse of several high-profile prosecutions against people accused of sharing secrets with China, which led to allegations that Chinese-Americans were being singled out as spies.—The New York Times

International News

• Up to $800 Million of IS Funds Destroyed
  Somewhere between $500 million and $800 million in cash held by the Islamic State group has been destroyed in air strikes, according to a top US military official. Major General Peter Gersten, based in Baghdad, said that said less than 20 air strikes targeting the group's stores of money had been conducted.—BBC News
• Papua New Guinea to Close Australian Detention Camp
  Papua New Guinea has said it will close an Australian detention center for asylum seekers after the island nation's Supreme Court ruled it was illegal. Prime Minister Peter O'Neill said his government would immediately ask Australia to make arrangements for the people held there.—Al Jazeera
• Paris Attack Suspect Extradited to France
  Salah Abdeslam, the 26-year-old suspected of helping plan the Paris terrorist attacks, has been extradited to France from Belgium, according to Belgian prosecutors. Abdeslam will appear before French magistrates today with a view to being placed under formal investigation.—The Guardian
• Venezuela Introduces Two-Day Week
  Venezuela's public sector employees have been told to work only Monday and Tuesday until the country overcomes its energy crisis. The drastic measure applies to 2 million public sector workers. The country is facing a major drought, dramatically reducing water levels at its hydroelectric dam.—TIME

Prince performing in Brussels in 1986 (Photo by Yves Lorson, via)

Everything Else

• Snowden Revelations Led to Chilling Effect
  Traffic to Wikipedia pages about terrorism plunged nearly 30 percent after Edward Snowden's revelations about the US National Security Agency. Experts believe fears of government snooping are having a "chilling effect" on online research.—Reuters
• New Moon Discovered Around Dwarf Planet
  NASA's Hubble telescope has found a tiny pitch-black moon orbiting Makemake, an icy dwarf planet on the outer reaches of the solar system. The moon has been named MK2.—CNN
• Prince Left No Will Behind
  Prince's sister, Tyka Nelson, has confirmed the artist left no formal will. She has asked a Minneapolis court to appoint a special administrator to oversee his estate, which reports claim could be worth up to $27 million.—Noisey
• Colorado Weed Taking Over Florida Market
  A series of recent arrests show Floridians have been heading to legal states like Colorado to grow weed, before returning to Florida to sell it. One Florida sheriff said there was still "a tremendous amount of dirty money to be made in this business."—VICE

Done with reading for today? That's fine—instead, watch 'Everything You Need to Know About a Possible Republican Contested Convention'

The dentist Jacobus "Mark" Van Nierop, found guilty yesterday of having mutilated hundreds of patients. (Photo by MaxPPP)

This article originally appeared on VICE France

If you're anything like me, the mere mention of an appointment with the dentist stirs up a whole array of anxieties. The news about the existence of Jacobus "Mark" Van Nierop, better known as the "horror dentist" or the "butcher dentist", has done little to change that. This Dutch dentist moved to Château-Chinon from 2008 to 2012 and hacked at the mouths of hundreds of patients who thought that they were receiving the appropriate care for their dental problems. He fled to Canada after his initial arrest in France in 2013, but was arrested again in New Brunswick a little over a year later. On Tuesday, he was sent to prison for eight years by the criminal court of Nevers, and was banned for life from practicing as a dentist.

It began in 2008 when Mark Van Nierop set up his dental practice in Château-Chinon, in the department of Nièvre. At first, he was welcomed as a saviour by a region bearing the brunt of the medical desertion of the French countryside. But word spread quickly about his brutality and his medieval methods, the effects of which are still being felt by his patients. None of the victims were aware of the fact that he had been banned from working as a dentist in the Netherlands. With the trial now over, his patients can begin to process the horror they endured over a number of months. Sylviane Boulestaix is one of these victims – she kindly agreed to talk to us about her story.

VICE: Could you tell me about your first appointment with Van Nierop?
Sylviane Boulestaix: I went to go see him in January 2012, I was already retired at the time. I hadn't been to the dentist for a number of years and since my previous dentist had retired, Van Nierop was the only one available in the area. During that first appointment, he immediately said he wanted to replace all my teeth. I was offered a price estimate, photos, everything. Right at the beginning of the consultation he injected me with something – he said it was "to rebuild my teeth". It was very painful. When he made a mould of my teeth, it felt like he was trying to rip my jaw apart. But once you're in that chair you're less inclined to ask any questions.

At that point you didn't suspect anything?
No! It's a small village and people are usually suspicious of strangers, but I didn't want to listen to what people where saying. And a former colleague of mine had had an appointment with Van Nierop, which had gone over well. His surgery looked perfectly normal: a waiting room with magazines and chairs set out along the walls. A receptionist in a white blouse who was neither particularly nice nor particularly rude, and an assistant to help him out. It all seemed functional and clean. He even had a nice bronze plaque with his name engraved on it. How are you supposed to suspect anything with all of that?

"He took out eight teeth at once and went out to have lunch with his assistant, leaving me to bleed all over the chair."

What happened after that first appointment?
After two already very painful sessions, the receptionist called to tell me to come to the surgery so that the dentist could replace some of my teeth with dentures. Again, I trusted him, but it was horrific. He injected anaesthesia in my gums eight times, so I couldn't feel or move three quarters of my face. I found it hard to breath. He then took out eight teeth at once and went out to have lunch with his assistant, leaving me to bleed all over the chair. When he got back, he tried to make a joke of it by asking: "Would you like a little sandwich, Madame?". I was there for hours, and kept bleeding for three days after the fact. And it left me in a vicious circle: I was in so much pain that I had to go back to see him. My gums were infected, so he took out the dentures to give them a chance to heal. After those appointments the surgery suddenly closed.

