This undated photo provided by the San Jose Police Department in California shows suspect Hasib Bin Golamrabbi, who was arrested with his brother in connection with the shooting deaths of their parents. (San Jose Police Department via AP)

On the morning of April 23, Golam Rabbi was shot more than a dozen times in his garage. When his wife, Shamima, ran toward him, she was taken out with a single shot to the head. A few days later, when relatives came looking for the married couple, they found disturbing notes scrawled on the walls that hinted a serial killer might be on the loose. "Sorry, my first kill was clumsy," read one. "Take care of your brother, or he's next," another portended.

The victims' two sons, who lived at home, were not around when relatives arrived. Nor were they present later, by the time police got to the scene, and they weren't reachable by cellphone. Instead, according to charging documents filed Friday, the two were hanging at an anime convention about an hour away, in Oakland. The younger brother, a 17-year-old high school senior, even attended class that Monday as if nothing had happened. But by last Wednesday, April 27, he and and his 22-year-old brother, Hasib Bin Golamrabbi, had been arrested for the double homicide.

Meanwhile, a possible motive emerged last week: Anonymous sources told a Bay Area NBC affiliate that the older brother and his parents, who immigrated from Bangladesh, clashed over his sexual orientation. Homosexuality is illegal in that country, and in April, religious extremists hacked to death two prominent gay rights activists living there. Some of the black-ink notes found on the walls of the crime scene seems to fit the anonymous source's potential explanation. "I can't be like you telling a lie," read another graffito. "I can't love someone without telling them." According to the charging documents, the handwriting could be grouped into two categories, one of which matched samples found in the younger suspect's bedroom.

Golam Rabbi, 59, was an engineer. His wife, 57-year-old Shamima, was an accountant. Both were active and well-liked at their local mosque, although the sons were described as much more reserved.

On his Facebook page, the younger brother describes himself as a "piece of shit." And despite the fact that Hasib's profile seems to have disappeared, the San Mercury News captured his final post: "Fuck yeah to the kids who feel like they're dying inside but still gather up the strength to roll out of bed, get dressed and leave the house," he apparently wrote. "You are strong and beautiful and worth so much more than you know."

According to the charging documents, the brothers stayed in an Oakland hotel after attending Kraken Con, where they ignored pleas from concerned relatives to return home. The next day, on the drive back, Hasib dropped his younger brother off about two miles from their home, where he was soon picked up by the cops. The elder brother reportedly hid in his friend's closet for another 24 hours, confessing what he had done. As soon as Hasib left, the friend directed police to him.

After he was arrested, Hasib admitted that he killed his father, cops say. However, he said it was at the insistence of a random intruder, and that he did not kill his mother. That same day, the 17-year-old told investigators his elder sibling killed both parents, and then instructed him to contain the situation by closing the curtains and ensuring blood wasn't leaking out from under the garage door.

At their arraignment Friday, both suspects pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder and a special charge of double-murder. The minor waited in the wings as his older sibling stood before a judge and reporters, wearing a yellow jumpsuit indicating he had been placed in the psych ward of Santa Clara County Jail.

Both brothers are being held without bond, although in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Hasib insisted that his younger brother was innocent. "I want everyone to know what happened," he told a reporter, "but I can't say anything without a lawyer."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Golamrabbi Charging Docs

Check out Alabaster Pizzo's website, Tumblr, and Twitter.

Poet Rupi Kaur (still via Daily VICE)

But with a loyal following of over 400,000 Instagram fans, a wildly successful book, and virtually no shrewd marketing strategy, 23 year-old Toronto-based poet Rupi Kaur has challenged our standard definition of what it means to become an instant media and literary darling.

In October of 2015, Kaur released the second edition of Milk and Honey, her inaugural collection of poetry that was first released in 2014. In its four sections, the book is a fresh departure from the sanitized feminism of Instagram affirmations, tampon commercials, and "because it's 2015" sloganeering. Her work addresses heavy topics like love, sex, trauma, loss, and healing and is imbibed in a written style that is disarmingly simple. With over 200,000 copies sold in North America alone, the enormous success of Milk and Honey is an obvious testament to the growing number of young women—and also men—who are embracing Rupi's message of resilience and self-love.

The young poetess's impact has also been revolutionary in ways that aren't immediately obvious. In early 2015, she successfully challenged Instagram's community guidelines after a photo she posted was initially removed from the platform because it featured a young woman's menstrual stain.

A brief scan of Rupi's Instagram page shows the accessibility of most of her poetry.

Since 2013, she has shared her work freely across social media allowing anyone with an Internet connection to consume her words. As a result, she's undoubtedly been a leader in the growing democratization of poetry alongside other poets like Atticus and Narriyah Waheed. Online reviews of Milk and Honey confirm that a large percentage of Kaur's readership are first-time poetry enthusiasts.

And while the unique format of Rupi's work allows her to engage with fans closely and in unprecedented ways, it also fuels the illusion that even as a person, she should be constantly accessible to her audience too. The impact of such an expectation became apparent last December when the poetess announced she would be taking an indefinite creative hiatus. In an Instagram post, she explained to her fans, "The writing doesn't need me right now. I need me."

Daily VICE's Aakanksha Tangri sat down with Rupi to discuss her poetry, the creative process, and what happens when a self-admitted introvert enters the unfamiliar landscape of (literary) notoriety.

Follow Neha Chandrachud on Twitter.

Mr. Li is one of many Chinese men who has been made impotent by surgery conducted at poorly regulated private hospitals.

This article originally appears in the May issue of VICE magazine.

On the afternoon of September 30, 2015, 23-year-old Little Huang stood on the roof of the 11-story Shenzhen Health and Family Planning Commission building, ready to jump to his death. In the lot below, Chinese officials' cars looked about the size of matchboxes, and the clamor of a nearby construction site filtered up as a dull hum. As Little Huang peered through the light haze toward the hills of Hong Kong, he dialed a 25-year-old man named Junjun. "We're on the roof," he said. "Bring alcohol and water bottles."

Junjun exited the metro at Cui Zhu station, stopped for rice alcohol and water bottles, then rode the elevator of the white-tiled building to the tenth floor. There a staircase wound up to the crumbling concrete roof, where he found that Little Huang had now scaled even higher, to the top of a mechanical shed that seemed to sway in the breeze over the building's edge. Two other young men who Junjun recognized, Mr. Wang and Mr. Peng, stood with Little Huang. Junjun was nervous, but Little Huang cajoled him to climb up, too. The men wore matching white ball caps. Characters on the front explained the reason the men might jump: "Black-Hearted Men's Hospitals Destroyed Our Well-Being."

All four men, like more than a thousand across China who communicate with one another in online patient chat groups, say they were duped into surgeries that doctors worldwide have determined pose great risk and have little scientific merit: a dorsal neurectomy that severs penile nerves, ostensibly to cure premature ejaculation issues, though Chinese physicians sell the surgery with whatever explanation will likely get the person on the operating table. As a result of the surgeries, Junjun, Little Huang, Mr. Wang, and Mr. Peng's penises have gone completely numb, they can't get full erections, and some experience searing pain, probably from neuromas, which result from nerve trauma. No known corrective surgery or therapy exists. (In this story, these victims are referred to by nicknames or surnames.) All four men, who are in their 20s, may never have offspring. The men, in turn, refer to themselves as "China's 21st century eunuchs."

Physicians at private clinics have bargained with patients during surgery, female patients have been tricked into aborting healthy fetuses, and there have been many documented deaths as a result of physician negligence.

Sham penile surgeries are just one part of a much larger system of poorly regulated and corrupt private healthcare in China. In other instances of medical malfeasance, physicians at private clinics have bargained with patients during surgery, female patients have been tricked into aborting healthy fetuses, and there have been many documented deaths as a result of physician negligence. Pseudoscientific medical devices are in wide use, as is the practice of proffering false diagnoses, as more than 60 private hospitals have done to Chinese undercover journalists in the past six years. Meanwhile, the number of private hospitals in China is blossoming—between 2005 and 2015, 9,326 new facilities opened their doors. Today they make up more than half of all hospitals in China. That proportion will likely grow as ongoing Chinese healthcare reforms aim to increase private investment in the sector and government-run insurance schemes expand to cover private healthcare facilities. American companies including Morgan Stanley Private Equity Asia, a division of Morgan Stanley, are pouring in millions of dollars as well.

On April 12, Wei Zexi, a 21-year-old college student with a rare form of cancer, passed away after paying 200,000 yuan for cancer treatments supposedly developed by Stanford University. A Chinese journalist showed the treatments held questionable medical value and that Stanford did not partner with the contracted-out public hospital, causing news about the scam to go viral in China. On May 2, China's internet regulator announced it would investigate Baidu, China's equivalent of Google, which is the dominant source of traffic for private hospitals.

Back on the roof, by 3 PM, security guards, health officials, firemen, and police officers had clambered up to try to dissuade Little Huang, Junjun, and the two others from jumping. The men drank their rice alcohol and dialed local Chinese newspapers and TV stations. If they had to jump, well, they didn't want to be sober. A small crowd gathered on the sidewalk, but the media never came.

At nightfall, the men remained on the mechanical shed, and a gaggle of health officials had appeared on the roof. When one of them approached the foot of the structure, gazing up at the patients, Little Huang and Mr. Wang screamed out their demands: find experts to treat them; arrest the physicians and nurses who conned them; ban the surgery that had made them all "eunuchs"; and pay for them to collectively undergo medical testing, the first step in legally proving the harm the surgery had caused. Until now, more traditional petitions and street protests had failed to gain the men attention, so they vowed to stay on the roof until city health officials took action.

"You caused this!" Little Huang screamed, tears streaming down his cheeks. "Victims have come to you before, and you do nothing! If there was oversight of these hospitals, would this happen?"

Finally, hours after the suicide pact/protest began, health officials relented and said they would meet the patients' demands, but only if they promised to come down to a negotiating room. The men were wary. Mr. Wang felt they needed to leave a bargaining chip on the roof. They chose Junjun. If the negotiations failed, the men agreed, Junjun would jump—as the meekest of the four men he was the most easily badgered into staying put.

"I told them if they left me, I wouldn't stay," Junjun said. "I wouldn't be able to last on my own."

Ten minutes after Little Huang, Mr. Wang, and Mr. Peng climbed down, health official Huang Penghui, who oversaw the hospital where Junjun had received the surgery, stepped forward. He held up his phone and told Junjun he'd sealed off operating room 7 in Shenzhen City Hospital, the clinic where the surgery was done four months earlier. Eventually, Junjun came down and looked at the phone himself. A photo showed a white strip of paper pasted over the door that read: "Sealed Off."

"Look," the official said. "What more can we do?"