What was your first impression of this man?
I found him quite nondescript. He was built like a rugby player and didn't have a great grasp of French, but enough to be understood. He was quite curt in his way of doing things but, again, when you're lying back in a dentist chair with your mouth open you don't really ask questions. His approach was brutal, but deep down you just think: he's a dentist. Dentists are rarely gentle and pleasant. And he did everything to put me at ease, he was pretty likeable. It wasn't until he had his dentistry tools in his hands that he revealed himself to be a torturer.

Do you think that he took some sort of pleasure in making his patients suffer?
No, I don't think so. In hindsight, I think that he was just there to make money off of honest people. You always had to pay 40 percent of the cost of the treatment in advance. I didn't have enough money, so I had to borrow it – I'm still paying it back today.

Have you seen a dentist since then?
I didn't have a choice, considering the state he left me in. For nearly a year and a half I was toothless. I couldn't eat solid foods. I had always been completely trusting of doctors and medical treatments, but now it's more complicated. When I go to see a doctor now,I always have a knot in my stomach. We try to rebuild our lives as best as we can, but we'll never be able to forget. I'll be wearing dentures for the rest of my life because of him.

Did you feel abandoned during everything that happened?
By medicine, yes. There aren't any family doctors in the French countryside anymore, it's completely deserted here. There's one doctor who comes around once every two weeks. I don't have a car and no internet. What am I supposed to do? Thankfully we were recognised as victims and we'll receive compensation.

What was being at the trial like?
I was shaking when I saw him. He didn't say anything. To every question that the prosecutor asked him, he replied: "I don't remember" or "I can't comment on that." He seemed completely disconnected from reality. I'm very happy it's over.

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A young boy stands by as members of the Afghan Counter Narcotics Police eradicate his family's poppy field in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. All photos by Jim Huylebroek

In densely populated Brent, one of the four poorest boroughs in London, it's not difficult to find heroin. It might have fallen out of favor with the younger generation of drug users, for whom the 1990s was enough warning of the drug's many downsides, but a large number of addicts who started using in the 1970s and 80s are still around.

Mike*, a tall and well-presented man in his 50s, has been injecting heroin for more than 25 years. The first time was with his former girlfriend Larissa, who was a drug dealer.

"One day she was sent heroin instead of the cocaine she was expecting," Mike explains. "We didn't know what to do with it, so we began using it ourselves. Though it made me feel sick, I continued taking it. Shortly after that first time, I got locked up in prison, where my cellmate happened to be a long-term heroin user. I picked up his habit of using crack cocaine and taking the heroin to bring the high down.

"The first time I overdosed, my drug-taking friends looked up to me like I was now one of them. After every overdose, I swore I would change, but as soon as I was discharged from hospital, I went straight back to heroin."

Although Mike seems calm enough about his drug use, there's a palpable sense of regret in his voice. "I messed up all my relationships because of the drugs—from family ties to the number of very destructive relationships I had with women, many of them addicts themselves, with whom I have various children," he says.

Three weeks ago, Mike, who is now a full-time carer for his 87-year-old mother, decided enough was enough and managed to wean himself off heroin—for now, at least—with the help of a methadone program.

In 2013, when the last relevant study was conducted, there were an estimated 300,000 heroin and crack cocaine users in the UK. In 2015, a study by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction found that the UK has the highest rate of heroin use in Europe. Many additional opiate users don't even make it into these figures—for instance, Eastern European heroin addicts who've recently moved to the UK, or opium users who've moved here from Iraq and Iran and who are often suffering from PTSD, according to Dr. Alexandra Moore, a psychiatrist at Brent's Addiction Recovery and Clinical Centre.

In the UK, heroin use tends to be a very private affair: Dealers are covert, and users take it at home or away from prying eyes. Elsewhere, it's not so invisible.

Addicts use opium and heroin in plain sight in central Kabul.

On a busy intersection in the heart of Kabul, hundreds of heroin addicts have gathered. "Take them to the desert," a police officer shouts, trying desperately to move the crowd along. Ignoring him completely, the men and women squat in nearby bushes, lighting their pipes. Yesterday, local police burnt many of their belongings, which were stored under a bridge not far from here.

Before the American-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the Taliban had enforced a successful ban on poppy cultivation, and there were few opium or heroin addicts to be found in Kabul. Now, following years of war, the collapse of the national economy and a "40-fold increase" of opium production, there are up to 4.6 million drug users throughout Afghanistan, according to United Nations estimates.

Opium production in Afghanistan was down 19 percent in 2015 because of a fungus and weevils problem, but according to the latest UN report, farmers still produced a total of about 3,300 tons of raw opium—much of which would have been grown in Helmand, a southern province that's almost three times the size of Wales and home to around half of the country's poppy fields. A large chunk of that raw opium would have passed through the labs housed in small mud huts along the border with Pakistan, where the plant matter is processed into heroin.

Members of the Afghan Counter Narcotics Police destroy a poppy field using tractors in Helmand Province, Afghanistan.

As our convoy of armored Humvees moves along the dirt roads of Helmand, we see barren fields where poppies once grew. A couple of months ago, the counter-narcotics police eradicated almost all the poppy fields in the Nad-e Ali district of Helmand, including those of Haji Abdul, a farmer who's switched from growing poppies to green beans.

"In the bazaar, I get one dollar for one kilogram of beans, and I have sixteen mouths to feed," he says. "I don't care what the government says; next season I'll be selling opium again! That will make me $200 per kilogram."

Abdul and other farmers in Nad-e Ali may have been affected, but generally, police action to thwart poppy cultivation seems to prove mostly futile. With poverty rates escalating, and, according to farmers, the government spending most of its funds on fighting the Taliban rather than helping local people, the allure of growing poppies is only growing stronger. Helmand Police Commander Mahmood Noorzai says that, despite their previous crops being destroyed, many farmers in Nad-e Ali are once again growing poppies.

Since 2008, the Taliban has been supporting the growing of opium, taking a share of each harvest to fund its insurgency. "For each good harvest, the Taliban demands 5 kilograms of opium," says Matin Khan, a tribal elder in Nawzad, a district in northern Helmand and a Taliban stronghold. "They also levy tolls at the checkpoints where drug smugglers pass with their packed Toyota Land Cruisers, and then escort them for money through the toxic triangle, the lawless border region between Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran."

In this stretch of no man's land, cars have no license plates, and heroin can be found at the local bazaar.

A family harvests cotton in their field in the Marjah district of Helmand. As farmers cannot survive from the revenues of legitimate crops, many will switch back to poppy next season.

Just a stone's throw away from the Iranian border, in Nimroz Province, is the Afghani town of Zaranj, which has been dubbed "Little Colombia" by locals.

In the cemetery of this dusty town, a boy no older than 12 approaches us, gazing nowhere. His friend, Ibrahim, is in a better condition to talk: "I've been using heroin for the past six years now, since I was about fourteen," he says. "I work at a brick factory in Iran. The work is so tough that everyone is using drugs to ease the pain."

We notice a bloodstained bandage covering Ibrahim's leg. "A work accident," he says. "That's why I'm back in Afghanistan. As soon as my leg gets better, I'll flee back to Iran. Over here there is nothing but misery."

A man dressed in rags comes running up and hits the young boy square in his face. "Not good—not good these drugs!" he exclaims. "The smugglers are selling us junk for 20 afghani per shot."

Some addicts in the region do find their way into proper healthcare, but the relapse rate is high. A few miles outside of Zaranj is a police station surrounded by golden sand dunes that serves as a rehab center for heroin addicts. It was built with the financial support of a local businessman.

In government-run centers, which provide care for about 10 percent of Afghanistan's addicts, there are beds and doctors. Here, those luxuries are few and far between; there's no running water, and the stench of a busted cesspit permeates the entire building. Police guard the addicts, who aren't allowed to leave the facility for 45 days.

Around 50 young men salute us as we walk up to the patio. A man named Abdul Jameh shows us a massive scar across his chest. Taliban attacked his convoy when he was still a police officer, he says, before telling us his family had him locked up here because of aggressive behavior.

"Nonsense," says the police officer standing next him. "Ever since that attack, heavily addicted to heroin. His family didn't know what to do with him any longer."

A drug addict outside Raha rehab center, located in one of the poorest neighborhoods of Zahedan, Iran. They get a free dose of methadone and a meal.

A ruby red Persian rug covers Ali's* entire apartment floor. We've arrived in Zahedan, the first major Iranian city after crossing the Afghan border. For the next four nights, we'll be eating, sleeping, and having long conversations on this rug, discussing the Iranian clerics who wander the streets, praying and weeping to honor dead saints. The authorities occasionally harass Ali, he says, because he has tourists stay every now and then.

Ali moved to Zahedan from Mirjaveh, a poor village near the Pakistani border. "If I was still living there, I would be smuggling dope for sure," he says. Instead, he now studies genetics at the city's university. When he went back to Mirjaveh last winter, he was immediately offered a job smuggling opium and heroin. Perhaps unsurprisingly, being the first country along the trafficking route from Afghanistan toward the West, Iran has one of the highest rates of opiate addiction in the world.

"I've smuggled shoes and oil before, but never drugs," says Ali. "I've seen too many people die because of it. My friends smuggle drugs because they haven't studied, and they don't think about the consequences. They just want to make money to provide for their families."

According to a 2012 report by the US State Department, since 2007, Iran has intercepted around a third of all heroin seized globally. The death penalty is still used for drug trafficking offenses, and it's used astonishingly often. In February of this year, the entire adult male population of a village in southern Iran was executed for drug offenses. In the first half of 2015, the country executed 694 people, the majority for drug offenses.

In 2007, Iran started building a wall along its border with Pakistan, which—according to authorities—is to prevent drug smuggling and insurgencies by terror groups. But beyond that wall, a largely uncontrollable wilderness stretches out.

Ali explains how smugglers head to Pakistan through the mountains using back roads, to pick up morphine, heroin, or opium. "Or they pay a ."

A few months ago, Mehrooz, one of Ali's best friends, was sentenced to death by hanging at the age of 26 after he was caught transporting heroin. I cautiously ask the authorities in Tehran if these severe punishments actually work when it comes to dissuading would-be traffickers, because while the Iranian government keeps killing, the smugglers keep coming.

"The UK would certainly treat drug smugglers differently if it had Afghanistan as a neighbor!" says General Moayedi, head of the Iranian police's anti-narcotics squad. "Yesterday, a colleague stepped on a land mine and lost both legs. For you, drug smuggling is an illicit business. For us, it is war. A war in which we protect Europe, the destination of all that rubbish. How does the West want to fight terrorism when it doesn't target drug smugglers? The Taliban is growing in strength. And what if ISIS hijacks the opium and heroin trade?"