After Junjun was found to have an enlarged prostate, he went online to look for medical care and wound up receiving unnecessary surgery that left him impotent.

By day, Junjun tests applications at an IT company. "If this didn't happen to me," he says, his voice high and wispy, "I'd be white collar in a couple of years, even getting married." He is a small, pudgy man with full cheeks and big, black sorrowful eyes. "Now basically all I have left is the ability to pee."

The story of Junjun's treatment is typical. On May 9, 2015, he accompanied his colleagues to get a physical done at a health checkup center, an annual routine for many workplaces in China. Test results indicated his prostate was slightly enlarged with possible calcification. The physician recommended he visit a hospital.

Junjun wasn't worried—he'd always been in good health. He didn't know where to go for further testing. In reality, he had two distinct options: an overcrowded public hospital, where a physician might see a hundred patients each day, or a private healthcare facility. Businessmen from Putian, a city in Fujian Province, own most of China's private hospitals and clinics. Their interests are united by the Putian Health Industry Association (PHIA), which represents some 8,600 Putian-owned private hospitals, or about 70 percent of China's private hospitals. Many advertise widely on Baidu, and last year, using its collective influence, the PHIA boycotted the search engine, demanding an end to the annual aggressive price increases for keyword advertisements.

Junjun turned to Baidu for help. On his phone's browser, he searched "prostate exam" and clicked on the first link. He didn't know it was an ad; Baidu search results blur the line between paid and unpaid links. Once on the website for Shenzhen City Hospital, a chat popped up:

":) Hello, I'm Shenzhen City Hospital's online physician, what can I help you with?"

Junjun described his physical results, and the online physician quickly convinced him to set up an appointment for a prostate checkup. On job websites where private hospitals recruit these "online physicians," the qualifications make clear that the position is for salesmen—many are paid on a commission basis. Baidu searches provide the traffic. In turn, PHIA-member hospitals in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou (China's three largest cities by GDP) contribute 10 to 15 percent of Baidu's advertising revenues, analysts at Nomura, a Japanese investment bank, estimated last year.

On the morning of May 16, 2015, Junjun went in for the checkup. The hospital was right in the heart of Shenzhen, where the skyscrapers partition the sky into distinct rectangles and squares. Dongmen market was nearby, too, and Junjun was looking forward to buying new clothes after the checkup.

A friendly nurse led him into an examination room, where a licensed surgeon, Dr. Tang Congxiang, waited with his assistant. When Junjun mentioned the possible prostate calcification, Dr. Tang said he would need another full physical done. The male assistant led him to the cashier, where Junjun paid $100.

The tests began—blood, urine, penile sensitivity, STDs, prostate exam, and semen analysis, for which Junjun was brought to a room upstairs and set up with porn videos. Then the assistant led him back to the lobby and told him to wait for the results.

Since Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms started the transformation of China's economy in 1978, private clinics and hospitals have slowly opened and expanded into medical fields like STD treatment, gynecology, andrology (men's health), and reproductive medicine, where patient demand for privacy is high, a detail not generally offered in public hospitals. Private clinics and hospitals advertise widely—on the radio, public busses and billboards, even packing discount abortion cards into pregnancy tests, to rope in patients. They provide such a large portion of advertising revenue for some local newspapers that when Qingdao's Metropolis Convenience Daily published patient complaints of a PHIA-member owned men's hospital in 2010, and the hospital president retaliated by leading a group of knife-wielding thugs to ransack the newspaper office and slash five reporters, it was the newspaper that ended up shutting down after all hospital advertising was pulled from its pages. The hospital remains open.

"It was serious. He scared me. He told me I needed to be circumcised. When I said I didn't want to, Dr. Tang Congxiang just repeated it again and again."
–Junjun

When the test results came in, the physician's assistant led Junjun back to the examination room, and Dr. Tang questioned him about his sexual history. Junjun disclosed he was single and a virgin. Then Dr. Tang hit Junjun with the diagnoses: urinary tract infection (UTI), overly long foreskin, low sperm count with low motility, and prostate calcification. He was in bad shape—the root problem was the foreskin. Junjun's long foreskin had caused the infection, he remembers Dr. Tang explaining, which in turn caused the prostate calcification and the ensuing prostate crystals. The foreskin had to go.

"He told me I needed treatment immediately," Junjun says, even though he had no symptoms. "It was serious. He scared me. He told me I needed to be circumcised. When I said I didn't want to, Dr. Tang Congxiang just repeated it again and again. He said other hospitals couldn't cure these diseases, but their hospital had imported medical technology to cure these problems."

Dr. Faysal Yafi, a professor of urology at Tulane University School of Medicine, told me a man who has a UTI is not generally circumcised unless recurrent infections become a problem and that alone prostate calcification and prostate crystals do not require treatment.

Oversight of private hospitals is minimal. Some so-called physicians work without licenses. Even those physicians with licenses generally rise through a separate vocational education system that requires less academic study, which oftentimes precludes them from positions in public hospitals. In online chat groups for private hospital hiring, physicians advertise their abilities by touting their "average patient spend," meaning how much money they can get out of each patient. Most of the posts list figures in the range of $450 to $600 per patient, akin to China's average monthly wage.

"I was a little bit worried and scared," Junjun says. "I couldn't believe all these things. But I thought, well, a doctor wouldn't trick me." Eventually, Junjun agreed to the surgery, and the doctor's assistant followed him to the cashier and waited as Junjun paid $220 for the circumcision and anesthesia.

None of the dozens of patients I interviewed could articulate why they agreed to surgery or believed their diagnoses. But Zhan Guotuan, one of China's pioneering healthcare entrepreneurs and an honorary chairman of the PHIA, offered clues in a 2014 interview with China's Entrepreneur magazine. "There are tricks for scamming money," he said. "One is the so-called hospital guide. After you enter, someone follows you like a shadow, like a retail salesperson, constantly brainwashing and scaring you... denying you the opportunity for independent thought or time to consult friends and family."

"I wasn't paying attention to the details," Junjun says. "The assistant was always following me, leading me. I didn't have any time to think." He was soon on the operating table. Dr. Tang injected local anesthesia and began the surgery. During the course of the operation, Junjun recalls Dr. Tang telling him he had too many nerves. "It was my first time ever having surgery," Junjun says. "I was scared." So while he was anesthetized and on the operating table, according to Junjun, the doctor pushed him to agree to a dorsal neurectomy as well, to get rid of the extra nerves, for an additional $430. Not knowing what the surgery was, but told it needed to be done, Junjun agreed. (Shenzhen TV ran a short segment on Junjun that suggested the hospital had forged his signature on the dorsal neurectomy patient consent form. Dr. Tang declined a request for comment.)

After the surgery, Dr. Tang advised Junjun he needed to use an "imported medical device" to break up the prostate crystals, which would be urinated out. It was expensive, $12 a minute, but he'd be healed in an hour's time, the doctor promised. Again, the doctor's assistant followed him to the cashier, where Junjun paid for the neurectomy and an hour of therapy with the device. He'd now spent $1,500, more than two month's salary. The $150 in cash he'd brought along was gone, and now his bank account was empty too.

"I'd already done the surgery," he says. "I thought, It doesn't matter about the money, and I can spend a little bit more if it will cure me, so I said OK."

The assistant led him upstairs to a room that held the imported medical device. It resembled an MRI machine, and a nurse operated it from a separate computer control station. When Junjun lay down on the machine's patient table, a cylindrical fixture extended down toward his groin like a zooming microscope. Soon a red light beamed at his prostate region.

"I didn't have any feeling at all when I was under the red light," Junjun says. "I just saw the light coming out of the machine. I was in a daze. I don't know what I was thinking."

When an hour under the red light was nearly up, Dr. Tang returned. "The doctor said one hour wouldn't be enough. He said I needed to do another hour. When I told him I didn't have enough money, he said, 'If you don't have enough money, just borrow some. You've just done the surgery, so the treatment is most effective now. If you wait to do more red light, the results will not be the same.'" Junjun dialed a classmate, who came with a bankcard, and Shenzhen City Hospital charged another $740. He was led back to the machine for another hour of red-light therapy.

Though he was wary, Junjun returned the next day to continue treatment. When Dr. Tang suggested even more red-light treatment, at a cost of $930, he finally grasped he'd been conned.

"Doctors at public hospitals all know these private hospitals harm people," Junjun sighs. "But no one stands up and says anything."

In total, he spent $2,400, equivalent to about four month's salary. He still owes his classmate money. After refusing more treatment, Junjun returned home to his parents' small apartment and searched Baidu for information on the surgery that Dr. Tang had added. He read about the potential side effects. He read patient accounts of being duped. He read of their erectile dysfunction. "I fell down, down, into a type of hell," he says.

The next day, Junjun called Dr. Tang and asked how he could do this to him. "He said it was nothing. He said I'd be fine." Nurses at Shenzhen City Hospital told Junjun the same thing. "The nurse kept telling me how good this surgery is. She has a son, so I told her I'd pay for her son to get this surgery done. Her husband, too. They could all do it for free, on me."

When Junjun went to a public hospital to understand his options, the doctor told him he'd been tricked. "Doctors at public hospitals all know these private hospitals harm people," Junjun sighs. "But no one stands up and says anything."

In coming weeks, his parents got involved, and after eight visits, the hospital agreed to return his treatment costs. "Return my treatment costs?" Junjun posted on an online Baidu forum. "They've turned me into a eunuch. I want them to cure me." Reached by phone, Shenzhen City Hospital's legal representative, Hu Jianfan, declined to comment for this story.

Shenzhen Luohu District Health Commission officials confirmed that Junjun's neurectomy was tacked on mid-surgery but said Junjun had consented to the surgery. They claimed not to be responsible for fake medical devices and referred questions to the China Food and Drug Administration, who told me that their agency ensured the quality of medical devices and stated no private hospital is allowed to use unapproved medical devices.

Over the course of 15 months reporting this story, 25 public hospital physicians practicing in 15 Chinese cities said that patients scammed by private clinics and hospitals often end up in their waiting rooms. "Some public hospitals don't even have an andrology department," laments Dr. Jiang Hui, a professor at Peking University and chairman of the Chinese Society of Andrology, "so if you have these problems, and you see the advertisements, well, you get taken in and duped."

Dr. Jiang believes in privatized healthcare, with regulation. "Oversight is difficult," he says. "In China, there is no oversight."

Shenzhen Qiaoyuan Clinic, where Little Huang received treatment

According to public records and interviews, Lin Jinzong owns Shenzhen City Hospital through his company Beijing Yingcai Hospital Management. He claims to own more than 200 clinics and hospitals across China and like most members of the PHIA, hails from the small town of Dong Zhuang, lying on the outskirts of Putian. Lin holds the position of supervisory vice chairman in the well-delineated PHIA hierarchy—only 15 men rank higher on the totem pole.