A load of heroin impounded and displayed by the Turkish police in Van Province

The bus ride from Tehran to the Turkish border takes us an entire night and a day. Here, in a provincial town in Turkey's Van Province, we meet Afran*, who has a short mustache and warm blue eyes.

Along with two of his brothers and four of his uncles, he has just been released from a seven-year spell in prison. Caught carrying 155 pounds of heroin on his way to Istanbul, Afran will now spend the next four years under house arrest. He grew up in a Kurdish border town in Hakkari Province, where—like in Mirjaveh—drug smuggling is a common means of income. The villagers used to believe that there were only two ways to get to heaven: either by killing Armenians, or by selling drugs to non-believing Europeans. "When we stopped believing that, a new religion emerged: money," says Afran.

"My father and grandfather used to cross the Iranian border on horses to get the heroin," he says. "I traded the horse for a jeep with a secret compartment, in which I got past border crossings."

A load of heroin hidden in barrels is intercepted at the Iran-Turkey border.

"Hidden compartments are getting old fashioned," says a member of the border police when I ask. Instead, he adds, smugglers now hide the heroin in goods such as fire extinguishers, cases of baklava, or even marble statues. He doesn't mention bribery as an alternative method of transporting heroin across the border.

Afran swears he never bribed a police officer. "But I know cops and soldiers who are involved," he says. "Even today, governors and members of parliament smuggle heroin to Istanbul in their own vehicles."

Smuggling, by all accounts, isn't as easy as it once was. The turning point came ten years ago, when Turkey started offering huge amounts of money for tips and rival gangs began calling the police when their competition left for Istanbul with a new shipment. Afran joins a list of narco-smugglers who got caught and survived to tell the story. He was pulled over in the central region of Turkey, after the police had tapped his phone. Whether or not the police arrested Arfan based on a tip-off given by a rival gang is still unclear.

Still, for years, the real bosses of the heroin trade—those who make the most profit along the supply chain—were Turkish nationals living throughout Europe. "The money they earned through heroin is now invested in legal businesses, like casinos," says a former Turkish police chief who wishes to remain anonymous. More recently, Albanian crime syndicates have taken over large parts of the Turkish heroin business.

Mimi and Evgeni, who both work for the Initiative for Health Foundation in Sofia, wait for addicts, so they can exchange their used needles for new ones. Outside their van, Pepi, a drug dealer, plays with his daughter.

After entering Turkey, any heroin that isn't intercepted and seized makes its way out along various smuggling routes into Western Europe, through Greece, Albania, Kosovo, and Serbia. In Sofia, Bulgaria's capital, the Roma community is worst affected by the importation of heroin, diluted with other chemicals and cheapened. In the streets of Pristina, Sarajevo, Belgrade, and other former Yugoslavian cities, most addicts have been using heroin since the wars in the 1990s.

Addiction is fanned by extreme poverty, but it's maintained by local dealers, who, we're told, are often protected by moles within law enforcement agencies. In Lazarevac, a Serbian city containing a high number of addicts, we meet Zlatan*, a former police commissioner who is talking to us anonymously, fearing a threat to his life. We're invited to his house, where we are welcomed with Turkish coffee, the fruit brandy rakia, and some traditional appetizers.

Politicians removed Zlatan from his position a year and a half ago, he claims, because he took his work too seriously. In one year, he raided more than 40 apartments, clubs, and cafés to arrest dealers. "I found hard evidence that dirty police inspectors were selling drugs themselves," he says.

Arthur, a heroin addict, lights a cigarette in the wooden shack where he lives in Sofia.

Zlatan takes us to a bar popular with members of Sveti Sava, a civilian organization that, in March of 2013, started out by publishing the names and addresses of eight drug dealers working in Lazarevac. Since then, they have released the details of many more. Their leader, a giant former kickboxer and member of a paramilitary group, says heroin usage has become rampant in the last five years.

"Youngsters were walking around like zombies," he says. "They disappeared, succumbed to overdoses. Dealers were rich people who commanded respect from businessmen or children of politicians. They were affiliated to Serbian, Kosovar, or Turkish gangs that were protected by police. By spreading their photos in newspapers and social media, we punctured that image. But unmasking these corrupt dirty inspectors, forget it! You can't beat the police."

Zlatan praises Sveti Sava's attempts to counter heroin trafficking, but admits that the number of addicts keeps on rising. "I can't make a difference here any longer, and each day, I fear for my family's safety," he says, before asking about the procedures one must go through to apply for asylum.

Thirty miles north of Lazarevac, we hit the Belgrade-Zagreb highway. This is where heroin enters the European Union, toward Western Europe.

Used syringes and other injection paraphernalia near train tracks in central Sofia

Back in Brent, Mike is taking it one day at a time, making steady progress in combating his addiction.

"I've seen enough madness," he sighs, recalling the harm his drug taking has caused to others, adding that he wants to make amends now that he's clean. It's routine—doing simple things like exercising, reading, and reaching out to help others in an early stage of recovery—that he says helps him stay clean.

Meanwhile, the heroin keeps on flowing through the world from its birthplace in Afghanistan, claiming hundreds of new victims in its wake.

*To guarantee their safety, some names have been changed.

The fieldwork for this article was carried out with the help of the Pascal Decroos Fund.

Follow Hanne Coudere and Jim Huylebroek on Twitter.

In his historic 1964 State of the Union address, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared war on poverty, wanting to find ways to changethe lives of those the American dream had left behind. LBJ believed that America had the resources to wipe out economic scarcity, and he used military rhetoric to rally the people around the cause. Central Appalachia became the frontier for the initiative.

This region comprises all of West Virginia and parts of southwestern Virginia, eastern Tennessee, eastern Kentucky, southeastern Ohio, and western North Carolina. It is a large swath of land that runs along the Appalachian Mountain Range.

News organizations descended on the region to put a face to the War on Poverty. Journalists depicted it as an unseemly place to live. These representations have haunted its people ever since. Those responsible, had the best of intentions, but ultimately they contributed to unfair stereotypes of a rural group of people who already felt ostracized from the American Dream. Fifty years later, most of the programs put in place to eradicate poverty have been severely hindered by reductions in aid.

I have been making photographs in the region for five years. This past summer I collaborated with VICE and local writers Juliet Escoria, Catherine Moore, and Jacob Knabb to tell stories that offer a complex and nuanced understanding of what central Appalachia looks like 50 years after becoming the poster child for poverty.

We focused on the effects of the declining coal industry, systemic problems with the healthcare system, the struggle against the obliteration of mountains due to strip mining, the drug epidemic, and the history and meaning of the terms redneck and hillbilly.

I did not want to produce a series of stories that reinforced mass media's view of central Appalachia as a poverty-ridden region. I also do not believe it is useful to ignore the poverty and only showcase selectively positive things. Both strategies fail to acknowledge the complexity of life in any region. If we want to utilize mass media to demystify stereotypes, represent culture, sum up experience, and interpret memory and history, we must collectively acknowledge that these stories do not offer an authoritative view of a place. Central Appalachia is too vast and complicated for this.

Despite the failure of past depictions, there is value in thinking through how and when we attempt to change the circumstances of people through government-initiated policies. There is value in reporting that examines what it looks like when these policies fail. It is useful to understand how marginalized communities continue to struggle. It is important to remind ourselves that there was a time when a president thought he could eradicate poverty in the Unites States. As we prepare for a new election and a new president it is valuable to revisit the issues at stake in overlooked parts of America. It is valuable to provide representations of life in Appalachia that are dimensional and considerate of its effects on those that live in the region. –Stacy Kranitz

Below is a preview of the stories in Ain't No Grave:

The child of a drug-addicted prostitute, Shawn grew up in the projects in Charleston and started selling drugs at 14. His life is dotted with death—the murder of a friend, a car accident that killed his mother—stints in rehab, and almost ten straight years in prison. What is unexpected is his softness, something he admits is new for him. –From "The Hard Times, Struggles, and Hopes of Addicts in Appalachia"

"There would be a lot of people hurting if this didn't exist." –From "Watching Lives Get Saved and Teeth Get Pulled at a Remote Medical Clinic in Appalachia"

"Whenever I take people and show them the disaster site up there I try to make it a point to say to them, 'This isn't capitalism gone horribly, horribly wrong... It's the American way and capitalism gone horribly, horribly right.'" –From "How Environmental Activists Are Fighting Back Against Pollution and Big Business in Appalachia"

"What's my life like? I work daylight to dark every day. I pay my own way. I don't the government for nothing. I don't want the government to know about anything I do. I don't ask for no welfare. I do my own thing. I work in the sawmill. I'm a professional board stacker. A true redneck don't give a shit about nothing but putting food on the table, working, and getting drunk. A man ain't got a job and can't provide for himself can go to hell as far as I care." –From "What It Means to Be a 'Redneck' or a 'Hillbilly'"

People like Bryan Dunlap were once the middle class in Boone County; they could buy cars and houses, pay property taxes, and go to the mall. With coal's death, all that's gone. What's left is extreme poverty and those who have always been really well off, and they'll stay there. –From "A Portrait of Coal Town on the Brink of Death"

Hi. Dogs actually hate us. They hate our touch, and they hate our smell. They hate when we hold them close and coo and caress them.

The jury, exhibit A:

Photo by Davide Gorla, via

B:

Photo by Ann Dabney, via

C:

Photo by Flickr user Gordon, via

These animals are praying for the hell to end. What dogs are thinking when you get all up in their face and ask them who is a "good boy": Please leave me alone, you braying trouser monster. Dogs are our furry hostages, and their large eyes disguise the truth. You like to think a dog's eyes are full of innocence and yearning to be patted, don't you? You're a fool. You like to think dogs can smile, don't you, when really they are only capable of a furry grimace. You are the jailor, and they are the prisoner. You put collars round their necks and only let them walk outside on a leash. You feed them sub-meat and tell them when they are allowed to shit. Dogs are prisoners. Admit this.

Science has admitted it this week, finally, with the truth that dogs largely hate us. Dr. Stanley Coren, canine expert and professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, examined 250 dogs being hugged and assessed them for signs of stress: 81 percent were totally not into it.

You know when people are trying to crack on to you at a party and really intensely talks to you forever—they've got you cornered, these people, you are between the large fridge and the sink, and they're poking you in a way they feels is flirty but is actually actively painful; they're dropping heavy hints about you going back to theirs: "So where you staying tonight?" that sort of thing. "Oh, you live in Clapton? That's on my way, actually, maybe we could share a cab"—and then your mate turns up making panicked gestures toward an Uber out of there, so you say goodbye, and then—and you can see this moment coming, they put down their drink to free their arms up, they come at you in slow motion, they clatter miscellanea to the ground as they approach you—then they awkwardly, clumsily try to hug? Sometimes they actually ask for a hug first or say the word "huuuuuug!" as they are trying to hug? That's you and dogs, that is. That is you hugging a dog.