(Lin did not respond to repeated calls and emails to his three hospital holding companies seeking comment.)

Public records link ownership of all the clinics visited by the four Shenzhen "eunuchs" to members of the PHIA. Little Huang visited Shenzhen Qiaoyuan Clinic, owned by Xiao Hua through the company Bohua Industrial Group. Xiao also hails from Dong Zhuang, holds the rank of vice chairman in the PHIA, and operates at least ten other clinics and hospitals in China. A physician told Mr. Wang the dorsal neurectomy would cure his fertility problems at the Shenzhen Wanzhong Clinic, owned by Yang Xiandong, who operates four other clinics in Guangdong Province. Yang serves as a member of the Guangdong Provincial branch of the PHIA, as does Su Kaiming, who owns the Zhongya Clinic that Mr. Peng visited.

At the top of the PHIA pyramid is the chairman, Lin Zhizhong, the principal shareholder of the Shenzhen Boai Group, thought to be China's largest private hospital holding company. His younger brother, Lin Zhicheng, owns a stake in Guangzhou Shengya Urology Hospital,2 which has given fake diagnoses to two undercover Chinese reporters in the last three years. Two miles away sits Lin Zhicheng's Modern Hospital Guangzhou, which in 2010 rebranded as Modern Cancer Hospital Guangzhou (MCHG) to draw late-stage cancer patients from Southeast Asian countries for "new and advanced, minimally invasive" cancer treatments. (One advertisement runs: "We create MIRACLES! We bring HOPE!") MCHG's chief oncologist, Peng Xiaochi, holds only a master's degree in neurology. The president of a prominent public hospital cancer center familiar with MCHG, who asked not to be named, noted that most of the hospital's advertising claims are false. "The hospital only cares about money," he said. "They will never cure late-stage cancer patients."

The PHIA would likely not exist if it were not for Chen Deliang, born in Dong Zhuang Town in 1950. Today, at 65, he is small and frail, with a stooped back and the remains of his gray hair concentrated in two large sideburns, which reach down to his jowls. A gold Rolex and diamond ring adorn his skeletal left hand. He's revered as the founding father of China's private hospitals and holds the position of honorary chairman of the PHIA. "There were no doctors during the Cultural Revolution," Chen told me on a visit to the $16 million Taoist temple complex he's building in Dong Zhuang, explaining how he got his start as a traveling medicine man crisscrossing China with a mercury-based (read: toxic) home remedy for scabies that he pedaled on street corners. By the early 1990s, he'd branched out into private STD clinics. "We started making the big money," Chen said, citing his trademark "gonorrhea cure" as his best seller. "In one year, we could make a million or more." Venereal disease was a gold mine, and Chen's spiraling wealth demonstrated to his relatives, friends and their friends the possibilities of private healthcare. (In 1998, China's health department sent out a bulletin calling Chen's acolytes a "gang of swindlers blanketing the country... wantonly scamming money and entrapping patients.") Chen's family now owns and operates more than 100 private clinics and hospitals. "As long as there is land," Chen said, "our Putian people are there running hospitals. I created a new path."

Chen's family manages the hospital assets, which include Baijia, a company comprised of 17 maternity and gynecology hospitals. In January 2015, Morgan Stanley Private Equity Asia invested $38 million into Baijia. (Public records show Chen is Baijia's second largest shareholder; his stake is about equal to that of his nephew's, Su Jinmo, who is Baijia's president and chairman.) According to Chen, Baijia is valued at about $308 million. Since Morgan Stanley's financing, the chain has added on four new hospitals.

Baijia's practices include linking doctors' bonus pay to surgery and pharmaceutical quotas—i.e., how much they sell—according to Chen and a gynecologist once recruited to work at a Baijia-owned facility. Baijia's online "physicians" (actually trained salesmen) detail varying price-point abortion packages—if you're planning to have a child in the future, they recommend the most expensive option. (Zhou Dan, a Shenzhen gynecologist who briefly worked at a private clinic with the same pricing scheme, claims they're all the same surgery.) Baijia hospitals are also unequipped to handle patients who need emergency treatment, and when there are life-threatening complications, according to a manager of a Baijia facility, they transfer patients to local public hospitals.

In 2014, a newborn at a Baijia-owned hospital ingested amniotic fluid during delivery and needed emergency treatment, so the hospital sent the baby to a local public hospital, local news agency Rednet reported. After the newborn died, the hospital spokesperson cited the hospital transfer and declared it impossible to say which hospital was responsible. The hospital then refused to hand over the family's medical records.

In April 2015, Chinese courts ruled two more Baijia-owned hospitals negligent in the death of one newborn and responsible for inflicting another with cerebral palsy (despite both hospitals transferring the infants to public hospitals at the last minute). In the latter case, the court ruled that Baijia's Wenzhou Oriental Maternity Hospital had likely falsified medical records and acted to conceal its responsibility. There is additional evidence of a number of similar cases that were settled before trial or never made it to court.

Even when treatment doesn't end in catastrophe, patients writing on review websites relay being exploited by doctors at Baijia facilities. "Garbage hospital," posted a patient of the Baijia-owned Maria Hospital in Changsha, Hunan. "A pelvic inflammation cost me more than $1,550 and wasn't even cured. They simply treat people as ATMs."

(Nick Footitt, a Morgan Stanley spokesperson, declined to comment. Baijia also declined to comment for this story.)

Morgan Stanley's private equity arm is helping Baijia expand, Chen Deliang told me, while the company prepares for a public offering. Another American-invested private equity firm, CDH Investments, has already seen a windfall from its investment in a PHIA-member owned hospital chain, which went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in July 2015. "I'm pretty satisfied with investments in Putian hospitals," Wang Hui, a former CDH Investments executive, told China Business News. "In most cases, every hospital starts making money after two to three years of operations."

Front cover of the Wolman Prostate Gland treatment system brochure. the English spelling of "Wolman" changes page by page.

Profits from private hospitals have transformed Dong Zhuang from an impoverished farming town into the Beverly Hills of China. The town is home to 35,000 private hospital owners and their employees, about one third of the total population, according to Dong Zhuang's propaganda official On plots of land where sweet potatoes once grew, Rolls Royces, Bentleys, and BMWs now park in front of great mansions of glass, onion domes, arches, and parapets. One mansion visible from Chen's temple window stands 16 stories tall and has more than 100,000 square feet of living space, making it one of the largest homes in the world.

When I visited in February 2015, medical device manufacturers had gathered in Dong Zhuang's new, three-story exhibition center for an annual medical expo. Lin Jianxing, the organizer, greeted me outside. "Two hundred fifty companies from twenty-eight provinces have come to sell medical devices," he said. The inaugural exhibition, 13 years earlier, had been held on the street, like a flea market, he explained, but now the exhibition was housed in palatial facilities. "Go on, look at all the equipment in there," Lin urged me. "It's really big and advanced."

A medical fantasyland waited. At the booth of Dekang Medical, I tried on a Sharper Image–type head massager that, the saleslady said, treated schizophrenic voices, depression, OCD, anxiety, mania, and PTSD. A salesman at Dongnan Medical soon explained why many of the devices were built to resemble MRI machines. "Private hospitals need to let customers know these are valuable pieces of equipment," he said. "The big devices entice customers in for treatment."

At the table for Zonghen Medical, I marveled at the ZD-2001A Pafeite Shortwave Space Pulse Machine, built with a sleek egg capsule design for patients to squeeze into, which was connected to a control station aesthetically suited to launch a 1960s-era NASA rocket. The device, a cheery attendant said, used shortwave diathermy to produce heat and treat a variety of gynecological and urological diseases. Surprisingly, China's Food and Drug Administration has approved the device for medical use, perhaps on the basis of one Chinese study, which appears to have been commissioned by the manufacturer, and claims the machine cured pelvic inflammatory disease (PID) in 98 percent of patients without the use of antibiotics. A professor of reproductive epidemiology in the US, however, pointed out that antibiotics and not heat are used for the treatment of PID, as bacteria cause the disease. Studies on using diathermy to treat the pain associated with chronic PID are limited too; one of the few was carried out in the US in 1955, when physicians didn't fully understand the bacteria associated with PID. This has not stopped Baijia-owned hospitals from stocking the ZD-2001 device and using it to treat PID.

Next, at Shenzhen Yuanda Medical Instrument's booth, I found what was likely the machine that "treated" Junjun. Advertised as in use on the Shenzhen City Hospital website, I now stared at the "Wolman Prostate Gland Treatment System." The machine resembled a large, open-style MRI machine, and its sleek white exterior held long English words—"Electrochemical Apparatus," "Infrared Light." On the patient table, a framed certificate stated the machine was made by the USA Wolman Prostate Institute, which later research revealed is a dummy company that was registered in Utah in 2011. You Dongqing owns the business, and more than 100 other dummy corporations share the same address in suburban Salt Lake City.

"The red light cures prostatitis," the salesman said, beaming proudly and handing me a brochure for the Wolman Prostate Gland Treatment System. The brochure featured a photo of the USA Wolman Prostate Institute's research center, which, thanks to a clearly labeled sign on the building, I quickly discovered was actually a photo of Invesco Field, where the Denver Broncos play football. "Number one seller for four years running," the brochure read, "in use at 800 private hospitals across the nation."

The traditional moral compass for physicians—the Hippocratic Oath—has fallen victim to unbridled capitalism and corruption in China, especially in private hospitals.

It was hard to tell, I thought, who was scamming whom. Both the hospital owners buying the machines and the salesmen knew patients like Junjun and Little Huang would trust the advanced, "imported" machines if physicians recommended them. Information asymmetry between doctor and patient is extreme in healthcare. The traditional moral compass for physicians—the Hippocratic Oath—has fallen victim to unbridled capitalism and corruption in China, especially in private hospitals, which saw 11 percent of all visits, totaling 325.6 million, in 2014. Once primarily a trap targeting the young or naïve or uninsured, private hospital chains like Baijia are now moving upmarket and beginning to accept government-run insurance, drawing in new swaths of society as patients. But when false marketing campaigns and supposedly low prices lure people of the middle class, will they too trust the doctor in the white coat and the big machines with English lettering? "The clinic is just a hole waiting for someone to fall into," Junjun says. "And the health department stamps it with a chop—Legal!"