"The results indicated that the internet contains many pictures of happy people hugging what appear to be unhappy dogs," Dr. Coren wrote on Psychology Today. "Dogs are technically cursorial animals, which is a term that indicates that they are designed for swift running. That implies that in times of stress or threat the first line of defense that a dog uses is not his teeth, but rather his ability to run away. Behaviorists believe that depriving a dog of that course of action by immobilizing him with a hug can increase his stress level and, if the dog's anxiety becomes significantly intense, he may bite."

Immobilizing. With a hug. Essentially, when you hug a dog, you are doing something one level below tasering it until it shits itself. You are locking it behind the bars of your misguided love.

I have known for some time that dogs don't like us, because a dog barked at me once, and I immediately started crying like a little baby, and I have been wary of the animals ever since. But tell people you don't like dogs, and suddenly you're some kind of monster: "Oh," they say, "are you some kind of monster?" Maybe I'm the only person left who still cares about dogs. They want to run free and uninterrupted. They want to fuck each other in parks and sleep together in big piles. They do not want to be clipped to a lead and made to shit into your awaiting, plastic bag–clad hand. They do not want biscuits to be balanced carefully on their noses and told to sit and wait.

A dog, remember, is a killing animal. All dogs are filled with an odd nervous energy that puts me on edge. They are made of muscles, dogs—tiny knots of rippling muscles hidden between soft downy fur. They are filled with violent potential. Every single dog alive is extremely capable of jumping vertically in the air and biting me on the penis and/or nuts. They are constantly primed to do this. Does that not freak anyone else out? Dogs are exceptional dick-biting machines. A dog could jump and bite my dick off without its little dog heart rate raising even one beat. And yet we dress them in little outfits on Halloween! We hug them and pretend not to mind their smell!

It's time we admitted the truth about dogs. We exist, with them, in an uneasy parlay. They have the teeth, and they have the numbers to turn on us all, thrash out of our tight hugs, bite all of our genitals off. We trap them in prisons of love and expect them not to clink their tuck cups against the bars. Be wary of dogs, and touch them carefully. You never know when the uprising will start.

Follow Joel Golby on Twitter.

The last known lynching in Clarke County, Mississippi, was only about 70 years ago. Closed to traffic, the hanging bridge where it took place still stands, a landmark for Jim Crow, white supremacy and a world where violence kept African Americans in fear for their lives. The old steel-framed bridge in Shubuta, a small town of about 700, has been the target of scorn for generations. But it endures, a sobering reminder of racial violence and the culture that sought to justify it.

In his new book Hanging Bridge: Racial Violence and America's Civil Rights Century, Jason Morgan Ward, an associate professor of history at Mississippi State University, tries to make sense of the brutal site. He investigates the symbolic power of the manmade spot where vigilantes used murder to enforce white supremacy, leaving a trail of bodies drifting down the Chickasawhay River.

Ward's story focuses in particular on two lynchings in the first half of the 20th century: the 1918 killing of two brothers and two pregnant sisters several days after their white boss turned up dead, and the 1942 slaying of two teens accused of rape by a white girl. When the recently-formed NAACP asked the governor to conduct an investigation into the first lynching, he told them, "Go to hell." But by the second lynching, the situation had progressed to the point that the FBI was dispatched to at least provide the aura of federal investigation.

I reached out to Ward for some perspective on the violence on the bridge, the demise of the white supremacist regime that supported it, and what the bridge means now, in 2016, as a symbol of the barbaric practices of the American past.

Here's what he had to say.

VICE: What led you to dive into this subject and write the book?
Jason Morgan Ward: I first ran across newspaper stories about the Hanging Bridge when I was researching my dissertation. I started collecting documents related to the lynchings and the broader history of the community. I wanted to write a different kind of book, both in structure and style. Being in Mississippi certainly helps when you're writing this kind of book, but one of the things that really motivated me to keep going was the discovery that pieces of the story were scattered across the county—it was truly national in reach and impact.

Does the bridge still being there all these years later tell us anything about a national failure to right the wrongs of slavery and discrimination?
It's significant, because the history of lynching and racial violence has a complicated relationship with place—bodies are hung from trees that eventually die or are cut down, killing fields and burial sites become thickets and forests, mobs set fire to buildings and bodies. The fact that a steel bridge remains gives us a site that we can connect to a story, and that is somewhat unique.

The legacy of slavery shapes that story, even though the steel bridge itself was not built until the early twentieth century. The river crossings that preceded it were built to connect the town to the plantations, and slaveowner wealth drove local development. The slave economy also shaped the demographics of the community to this day—a black-majority area where wealth and power remained largely in the hands of a white minority.

Black Mississippians frequently attributed mob violence and harassment to the Ku Klux Klan, pictured here at a 1920s rally near Meridian, but the violence extended beyond members of white supremacist groups. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Walk us through the two lynchings that serve as the main threads for the book.
In 1918, a mob hanged two black men and two black women from the river bridge. According to white officials, the four had confessed to a murder conspiracy shortly after their white employer turned up dead. Walter White, a blond-haired, blue-eyed black southerner who had recently gone to work for the NAACP, posed as a white traveling salesman and investigated the lynchings personally.

He discovered a much more sordid story.

The white employer was an alcoholic philanderer who had abandoned a failed dental practice and moved back to his family's farm. Both of the lynched women were pregnant by him. And the Hanging Bridge lynchings had special significance because of their timing—five weeks after Armistice Day, weeks before the NAACP released its landmark report, Thirty Years of Lynching.

And the World War II-era lynching?
In 1942, a smaller group of vigilantes lynched two adolescent boys, aged 14 and 15, for allegedly attempting to rape a 15-year-old white girl. The incident prompted the first FBI lynching probe in Mississippi history, several undercover investigations by white and black journalists, and even inspired a eulogy poem by Langston Hughes. Like the 1918 lynchings, these killings occurred at a pivotal moment. Civil rights activists had launched the "Double V" campaign—victory over race-haters abroad and at home—and they likened lynchers to Nazis in speeches and editorial cartoons.

All that said, no one ever answered for the lynchings. But certainly, taken together, the lynching cases in 1918 and 1942 reveal that no southern community was ever beyond the reach of the black freedom struggle—and that reach kept growing.

How difficult was it dealing with this material from an academic standpoint?
I think some of the hardest realizations come later in the book: the only part of the book in which no lynchings occur, ostensibly a measure of racial progress. But racial violence and the attitudes that condoned it persisted. At the end of the day the logic of brute force and the ever-present threat of violence remained. I think that is relevant today, when many are eager to emphasize racial progress and point to an ugly past simply to show how far we have come.

Did the broader community in this area support racial terrorism and the horrors that transpired on the bridge?
Lynching relied on the complicity and solidarity of the white community. In 1918, the richest man in town submitted his own version of events to a regional newspaper to supposedly set the record straight—and protect the town's good name. Despite the fact that the mob abducted their victims from the town jail around dinnertime, everyone claimed not to have noticed.

The FBI records from the 1942 lynching investigation are especially revealing, because they provide a detailed inside view of how everyday people in this community tried to cover for themselves and their neighbors. You see how, even in a rural Deep South community, a few white folks would break rank and turn confidential informant. While that helps me make some informed conclusions about what I think may have happened, it did not help bring anyone to justice back then.

Why have southern whites clung to white supremacy for so long even as the rest of the world moves on?
I don't know if the rest of the world has moved on, but white southerners are used to being scapegoated for the sins of white supremacy, and would rather throw the charge back at their critics than own up to the historical and contemporary reality that race still matters immensely in southern politics and culture. It also matters in history, which is why you see so many people hold onto a white supremacist reading of history that emphasizes southern pride and heritage.

McArthur "Sonny" Gray leans on the wrought-iron cemetery fencing that surrounds the unmarked graves of at least two lynching victims in Shubuta, Mississippi.Photo courtesy Andrew Lichtenstein

How have local African Americans come to grips with the history of this spot?
African Americans defied the bridge's history before it was history: the families of the lynching victims in 1918 and 1942 all refused to accept their loved ones' bodies for burial. Whether or not that was an act of defiance, it meant that the white community had to deal with their dirty work. Local African Americans, in 1918 and again in 1942, assisted undercover investigators at great personal risk. So even in a repressive and seemingly isolated environment, they pushed back.

In the 1960s, local civil rights activists spoke frequently of the bridge, both to explain why their neighbors were scared to get involved, and also to explain to outsiders the stakes of the struggle. Racial violence had a profound effect on how civil rights activists saw themselves and how they understood their opponents. Having the bridge meant they could literally point to a structure and a site that manifested that violence.

What can whites in the Deep South do now about their ancestors' actions?
I think that honesty is a start. I did not write this book, or anything else that I have scribbled through the years, out of a sense of guilt—or innocence. The State of Mississippi spent thousands of taxpayer dollars in the late 1970s and early 1980s trying to keep a history textbook out of public schools because it contained a photograph of a lynching.

When Victor Bernstein, the Jewish journalist, interviewed the governor of Mississippi after the two boys were lynched in 1942, he asked what would end mob violence—especially when white folks refused to tell on their neighbors and law enforcement failed to prosecute. When the governor replied, "Education," Bernstein wrote, "I wonder what their mothers are thinking now about education as a cure for corpses swinging in the wind."

Are race relations in Clarke County, Mississippi, still bad today?
The most prominent racial issue at the moment is the question of the state flag, which I would like to see come down on my university campus and across the state. In one of the Clarke County's recorded lynchings that did not occur at the Hanging Bridge—in 1920—a mob reportedly forced their victim to kiss a Confederate battle flag before riddling his body with bullets and hanging his corpse from a roadside pole. Symbols matter, then and now, and no symbol has been more closely linked with southern racial violence. So it is no accident that in an era of intense debates about white supremacy, police brutality, poverty, education, immigration, and a host of other issues, controversies over symbols remain so prominent in public life.

Learn more about the book, which drops on Monday, here.

Follow Seth Ferranti on Twitter.

Illustrations by Ella de Souza

Achieving the perfect work-life balance is tough, whichever industry you're in. But when that industry involves sex, that balance gets even tougher. From first dates to long-term relationships, is there ever a right time to tell your sex partner that you also have sex for money?

When I worked as a lap dancer, I stopped dating altogether. Something about selling the idea of sex to men every night just put me off intimacy. Long after I quit dancing, I'd meet guys who fixated on the fact I took my clothes off for money when I was 18. They seemed either disappointed in me or weirdly turned on by it.

But what's it like for people who have both business-sex and pleasure-sex? I spoke to sex workers across different areas of the industry about their dating lives.