Mr. Fang, who went to a People's Armed Police hospital contracted out to PHIA member Wang Wenlong

On the night of November 3, 2015, about a month after Junjun came down off the rooftop in Shenzhen, China's 21st century eunuchs squeezed into a small guest room on the outskirts of Beijing. Twenty other men joined them, ages 22 to 44, all born in rural areas all over China. For months, the men had communicated through an online chat group, organizing the plans for a protest in Beijing that, they hoped, would finally draw the attention of the country's highest officials to regulate the private hospitals and find treatment for their surgically imposed erectile dysfunction.

Now, 27-year-old Mr. Li, the moderator of the online chat group who had a dorsal neurectomy five years prior, stood with his legs pushed against the bed. He spoke loudly, so even the men packed into the bathroom could hear. Junjun was pressed into one wall, shorter than most, and he craned to see Mr. Li.

"We've got our petition," Mr. Li said, raising a 31-page document that Junjun had handwritten the previous day. The front page held each man's name, hospital, and thumbprint, and inside pages included detailed narratives about each man's injuries and attempts to seek redress. They planned to deliver it to the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) office, the Communist Party of China's top organ for rooting out corruption and malfeasance, at 8 AM the next morning.

If the men succeeded, they hoped the Communist Party officials would be moved to action by the stories detailed in the petition: That of 24-year-old Mr. Xi, who now sat cross-legged on the rock-hard bed, with a scar on his wrist from where he slashed it while pleading for help in his local health commission. There was the story of nearby Mr. Yao, whose wife had divorced him after a dorsal neurectomy left him impotent—he'd subsequently climbed to the roof of his local health commission to douse himself in oil and threaten to light a match. And then there was Mr. Gao, a lithe 25-year-old who was now, despite the crowded quarters, sprawled in the center of the bed, his face flushed red from alcohol. He'd cut off his own pinkie finger while pleading for justice, and now he used his four-and-a-half fingered hand to wave his phone at the group.

On the phone's screen, Junjun and the others saw text messages from Mr. Duan, head of Mr. Gao's local health commission. Mr. Duan had followed Mr. Gao to Beijing to beg him not to participate in the protest, out of fear that the men would successfully attract the attention of high-level Communist officials. "Come home with us tomorrow, and we'll resolve this," Mr. Duan had written. "No matter what you do, in the end, you'll have to return for a resolution." In another message, Mr. Duan had offered $7,730 if Mr. Gao left Beijing.

"We've got to last at least a couple of hours," Mr. Gao said, confidently. His own protest back home in Shanxi, on the roof of the private hospital, had lasted at least as long and earned him his first audience with Mr. Duan.

"Even if the People's Armed Police rope off the area," offered Mr. Wang from Shenzhen. "We're not leaving."

"They'll drag us away," added another man.

"We're not breaking any laws," Mr. Wang shouted. "Breaking the laws? They destroyed our cocks!"

The next morning, after a fitful night's rest in the guesthouse, the men awoke to find thick smog choking Beijing. They had not scouted the entrance to the CCDI building, and they were dismayed to discover that a blast wall, towering 20 feet tall in stretches, rings the complex. At the main gate on Pinganli Boulevard, an officer stood on a podium, with a detachment of five more standing in a roped-off cordon at his feet. Still more officers filled two public busses parked to the left and right of the entrance.

The 24 men crossed the wide boulevard and gathered opposite the gate, where only a couple of officers sat in two police vans.

On the sidewalk, the men broke into two rows. Little Huang dropped his backpack and pulled out a banner reading, "National Dorsal Neurectomy Victims." Another man to his right held up, "Evil Hospitals Scam Money and Murder." Junjun dropped to his knees, as did other patients in the front. As the banners went up, the men chanted, "Evil men's hospitals, return my well-being!"

In the end, all of the protesters would spend five days in detention before being released into the custody of their local government officials, who promptly deported most of the men back to the countryside. Little Huang recently received a small settlement from his clinic. Junjun is in the process of suing Shenzhen City Hospital. The clinic, however, has received no penalties or fines, and the closed surgical room has reopened.

But on that morning in November, they still had hope. Had there been an official walking into work at the very moment the men started their chant, he or she may have turned to see what the commotion was about. He or she may have seen the banners, may even have crossed the street to take a copy of Junjun's petition. Maybe he or she would've read it, too, understood the men's suffering, and as all 24 dreamed, launched a project to find a cure.

Instead, in less than a minute, a large police van flashed out from a side street and pulled to a stop in front of the protesters, screening them from view. First to go were the banners—offi- cers tore and stamped them to the ground. Scuffles broke out. More police vans arrived; the first group of men was carted off, then the next. In ten minute's time, there was no sign of the protest or the banners or the eunuchs.

Au revoir, Péladeau. Photo via Facebook

Well, that was quick.

Two women compare holsters at an open carry gun rally in Austin, Texas. Photo by Erich Schlegel/Getty Images

This post originally appeared on The Trace.

Gun-rights advocates are seeking to win new support for their agenda by promoting, with increasingly strident rhetoric, the notion that women are safest when they are armed.

"All of America's women, you aren't free if you aren't free to defend yourself," National Rifle Association Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre declared in a fiery speech in March. Marion Hammer, a former NRA president who wields tremendous political influence in Florida, accused opponents of a guns-on-campus bill of "engaging in a war on women" last August. Gun marketers, too, have pushed women to arm themselves. There are now whole stores set up to sell pink-hued firearms and accessories.

Recently, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz has brought the notion into the 2016 campaign. "If you're a single mom living in a tough neighborhood, the Second Amendment protects your right, that if someone comes through the window trying to harm your kids," he said in an April appearance on Good Morning America. "You have a right to be armed to protect your family."

By at least one measure, the message seems to be persuasive: 56 percent of female gun owners believe that having a gun makes the home a safer place, according to a recent survey conducted by Marie Claire; among women in general, 20 percent hold that view. But the available evidence does not support the conclusion that guns offer women increased protection. Myriad studies show that the NRA and its allies grossly misrepresent the actual dangers women face. It is people they know, not strangers, who pose the greatest threat. There is also strong, data-based evidence that shows owning a gun, rather than making women safer, actually puts them at significantly greater risk of violent injury and death.

In some places and in some instances, women have, in fact, used guns to successfully defend themselves. But the case that gun rights advocates make when pitching guns as essential to women's personal and family security goes beyond the anecdotal, leaning heavily on an oft-cited 1995 study by the Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck—a study built on faulty research.

In his findings, Kleck estimated that women use guns to defend themselves 1.2 million times per year, and that 200,000 such defensive gun uses stopped sexual assaults. Those estimates have proved to be wildly inflated. Successful defensive gun use is, in fact, extremely rare among all people: There are fewer than 1,600 verified instances in the US each year, according to the Gun Violence Archive. By comparison, annually, 118,000 people are injured, killed, or commit suicide with a gun.

Women who were victims of attempted or completed crimes used guns to defend themselves just 0.4 percent of the time, according to the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which uses a representative sample of 90,000 households in order to estimate national crime rates. A Harvard study found that, of the more than 300 cases of sexual assault reported in the sample of NCVS data between 2007 and 2011, none were stopped by a firearm. Of the 1,119 sexual assaults reported in the NCVS from 1992 to 2001, a different study revealed that only a single case was stopped by defensive gun use. And even these numbers from the NCVS likely overestimate the true rate at which women protect themselves with firearms.

The evidence is clear: Women simply aren't defending themselves with guns at a significant rate.

It's possible that gun activists could use that fact as reason for getting more firearms into the hands and homes of more women. But here their argument hits its critical flaw: Every credible scientific study of women and guns in the last two decades strongly indicates that a firearm in a woman's home is far more likely to be used against her or her family than to defend against an outside attacker. The bottom-line statistic that most broadly assesses the relationship between women and firearms was determined by research conducted by the Department of Preventative Medicine at the University of Tennessee. That study, from 1997, concluded that the presence of a firearm in a woman's home triples the odds that she will be killed.

Usually, the person using a gun against a woman—contrary to Cruz's assertions—is not a stranger, but someone she knows, frequently an intimate partner. As The Trace previously reported, an average of 554 American women are fatally shot by romantic partners every year. That works out to a domestic violence gun homicide with a female victim once every 16 hours.

According to another, older University of Tennessee study, the rate of women killed with a gun by their husband or an intimate partner is more than double the rate of women killed by strangers using guns, knives, or any other method. (Newer gun violence studies are scarce, due in part to Congress' decision to curtail federal funding for research on the subject in 1996.)

Domestic abuse is five times more likely to turn deadly if firearms are present in a home. A case-control study comparing women killed by an intimate partner to women who had been battered but not killed revealed that more than half of the homicide victims lived with a firearm in the home, while that was true for only 16 percent of women who were abused but survived. Yet another study found that family and intimate assaults involving firearms were 12 times more likely to result in death than those using other weapons or bodily force.

Despite all the evidence, when given the opportunity to endorse gun violence prevention measures that would make women safer, the NRA consistently does the opposite, fighting to defeat legislation, for example, that would require people served with a restraining order—whether temporary or permanent—to surrender their firearms.

Such laws, which have been put in place in a handful of states, including California and Massachusetts, seek to remove guns from abusers immediately after a restraining order is issued—an especially volatile time in these types of cases. A 2009 study published in the journal Injury Prevention found that domestic violence restraining orders that block access to firearms decreased intimate-partner homicide by 19 percent.

The NRA has also sought to keep open the "boyfriend loophole." Under federal law, a person convicted on a misdemeanor domestic violence count of abusing a dating partner is not required to surrender his or her guns, though some state laws have sought to eliminate this exception.

The maintenance of this loophole means an estimated 50 percent of victims have no legal recourse to prevent their abuser from possessing a firearm. Convicted stalkers are also exempt from laws barring abusers from buying and keeping firearms—despite the fact that 76 percent of domestic homicide victims are stalked before they are killed.

But the NRA often has little use for empirical evidence that does not match their pro-gun views. Last year in Louisiana, the organization argued that extending the definition of domestic abuse to women who were not married to their abusers would incentivize false claims of abuse. An NRA spokesperson claimed that the bill was "so overly broad that it could make a felon out of a girlfriend who pulls a cell phone from her boyfriend's hand against his will."

Follow The Trace on Twitter.

All photos courtesy Anna Johansson

When Henrik Seva butchers a reindeer, not a shred of meat is wasted. First, he shoots it and gently slits its throat. Once the blood is fully drained from its body, he thanks the animal for its sacrifice. Flipping the carcass onto a sled, he tugs it back to his cabin. Standing alone in the arctic tundra 45 kilometres from Inuvik, in the Northwest Territories, Seva's cabin looks straight out of a horror movie; chainsaws, axes, knives and other weapons hang on the wall, everything is covered in blood. Outside the door is a pile of reindeer meat, choice cuts, flash frozen under a hide. Not far away is the "gut pile."

All photos by Raphael Iltisberger

The narrow street that winds through the seemingly endless tea plantations in Haputale, Sri Lanka is lined with big signs displaying inspirational sayings. Every few hundred meters, there's a new one: "The fate of animals is indissolubly connected with the fate of men," reads one. "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has," reads another. "Let us be them." It seems like sad irony that these signs should exist in a place like this, where the tea pluckers slave away for hours in the fields to make a barely-livable wage.

Sri Lanka exports over $1.5 billion worth of tea annually, and Haputale, a small town in the hills, is the epicenter of tea production. Situated on a high mountain ridge, the town is home to about 5,000 people, who are mostly Muslims and Hindus (the majority of Sri Lankans are Buddhist).

Promodh Dias and M. Kanagaraj, the principal of a school near Haputale

While tea is one of Sri Lanka's most lucrative exports, the tea pluckers make around $6 per day (that's after a recent wage hike). A working day lasts about nine hours, and many tea pluckers walk between two and four hours each day just to get to the plantations. There is no social security, healthcare, or pension provided by the companies.

Many of the tea pluckers' children leave school by the time they're 13 or 14 to start working in the fields with their families, according to Promodh Dias, a tea plucker's son who dropped out of school himself as a child."Parents sometimes have trouble raising money for school books, uniforms, or even for the school bus fare," he said—and so instead of going to school, the children join their parents in the fields.

Rows of tea plantations in Sri Lanka's Hill Country

Promodh knows there's little he can do to change the working conditions for the tea pluckers, something other organizations are already committed to doing. So instead, he's spent the past several years personally working to secure better educational opportunities for the tea pluckers' children, including vocational training and specialized courses, by raising money and partnering with local non-profits. At the very least, he wants to ensure that every child has the chance to finish secondary school.

His family runs a small guesthouse between the city of Haputale and a big tea factory. Westerners often stay there, and he takes the opportunity to ask for donations for his one-man charity operation. Though his funding is meager, Promodh regularly visits schools in the area and talks with the principals and teachers to find out which students are notably absent or have trouble keeping up in school. He then visits these children's parents to find out about the nature of their problems—usually, he told me, there's just not enough money or there may be health issues in the family—and doles out financial assistance from the donations he's raised from tourists and friends. The money goes toward keeping the kids in school while their parents work.

A tea plucker on a plantation outside of Haputale

Parallel to Promodh's work, there are other efforts to improve educational opportunities for the next generation. The Robin Hood Laptop Project offers computers to kids who otherwise wouldn't have the technological literacy to escape the plantations, and even some tea plantations have made their own efforts to provide educational opportunities to the tea pluckers' children, like Fair Trade gardens in India, which require children stay in school until graduation.

But even when kids manage to show up to school each day, the local schools have their own problems. M. Kanagaraj, the principal of one school in Haputale, explained on a recent visit: "We are a rural school, we don't have any facilities, no computers, no laptops. We are very happy when someone from outside comes and helps us."

The principal's office was divided down the middle by a row of lockers; on the other side was a classroom full of kids, and Promodh was talking to their teacher. The building was small and cramped, and each classroom accommodated at least two, sometimes even three different grades. "This is our playground," Kanagaraj said, pointing toward a patch of dusty brown earth.

"The biggest problem in my opinion is that the parents are uneducated and cannot support their children ," said S. Kisho Kumar, who teaches English at another rural school three miles outside Haputale. There are almost 400 children at this school, and even though a new building—which was funded in equal parts by a local non-profit and the rural community—was recently constructed, there is still not enough space nor teaching material to create an adequate atmosphere for proper education.

Students in a school near Haputale

If he can raise enough money, Promodh hopes to build up a "skills development center" in the community, where the local kids can take vocational classes in order to have an alternative to working on the plantations. For now, he's personally offering some classes on his own and finding partners who will take the kids on as apprentices.

While the working conditions of the tea pluckers might not change, Promodh is hopeful that the next generation will have a brighter future. "Education is the most important thing to get out of this misery," he told me, sounding a little like one of those inspirational signs outside of the tea plantations.

The problem with Views—the recently abbreviated title of Drake's fourth official studio album—is that the build-up has been so monumental. In an era when monolithic pop albums seem to drop from the sky, Views has finally been released into the world, but only after a surprise mixtape, summer-defining singles like "Hotline Bling," the beef with Meek Mill that launched a thousand memes (and one Grammy-nominated song), and a joint mixtape with one of the most critically lauded rappers in recent memory that also doubled as his first major release under a massive contract with arguably the world's largest technology company. Ever since Drake's third album, Nothing Was the Same, was released in 2013, Drake has become an unavoidable and constant fixture of American music and culture.

As Views arrived late last week, it was accompanied by an interview with Drake on a special episode of OVO Sound Radio, conducted by Apple Radio's Kiwi-accented mouthpiece, Zane Lowe. The interview wasn't as much as a journalistic endeavor as it is an extended promotion of the Drake-controlled image and his ideas, a clearing of the air of anything associated with Drake that hasn't been Drake-approved. He mentioned several times that he doesn't want to "shamelessly plug," despite the obvious fact that everyone listening to the program was someone who was probably paying for Apple Music in order to access all of this Drake content. About the music, Drake only seemed to have one specific thought: "I hope it opens people's minds."

Even the publicity juggernaut that is the combined force of Drake's OVO operation and Apple Music can lose inertia in the face of unforeseen circumstances. Views was already due out in the early half of a year that has seen releases from three artists that can match/surpass him in profile: Rihanna, Kanye West, and the April 23 release of Beyoncé's Lemonade (more on this in a second). Compounding these events, the very recent and sudden death of Prince, a virtuosic artist always ahead of his time and much more willing to explore gender than nearly any other modern male music icon, casts Drake's fragile masculinity in an unflattering light. What's more, the eternally beloved Queen B had already produced an album more ambitious in execution, more political, and with more at stake emotionally than any Drake project likely would or could. To top it all off, Drake in all his masculine posturing is exactly the kind of man she's in contention with throughout Lemonade, the sort to use "love like a weapon."

This can all be true, but it doesn't mean that Views should be dismissed as shallow. Drake's main obsessions may seem surface-level, but it's worth noting the very personal way he relates to women, money, fame, vulnerability, and bravado that connects to something larger, and surprisingly resonant—a Drake concert is one of the most diverse events you may ever attend. At the recent "Drake Debate" at Greene Naftali gallery in Manhattan, cultural critic Judnick Mayard said that "black women want to be Drake," an echo of writer Hannah Giorgis's BuzzFeed essay "Drake Belongs to Black Women." Poet Jenny Zhang described Drake's expression of feelings as "aspirational." Mayard, Giorgios, and Zhang were returning to one of the main tenets of his success: Drake as mirror.

Despite inspiring such strong reactions from critics and fans alike, Drake has never been an artist who creates for an immediate reaction. His music is often made to his own exacting preferences, as he notes near the end of a 2015 interview with the Fader, in a way that tends to grow on you and change with multiple listens. Views' release has already produced reviews from several traditional outlets, gotten the roundtable treatment, and been impulsively reviewed, but I wouldn't put much stock in anything produced from one or two listens. It's easy to try and trim away the perceived fat of a long album, but Drake made the album he wanted to make, not necessarily the one that would be the most commercially viable.

Drake remarked in his Lowe interview that the album is divided by the seasons in Toronto—winter to summer and winter again. This demarcation is clear throughout this 19-track album (the 20th track is the summer banger "Hotline Bling"). The first ten are brooding and layered with dissonant strings, while tracks 11 through 16 tap into the musical style inspired by the Caribbean, North Africa, and their diasporas before returning to some harsher reflections in the last few tracks. Drake's usual suspects are still here, his OVO stable of artists like PartyNextDoor, Majiid Jordan, and newcomers DVSN along with Future, Rihanna, and Jeremih. That the album manages to hold through all this is a credit to the direction of Drake's longtime producer, Noah "40" Shebib. Views is easily Drake's most stylistically varied album, and 40 does the best he can trying to keep the thread. The album has a discordant edge to it, almost experimental seeming in its lack of ambition or bombast, and it's great to see how they both worked to improve upon the formerly leaked song "Views from the 6," which is now titled "You with Me."

The songs of Views are all, undeniably, Drake songs. This may seem like an obvious thing to say, but it's part of what makes Drake such a singular and popular artist. The constantly revisited themes of family, women, jealousy, and money are all filtered through Drake's all-consuming ego. Toronto, the fabled 6 that has so transfixed Drake over the last few years, is not a geographic location or a community made up of various groups and races. "The City" that populates his songs is the distilled experiences of life, the Toronto that only truly exists to him, filtered through his singular vision and broadcast out to the world along with incantations of every woman that didn't check back with him. Sonically and narratively, the album is relentlessly immersed in Drake (the man, the artist). The goofy charm and bristling sensitivity, bordering on unacceptable masculine behavior, are still at work on Views. It's been five years since the revelatory vulnerability of Take Care and the tone has only changed in that it has settled in. As he says on the closing track of Views, "If I was you, I would hate me too."

At the end of their interview, Drake told Lowe that things are really going to start to change when he finishes the house he's building in Toronto. He called it "his life's work," which is tongue in cheek, to say the least. The house Drake has truly built, and continues to build, is his success at making the deeply personal nearly universal.

Follow Aaron Calvin on Twitter.

Downtown Madison, West Virginia, was once home to a vibrant collection of family-owned businesses, including a movie theater, a bank, a jewelry store, a two-story department store, and several beer joints. Now it is struggling to survive with many of the businesses boarded up and literally falling apart after a decade of consistent economic decline that followed multiple rounds of mine closings and layoffs.

All photos by Stacy Kranitz.

Handley's Funeral Home buried most of my family. The stone structure sits on a corner lot near the terminus of Phipps Avenue, a couple miles downriver from my parents' house in Madison, West Virginia, and right across the street from the old Bank of Danville building. The funeral business is one of the few that remain viable here in Danville—these days home to a smattering of churches and fast-food joints, a shocking number of for-sale signs, and not much else. But there are always going to be bodies to bury, grieving families to comfort, and so Handley's remains, its logo emblazoned on the menus a few blocks up Phipps at the Park Avenue Restaurant, on the fence at the Little League Ballpark in Madison, and on the press box perched above the football field where the Scott Skyhawks play.