"The best relationship I've had was with another sex worker"

The two responses I get from potential dates are, "No, because you're a sex worker" and, "Yes, because you're a sex worker." It's never just about me. I totally understand when they can't handle it, but then there are the ones who want to try out new things sexually, and if that's the only reason they want to date me, forget it.

My last relationship lasted two or so months. He'd ask me how my day was, and I wouldn't want to talk about it. That's because I'm sharing a part of myself with a stranger, and I wouldn't want my boyfriend to think he wasn't getting the real me. The thing is, I genuinely enjoy my work—I love it! I orgasm all the time. Which is brilliant, but it also makes me reluctant to be completely open because I don't want my partners to get jealous.

The best relationship I've ever had was with another sex worker. It was brilliant. We were just so comfortable with each other and could talk about everything. I remember one time in a restaurant, this couple on the next table were talking about their days—business proposals, presentations, stuff like that—so I asked him what he'd done that day. "Oh, I fisted this woman, how about you?" he replied. And I said, "Oh, I fucked a man with a strap-on." We laughed so much. The only reason it didn't work out was because I have kids, and he's a bit younger than me—it was nothing to do with our work.

I think some female sex workers can be overly naïve when it comes to trying to find a partner, so when we do find something, sometimes we put up with more than we should. That's probably why I've decided to remain single—it's too much hassle.

Charlotte Rose, London

"The women I date assume I'm a rampant sex machine"

I'm a male sex worker specializing in conscious kink and erotic ritual. People are generally stunned that as a man I can be a successful sex worker. Women I date assume I'm some kind of rampant sex machine but, actually, I'm a pretty sensitive soul. Someone I dated recently thought I was lying until I showed her my website.

I'm in a long-term relationship, but I practice ethical non-monogamy, a.k.a. polyamory. My partner used to get upset if I had last-minute bookings and changed our plans, but I've stopped doing that to avoid friction, so now I only take advanced bookings.

I don't lie to the people I date, but I lie to other people all the time—shop keepers, taxi drivers, random people in bars or cafés, who ask me what I do. It's to avoid long conversations that I've had a million times; it's not out of any shame. There isn't much stigma associated with being a male sex worker, but there is loads in being a female one. People make a lot of assumptions about what it's like to date sex workers—they expect disease and drugs and lack of self-worth. In my experience, nothing could be further from the truth.

Seani Love, London

"He drunkenly proposed one night at the parlor"

I've only had two relationships since I was twenty-one. The first happened when I was taking a break from escorting, but when I told him that's what I used to do, he was upset. He would bring it up when we argued and found it difficult to trust me—to the point where he'd check my phone and emails. We broke up because he wanted a family, and I wasn't ready for it.

When I went back to escorting, I had no wish to enter another relationship. Then one day I saw I a new client and liked him; I thought he was funny and sweet. He was my age and would turn up at the parlor slightly drunk on nights I was working. He drunkenly proposed one night in front of all the Romanian girls I worked with and my stoned manager. At that point, I was training to be a domme, so when I set up on my own he came and saw me at my dungeon. Suddenly, he disappeared for a year, and it was only then that I realized how much I liked him. Finally, he called me again. We had a session, went for dinner, and now we've been together for a year.

I can be tricky trust-wise. I wonder if he will see another sex worker, and obviously he can get jealous at times too. But I think we work well together because we've both seen each other at our most vulnerable, so there is a mutual respect. However, when people ask how we met, we just give them a boring story.

Yvonne*, London

"I've lied for the first few months of every relationship"

I'm a full service sex worker specializing in kink milkmaid service and feeding, but I never tell that to anyone straight away. I've lied for the first few months of every relationship. I hate telling new people; there is too much judgement, and I don't feel that people who I've only been dating a month deserve to know such intimate details about me.

I told my current boyfriend in a series of steps. First, I said I used to do it—then finally I told him I was still doing it and wouldn't stop for anyone. He was really gutted about me lying, and so I moved out of the house for a couple of days. Later, after we'd both cried and had time to think about everything, he realized it wasn't such a big deal. It's only a job—it doesn't change who I am.

Jamie Drake, Edinburgh

"He said I was doing it for the attention"

Almost every man I've ever dated has had a bad reaction to my working in the escort business. It's often a shock followed by a sudden re-evaluation of everything they think about me. I've had dates who immediately jump to ask, "What's the most heinous thing you've ever had to do?"—as though I'm forced to do horrible things. Others act perfectly fine and then never call back. One guy I used to date was constantly worried about contracting HIV and STDs from me, which made me aware of how little people know about the industry. Another guy told me he thought I was doing it for the attention, and it was just a phase.

When my last relationship became more serious, I decided to take a job as a waiter and hold off on escorting for a while. I found that I couldn't be emotionally involved with him if he wasn't on board with my work. It's a compromise, and in a more liberal, educated world, I imagine I'd find a lot more men who accepted me for it.

Ben*, London

"My ex ignored me for two days"

I don't have relationships with men because I find it too difficult to lie, and I couldn't tell any man the truth. I once told my ex that I'd done sex work in the past, and he ignored me for two days while he decided whether or not he wanted to continue our relationship. At the time, I was devastated and worried about our relationship ending. He asked me questions about what I'd done and how many clients I'd seen and if I'd ever done it while we were together. I felt ashamed and upset.

Since then, I've had a few dates and flings but just found it too difficult to lie. I hate living a double life, but I don't even tell my friends because I think they will judge me.

Stacey*, Edinburgh and Belfast

*Names have been changed.

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