A few weeks before my grandmother's funeral, I stood with my back to Handley's, staring at the Bank of Danville building. The black-and-white tile near the entrance was broken into hunks, and I contemplated carrying one off. One of the windows had been boarded up with a wooden "Elect Bobby R. Hale" sandwich board, and the other was obscured by ivy. Like most of the older structures in Boone County, the bank is mostly unused, abandoned, and rotting. A few apartments are available for rent in what once must have been an attic, but the interior of the main level is a decaying mess of wooden planks and plastic grocery bags and broken concrete. None of the coal money once housed there remains. I snorted pills in one of those apartments two decades ago with a high school buddy and his girlfriend, but they're both long gone now. Handley's buried him shortly after that, and she's married and working in North Carolina last I heard. I went so far as to pick up a hunk of that tile work, but it crumbled apart in my hands.

Kevin Bailey manages Big Eagle Gun & Pawn, and he's seen a huge decline in revenue, nearly 50 percent since he began working there. He attributes some of that to a decline in coal. But he also feels enhanced competition from Walmart and Cabelas have played a part. "There's a combination of things that has impacted that. I can't say all of our sales decline is due to the economy. A big part of it is that you don't have as many people getting outdoors. As an example, we would move thirty cases of shotgun shells before the opening day of squirrel season, which used to be a tradition here. A father took his son or daughter into the woods with him to hunt squirrels. The day before squirrel season was was our biggest day of the year." Kevin says now too many people are working low-paying jobs with long hours and no vacation. "Dad just doesn't have time to take them. Plus in the age where electronics are booming, not as many kids even want to go into the woods. Now the day before squirrel season is just like any other day."

In the 1930s, there was a stretch of shanty houses in Madison located just east of Main Street called Rat Row, most likely built to accommodate the population boom in the area from just shy of 10,000 people at the turn of the century to nearly 30,000 by the 1940s, according to Census data. My grammy's father, Ezra, moved the family there after his job in Thurmond either got too competitive or the conflict with scab labor and the fallout from the mine wars got too hot.

Grammy never knew the exact reason, but she told me more about how they ended up in Boone County as she sat in her West Madison home dying of cancer. Her mother's people were Dangerfields, and her father's were Halls, both down from Kentucky. Grammy said they all moved around a lot, so she didn't think to ask. They were quirky people, and traveling was an inborn thing, something she never let go of completely. Even though my pawpaw built a house for them in West Madison a few blocks away from Scott High School in 1973, the same house where she died, she never stopped rambling. The two of them toured the country in a pearl white Cadillac and made frequent trips up to a red cabin in the woods near Summersville Lake that Pawpaw had also built. They visited family in Florida and Nashville. They were restless people. But they always came back to Boone County.

Read more from our series on Appalachia.

Coal was humming in those days, the hollers of Boone County all bursting at the seams. Some of them held camps with hundreds of houses, peopled with sections for the Italians, the Russians, the Scots Irish, the African Americans. There was a dance hall, a movie theater, several bars, an apothecary, a grand bank building in Madison and another in Danville, and coal trains several miles long, chugging alongside the Little Coal River on the way to the Kanawha Valley, then the Ohio River, then out to the rest of the world. By the time of World War II, a good deal of Boone County Coal fueled the coke plants and fed the steel mills in cities like Pittsburgh and Youngstown and Cleveland, helping to produce things that Grammy proudly said won the war. Houses sprung up on both sides of the Little Coal River, forming the towns of Madison, West Madison, and Danville. Boy Scout troops and Pop Warner football leagues were organized, a VFW hall was erected, and the largest high school in the county was built, as were a local library and modern hospital. An entire generation of union miners got used to comfortable middle-class living, and their money boosted economic growth that everyone thought would last forever.

But that was a long time ago. Grammy was 94 when we watched her die, and Handley's buried her. There weren't many of her friends at her funeral. She'd outlived them all.

Sylvia Iris Meadows is the 2015 Boone County Coal Festival belle. She is the founder of the Boone County Red Hatters Association and has been active in the Girl Scouts of America. She was also an Avon representative. Last year, it was discovered that Meadows was a victim of elder abuse when the local police arrested family members and charged them for abuse of an incapacitated adult and embezzlement. She is now safely residing at Hillcrest Healthcare in Danville.

My pawpaw's name is Harold Ray "Tony," Ball and he grew up on Hewitt's Creek. In Boone County, you can track almost any family back to that damned creek, and my pawpaw loves that mental exercise, asking just about any shaggy kid on the streets who his grandfather is, and the whole thing goes from there. His people are Balls and go back a couple of generations beyond him, so that by the time of his birth the Balls had their own branch of Hewitt's Creek with a dozen or more houses and their own mine where they dug coal by hand for a while. He's a self-made man who took his gift of making things with his hands and used it to build houses all over Boone County, including his own. He also built a career as a tax man and worked his way into the courthouse, where he became connected with most of the heavy hitters in Boone County politics. He kept their books and helped them run their election campaigns. Perhaps his greatest achievement as Tony the Tax Man was helping elect Ron Stollings to the West Virginia Senate in 2006.

Once, Pawpaw built a dolly for his karaoke machine out of fragments of wood and pipe and fitted two nice rubber tires to it, so it would be easy for him to push. That was before his last fall, which happened when he and Uncle Bug went to Cleveland to see their sister Betty in the retirement home one last time before they all die. As they were leaving, his legs wobbled beneath him; he tore the rotator cuff in his left shoulder trying to break his fall. But he's a tough son of a bitch, so he insisted on driving home, despite Uncle Bug pushing him to go to a hospital. Ever since he nearly died in a hospital in Florida two decades ago, he's insisted on coming home when illness or injury strikes. He wants to die in his own bed, the one where Grammy died. He slept in his recliner that night, and the following morning, my dad finally convinced him to go to the hospital. Grammy had only been in the ground a month, and we all figured this would be it, that he'd give up. People married for more than half a century like they were, in love like they were, don't usually linger after the other one goes.

But Pawpaw did his therapy, and the shoulder improved, though not enough to push his karaoke machine around. I came home to see him, and the first thing he asked me to do was go to Boone Nursing Home and sing with him. So I loaded his machine into the back of his minivan the following morning, and he drove us down to Lick Creek. The staff there were more than happy to have us because the patients get a kick out of hearing the old songs they'd loved so much during their heydays, country hits by Hank Williams and Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard and Ray Price that emanated from every Boone County jukebox and radio in the 50s and 60s and 70s. Love songs and fighting songs and songs about crazy arms, songs about loss. There were 20 or so people in the rec room waiting for us, some in wheelchairs, others sleeping or trembling to an internal rhythm nobody else will ever hear. One old woman flirted with Pawpaw, telling him she used to serve him french fries and fried liver when she was a little girl and worked at Morrison's Drive Inn over toward Logan.

We've been half a dozen times now, singing mostly the same songs. Each time Pawpaw looks for familiar faces in the crowd. But that time the only one he knew was Trudy Vickers, and there was very little left of her. Pawpaw took the mic and called out to her, but she didn't register. He said, "That's my good friend Trudy! How are you?" But she was gone, blasted clean of anything functional—80 pounds of trembling flesh were all that remains of her.

In the car on the way home, Pawpaw nudged me and said, "Trudy was the most beautiful woman I ever saw. But she wasn't as beautiful as your grammy."

Freedom Baptist Fellowship sat on the corner of Third Street and Jackson Avenue in Madison and was one of the few places offering some sense of community most nights. The congregation was a good blend of young and old, and the pastor preached on the topic of self-reliance and personal responsibility in an interesting blend of libertarianism and Baptist faith. About halfway through the service, we snuck downstairs to talk to some of the teens about the problems facing their community.

Devin is 14 and frustrated by the number of classmates who he saw falling prey to addiction. "I kind of grew up knowing to stay away from people like that. My mom is an addict, and I don't associate with her. I'm also estranged from my father, and so I live with my sister. She is an ambulance driver." He plans to move to New York to attend acting school after graduation, but in the meantime, he hangs out at the comic book shop in Danville playing Dungeons & Dragons.

Sapphire McNeely, a 20-year-old college freshman, lives with a family friend and commuted to school. When she was home, she ran the youth services at her church. She decided not to stay with her mother because during her sophomore year of high school the woman got into a relationship with a man and moved to Charleston. "I just didn't want to leave with her. I wanted to finish at Scott High School. I grew up with the family that I lived with in church, and they didn't have kids, and they took me in. I'm happy. It's a good situation." She plans to become a psychologist but intends to move away from Boone County after college. "There are too many addicts. I don't want to be around that, and I don't want my kids to be around that. I want to do developmental psychology."

Kiera, a 19-year-old student at Glenville State, is majoring in special education. She doesn't want to stay here when she's done either. "We see so many of our friends get pregnant. We've decided to work hard to be responsible. Not to make the same mistakes. I was a teen pregnancy. If there were more things to do, there might be less teen pregnancies. I want to work with disabled kids. My brother is autistic, and that's what I do." She doesn't know where she'll go after college. "Just not here. That's where I'm gonna move, to not here."

The All-Star Wrestling Association is one of the few live entertainment options in Boone County. The shows take place monthly at the Madison Civic Center to a packed and enthusiastic crowd.

Boone County holds onto a shred of optimism that it can bring in tourism dollars to keep local restaurants and services open. The thriving Hatfield and McCoy ATV trails, built on top of former strip mines, draw some enthusiasts from neighboring states to the towns of Danville and Madison, but the lack of direct access to the towns currently limits engagement from tourists riding the trails. Hatfield and McCoy ATV trails offer some of the best four-wheeling recreation in the country and are a much-needed source of income for south West Virginia. Tourism may not be large enough to save Boone County, but it is part of a plan to diversify the economy away from coal.

Mamie White is the reigning matriarch of the White family, the notorious brood of hellraisers and outlaws hailing from the hollows of Boone County. Behind her is a wall of photographs and newspaper clippings of her brother Jesco White, the Dancing Outlaw. Mamie's father, D. Ray, taught his children how to live off of welfare after he spent many unstable years working in the local coal mines. He believed that the welfare system offered more financial stability than digging coal, and in some ways, he was correct. Unfortunately the Whites have struggled with poverty, drug addiction, and persistent fatalism. Though their chaotic lives have been the subject of a documentary, they are not unique to the region. Many families in Boone County struggle under similar circumstances.

Dakota Workman is a fitness enthusiast and personal trainer at Southern Fitness in Madison. A youth leader in his local church and volunteer at the Madison Public Library, he worked in AmeriCorps the previous summer and was an honors student at Scott High School in West Madison. Dakota hasn't given up hope for a brighter future in the region and sees himself as having an important role in building a community in Madison, largely by mentoring children.

Kirk is drinking at Buddy's, the only bar left in Madison at the time (it's since closed). Like most counties in the region, Boone County is struggling against becoming a ghost. Since the most recent decline in the coal economy, miners have been laid off in record numbers, and as a result, local businesses like Buddy's have begun to close their doors for good.

Jacob Knabb, the author of this piece was born and raised in Madison, West Virginia. He took the "Hillbilly Highway" west looking for better opportunities and ended up in Chicago, though he returns regularly to see his family. This past year, his father's contract was terminated by Patriot Coal during one of a series of bankruptcy filings designed to streamline operating costs and shed expensive healthcare and benefits packages for retired and semi-retired employees like Jacob's father. On his arm is a tattoo of the state of West Virginia with an X marking Madison, the seat of Boone County.

Though many in Boone County mistrust them as a result of their road-dusted black leather attire, loud motorcycles, and the outlaw tendencies of some members, the Brothers of the Wheel serve an important civic role in the region, raising money for charities and serving as both an outlet for disenchanted, thrill-seeking locals and an unofficial security force. The annual Poker Run draws thousands of motorcycle enthusiasts to the region every summer, injecting much-needed tourism dollars into the local economy.

Jason is 22 and "from the other side of the mountain in Van." He'd love to "go anywhere and do anything but can't." He wishes someone would fix the basketball courts. He asked, "What are we gonna do with a Little League field?"

Danny Dunlap's granddaughters were running an honest-to-goodness lemonade stand last summer and had made a little over $20 selling cups of lemonade and homemade cookies. Danny's home is a rarity, an echo of the once-thriving middle class now all but gone from the region, their well-maintained lawns speared by "For Sale" signs.

The solar-powered Solar Impulse plane (Photo: solarimpulse.com)

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

US News

• Clinton Apologizes to Coal Country
  Hillary Clinton was forced to apologize for remarks she made on the decline of the coal industry. Meeting a West Virginia miner who recently lost his job, Clinton said a comment about putting coal miners and companies "out of business" had been a "misstatement."—NBC News
• Supreme Court Upholds New Minimum Wage in Seattle
  The Supreme Court has turned down a case by business groups attempting to challenge the Seattle law that raises the city's minimum wage to $15 an hour. The International Franchise Association argued local franchises of big companies like McDonald's needed until 2021 to get ready for the wage rise.—Reuters
• Solar-Powered Plane Completes US Trip
  Solar Impulse, the zero-fuel aeroplane using energy from the sun, has flown from Mountain View, California to Phoenix, Arizona, its first US leg in an attempt to fly around the world. Swiss pilot Andre Borschberg is now aiming to get to New York by the start of June before flying over the Atlantic.—ABC News
• Racist Emails of LA Police Official Revealed
  Tom Angel, a leading Los Angeles County sheriff's official, resigned after racist emails he forwarded about Latinos, blacks, and Muslims were made public. Sheriff Jim McDonnell said he hoped Angel's resignation would be a "learning opportunity" for members of his staff.—VICE News

International News

• Syrian Prison Besieged After Riot
  Government forces have encircled a prison in the Syrian city of Hama after prisoners reportedly took captive the warden and several guards. The prison revolt happened in response to the government's plans to transfer several detainees to a notorious military prison near Damascus.—Al Jazeera
• Canadian PM Promises Investment in Indigenous Communities
  Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said major investment was coming to Canada's isolated indigenous communities. "We have discriminated against indigenous children for generations, for decades, for centuries," he told VICE News. Dozens of indigenous communities have recently declared states of emergency.—VICE News
• EU Proposes Visa-Free Travel for Turkey
  The European Union's executive will give conditional approval to relaxing visa requirements for Turkish citizens traveling to Europe's passport-free Schengen area. The move must be approved by the European Parliament, but Turkey has threatened to walk away from a migration deal unless it happens.—BBC News
• Second Refugee Dies After Self-Immolation
  A Somali refugee has set herself on fire at an Australian-run detention camp on the island of Nauru, just days after an Iranian man died in a similar act. Australia's immigration minister blamed refugee advocates for "encouraging" the asylum seekers towards acts of self-harm.—Reuters

The Rolling Stones in 1971 (Photo: press image, via)

Everything Else

• The Stones, Dylan, and McCartney Hint at Mega-Festival
  The Rolling Stones, The Who, Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney have all released teaser clips about playing a rumored mega-festival at Coachella's grounds this October. All of the cryptic posts featured the word "October."—Rolling Stone
• Anti-Smoking Ads Aimed at LGBT Youth
  The FDA launches a $35 million anti-tobacco campaign today focused on LGBT adults using the slogan "Freedom to be, tobacco-free." The FDA says 18 to 24-year-olds who identify as LGBT smoke at double the rate of other young adults.—The Hill
• Corruption Rising in the Arab World, Poll Finds
  A majority of people—61 percent—believe that corruption is on the rise in the Middle East and North Africa, according to a poll of 11,000 people in the region. Nearly a third said they had paid a bribe to access services.—Middle East Eye
• Trio of Potentially Habitable Planets Found
  Three potentially-habitable Earth-sized planets have been discovered only 39 light years from our own solar system. The TRAPPIST-1 system is home to a trio of exoplanets orbiting an "ultracool" dwarf star.—Motherboard

Done with reading today? That's fine—instead, watch the latest VICE Special: On Patrol with South Korea's Suicide Rescue Team.

Read: Why Sheds Are Actually the Perfect Homes

In the most depressing British news of the day, the good old Bank of Mom and Dad will help finance over a quarter of mortgages in the UK this year, the Independent reports.

Nigel Wilson—chief executive of Legal & General, the financial services firm that conducted the research—explained that due to a low housing supply keeping prices "out of sync with wages," more and more parents are having to help their kids out, spending an average 7 percent of the total purchase. More than 300,000 mortgages this year will be aided by parents, giving them the same collective lending power as one of the top ten mortgage lending firms in the UK.

Obviously, if you don't have a parental bank, you're fucked, leaving many working-class millennials wondering if they'll have to rent forever. Wilson believes that beefing up the housing supply could help curb soaring housing prices across the country, alongside the rapid death of public housing.

Soon, parents may not be able to help their kids at all. In London, parental contributions make up more than 50 percent of the wealth of the average household—excluding housing. In other words, contributing to mortgages in London is hurting middle- and upper-middle-class parents.

This is all just another bit of proof that homeownership is no longer possible through hard work.

Photo courtesy Bull Bag

Balls are crazy. They're always there, flopping to and fro underneath the shaft, but they exist somewhere on the periphery of our consciousness, an essential but rarely acknowledged component of the whole, much like George Harrison's role in the Beatles.

And like Harrison's songwriting credits as a member of the Fab Four, the world of ball-specific sex toys is sparsely populated. There are plenty of masturbators and cock rings out there designed to simulate penetrative sex and get a dong harder than the SATs after three pot brownies, but the focus is always on the meat rather than the potatoes. With the exception of some ball stretchers—including this one that allows you to hang a sneaker from your sack—male sex toys are very shaft-centric.

The good people at Perfect Fit noticed that hole in the market and decided to put a ball bag in it. Their creation, the Bull Bag, hit the market a few months ago and is essentially a silicon safe for the family jewels. For the gentleman who likes to shake things up, there is also the Bull Bag Buzz, which has a little vibrating motor at the bottom of the bag.

"For a lot of guys, they don't have a lot of sensation in their testicles, and they don't really hang low," Perfect Fit CEO, Steve Callow, says in a promotional video. "I thought it would be fun to create a little slap action while you're having sex. I came up with a product called the Bull Bag."

I don't hate ball play, but if I have to decide between punching the pope and tickling the bishops, I'm going for the pope 11 times out of ten. But am I missing out on something in my papal fervor? Is there a whole new world of pleasure waiting to be discovered just south of the Vatican? I decided to put my nuts in this bag and find out.

Related: Watch our documentary 'ResERECTION: The Penis Implant'

The first thing you'll notice about the Bull Bag is its easy-to-use design. Just stretch the opening at the top of the bag and gently lower your balls inside. The elasticity of the narrow neck will tighten around your junk, securing your boys inside their new cozy silicon apartment. The Bull Bag is also very stretchy and has an almost fuzzy texture to it, unlike many of your average cock rings and ball stretchers.

The funny thing about nuts is that, like cocks, they come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. I don't have especially large or pendulous balls, so, for me, the bag was a bit too spacious, like a boxed two-bedroom when a studio would have been fine. But a perfect fit is hard to come by no matter what type of dick product you're trafficking in, and while a snugger fit would have been nice, I know plenty of guys with more than enough flesh to fill out the pocket.

At its core, the Bull Bag is really just a ball stretcher with a better design. A traditional ball stretcher is a thick rubber band or leather strap that wraps super tightly around the nuts. Most stretchers are a bit too tight for my tastes, usually leaving me with a kicked-in-the-nuts feeling after taking them off. The nice thing about the Bull Bag is that, while it was a bit too spacious around the bottom of the testes, that bagginess made for the perfect fit up top—not too tight or pinchy. It also creates a nice ball swinging motion, turning your unit into a Cirque du Soleil trapeze artist.

The Bull Bag Buzz does essentially the same thing but with the added benefit of vibration. Personally I couldn't feel much of the buzz, but that might have been due to the spaciousness of my bag, as mentioned earlier. The motor goes at three speeds, which I could only differentiate by how high-pitched the buzzing was. The extra stimulation felt good on my thighs and hand while jerking off, and I imagine that vibration slamming against sensitive lady parts would add a jolt to an encounter between a P and a V, but that is beyond my area of expertise.

As the old saying goes, where there is a niche in the market the sex toy industrial complex will strive to fill it, and that's exactly what they've done here. It didn't add much to my masturbatory experience other than a sense of novelty, but sometimes that's all you need to spice things up. In short, if you're the kind of person who enjoys piling copious amounts of attention onto your balls, the Bull Bag just might be a godsend. I'm not really that guy, but then again I never liked George Harrison's "While My Guitar Gently Weeps."

Buy your nut house here.

This review was conducted with complimentary bags from Bull Bag.

Follow Brian Moylan on Twitter.

In an age of expressive sexual freedom, who can really be sure what counts as cheating, and whether it's the same for every couple. A recent survey commissioned by law firm Slater and Gordon found that 35 percent of the 2,150 participants believed sending explicit or flirty messages didn't mean you were unfaithful, while only 62 percent of people said they would feel guilty about sending explicit photos to someone other than their partner. Unsurprisingly, there was a bit of a gender divide here: 49 percent of women consider sexting to be cheating, as opposed to 34 percent of men. Still, that means half of all women think it's fine for you to send an eggplant spaffing onto two peaches to Becky with the good hair.

This all sounds a bit hopeful. I once met a girl who smashed her boyfriend's phone face down on to a marble floor because he hadn't deleted old Instagrams of his ex. So we conducted our own investigation to find out whether people are really more chill about cheating.

MR. PIGEONS, 27, MUSIC PRODUCER

VICE: Hey, Mr. Pigeons. Are you currently in a relationship?
Mr. Pigeons: Kind of.

Is sexting cheating?
It depends on the dynamics. It's all about communication and rules. Once you understand each other, it's cool. I know people that think cheating is checking out half-naked girls on Instagram.

Why do people in relationships start to sext others?
Boredom. I think there's a temptation and desire with human beings. You naturally feel these urges, so it's difficult. When tempted, not thinking, you can just do it.

Have you ever snooped through your partner's phone for sexts?
All the fucking time. It's very hard to trust people nowadays. Culture like "Netflix and chill" is fucked up.

If you caught your partner sexting someone else, how would you feel?
I'd be pissed off, and I'd blame her! But I wouldn't necessarily end the relationship.

SAM COX, THE DOODLE MAN, 22, DOODLES FOR A LIVING

VICE: Is sexting cheating?
Sam: I don't think it's right, but I don't know if it's "cheating." I guess if you're not being honest, it's on the spectrum of cheating.

If you were in a relationship and found out your partner had been sexting, how would you feel?
I would not be comfortable with it. Imagine if your parents were doing that. So I think sexting is worse than meeting someone when out randomly.

Would you end the relationship in that situation?
We'd definitely talk about it, and it wouldn't be good. But it all depends on the circumstance, doesn't it?

SARAH, 24, DESIGNER

VICE: Does sexting count as cheating?
Sarah: Yes. It indicates you are not committed to one person.

So when does texting become sexting?
When it gets inappropriate. Sexual and personal.

What would you do if you caught your partner sexting?
I'd definitely just get rid of them. If there were evidence, it would be hard to brush it aside. It would take more to end a relationship in those circumstances, compared to if I caught them physically cheating.

Would you snoop through a partners phone to see if they were sexting?
Yes, for sexting and just general stuff, maybe just to see what they've been up to. It doesn't have to be looking for bad things.

Who does the blame lie with when someone is sexting in a relationship?
The people sexting. If you want to sext other people, you shouldn't be in a relationship. If your relationship is unfulfilling, that's not the way to handle it.

POLARIS, 27, WORKS IN RETAIL SALES

VICE: Is sexting outside of a relationship cheating?
Polaris: I don't think so, because it's just texting. It's not done in real life, so it's fine.

Even explicit photo sharing?
I don't like the idea of sharing explicit photos. But texting is fine.

Would you snoop through your partner's phone for sexts?
I wouldn't want to check because I wouldn't want to know. If you sext, your partner might sext as well, and in that case, I don't want to know.

Have you ever sext outside of a relationship?
Yes, but only through text. No pictures.

Why do you think people sext people other than their partner?
Sometimes when you're in a long-term relationship, you want something new and exciting.

BILLY, 21, STUDENT

VICE: Is sexting cheating?
Billy: I don't think it's cheating.

What makes people in a relationship sext other people?
They might just find it interesting to talk to other people. Or they could be looking for someone else. But if people don't pay attention to their partners, or compliment them enough, they will look elsewhere for recognition.

Have you ever sext?
Yes, because my partner wasn't giving me attention. I left my phone unlocked, and she found the images I had been sending.

What did she say?
She confronted me about it, and defended herself by saying she was busy. I told her that obviously I needed something. I'm a man.

If you found an image your other half had sent to someone else on her phone, how would you feel about it?
Firstly, I would question why she is doing it. Secondly, I question what I'm doing wrong because it insinuates I'm not giving her enough attention. I would blame myself in the situation.

Is awkwardly fucking around in the back of a taxi about to be a thing of the past? Photo by author

Ours is the magic, ours is the power – The Craft, 1996

The first thing you see is teenage girls, eyes shut, in a circle, chanting. Sitting among cards and occult trinkets in the dark, they declare their authority and strength. Simply put, The Craft is a story about young women trying to take back power because being a teenage girl is to be powerless. By the time the Buffy-style high impact intro runs—wailing guitars, flashes of dark-made up eyes, and historical images of tarot cards, devils, witches, and red candles—every young woman is mesmerized. How could you not be?

You don't become a witch, or go through your teenage years, for that matter, without feeling othered, and in each of the four characters, there's a difference to relate to. They're marginalized first and foremost by gender, thanks to the jocks who fuck them over—Nancy catches an STD, and the same guy, Chris, lies about sleeping with Sarah after she doesn't go home with him, spreading around the school that she was the worst lay he's ever had—but each has a quality that marginalizes her further. Sarah is the new girl who suffers from mental health issues and previously attempted suicide. Rochelle is multiracial and is bullied for her hair by a blond, popular girl. Bonnie has burn scars all over her body, so she covers herself in so many dark layers you feel uncomfortable just looking at her. Nancy is living a working class "trailer trash" existence with a vile step-dad who's physically and emotionally abusive to her mum. She also has to go to a Catholic school predominantly full of middle-class pupils.

They are outsiders, and everyone knows it. Sarah is sitting with fuckhead Chris just as she is getting to grips with her new school environment. He points out the girls she shouldn't hang out with: "the bitches of Eastwick." Nancy is a "slut," Bonnie has weird scars, and he carefully ignores Rochelle's perceived fault. The camera cuts to the bitches lounging around a huge rainbow mural of the Virgin Mary—the least subtle, but most brilliant visual juxtaposition. Sadly, in true-to-life teen style, the girls agree with these defects. When they start their first official foray into witchcraft in a field outside town, they all pray to their god Manon to rid themselves of them. In a teen dream fantasy film, they are given the power to actually do it. What could be more seductive than that?

Teens are perfect material for writer Peter Filardi to project witchcraft's historical past onto because, of course, all of these markers of being a freak are still as real in a classroom as they were in a small village in rural England. Any scarification or bodily deformity was enough to get you struck off as a witch. So was mental illness, and so was sleeping around.

In the portrayal of Nancy as bad bitch, the film is totally unapologetic about teenage girl sexuality. It's just as crude and delightful as the pathetic jibes of the horny dudes who sleep around and treat women like crap. It's implied she's bisexual—"I love a woman in uniform," she laughs at a female officer, and when the four try the "light as a feather, stiff as a board" trick where you lift someone with two fingers, she immediately starts fingering the air. Every gesture and flash of her wide eyes and flick of her tongue is dripping with suggestion. She's the girl you don't know whether you want to be or hook up with. Twenty years later, media and wider culture still don't know what to do with a young girl's sexuality. It's part of what leads to her downfall at the end of the film—she's just too excessive, too much, taking things too far.

§

If you've been a 16-year-old in an all-female friendship group, you'll understand the intricacies of one. A gang can be the most impenetrable support system imaginable. It can also become a living nightmare: a tangle of emotions, under-handed cuts, and struggles for recognition perceivable only to those operating on a higher level of sensitivity or those in the friendships themselves. The Craft recognizes the unbridled power that comes with those friendships. Quite literally, the four can do anything. They make a racist bitch's hair fall out in clumps and scar tissue completely disintegrate. Sure, that power comes from witchcraft, but it's about girl power too. It's about what happens when girls have a support group.

This film understands the scope of that, and so too its flipside. Nothing is as savage as female friends turning on one another at school—worse still when it's three on one. When Nancy and company decide to terrorize Sarah, it's truly hideous. In Sarah's sleep, they come to her, hovering over her bed with vicious taunts. In real life, she's hunted too. "In the old days, if a witch betrayed her coven, they'd kill her," Nancy threatens after bashing down her bathroom door. If you leave a friendship group, God save you. There is nothing as all-consuming as the emotional stress of girls on your back—especially ones that used to have it covered. This four-way undoubtedly paved the way for Mean Girls, building on what Heathers had offered eight years previous with Veronica Sawyer and adding the occult element. Imagine what the Burn Book would've done in the hands of these four.

The response to this representation of teen girls was phenomenal. It excited a generation of young women and the powers that be knew its strength too. Despite following guidelines for a PG-13, the MPAA gave the movie an R rating. The director, Andrew Fleming, suspects it was just the fact that teen girls are experimenting with witchcraft. Lest girls recognize what they could do.

Brilliantly, the sorcery itself was all based in truth. Fleming hired Wicca consultant Pat Devin, high priestess of Covenant of the Goddess, to help with the narrative, and she made sure the spells were common enough to be found in basic Wicca books, and she even consulted her Covens on the chants included. "Neopaganism may have been sensationalized for the sake of the movie, but it was still identifiably neopaganism," explained Brooks Alexander in his book Witchcraft Goes Mainstream. "The fact that the movie's portrayal of modern witchcraft was recognizably true to life is what made it's impact so substantial."

Why? The lure of occult power was not lost on girls who felt powerless. And since the witchcraft in the movie was so closely resembling real occult rituals and customs, the more teens investigated, the more they were curious. As Devin said in a rare interview about her involvement with The Craft: "I began calling myself a Witch at 16 because Donovan wrote a song called "Season of the Witch." I do not underestimate the impact of the media on teenagers, and this movie was brewed up for the teenage audience."

According to Alexander, within days of the movie opening, inquiries began to "pour into" various witch groups and neopagan organizations. "They were caught off-guard; even those that had some advance knowledge of the movie were stunned by the size and suddenness of the response." Naturally, this was a problem. They'd never been cool before, and they'd definitely not had interest from young people or had to worry about getting sued by worried parents. What coven would want to welcome teen girls to the absolute outrage of parents?

On the one hand, legitimate neopaganism grew; on the other, witchcraft suddenly became its own massive thing in teen culture, very separate and out of control, a phenomenon unlike the real occultism that'd predated it.

Later that year, Sabrina the Teenage Witch hit global television screens, and the following year, 1997, came Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Then 1998, it was Charmed. Although Hollywood doesn't move at lightning speed, and no one can say with certainty that The Craft had directly led to the others, nothing exists in a vacuum. Whether the climate was right for that sort of teen-led power, or it was just coincidence that various projects were chugging along at a similar pace, The Craft helped create a very new feeling. Teen girls were dangerous magic, and that wasn't to be forgotten in a hurry.

Follow Hannah Ewens on Twitter.

A woman charged with three counts of attempted murder confers with her public defender in Daytona Beach, Florida. (AP Photo/The Daytona Beach News-Journal, Jim Tiller)

This story was co-published with the Marshall Project.

Earlier this year, when San Francisco public defender Mark Jacobs addressed a group of potential jurors in the murder trial of a young black man, he asked them point blank to consider whether they might judge him more harshly because of his race. "Look at my client," Jacobs said, noting his dark skin. "He's the stereotype of everything you think is scary."

Jacobs was surprised the judge allowed such explicit talk of race in the courtroom, but he was even more surprised at himself: He would not have made this sort of remark a few years ago. The moment reflected a rising awareness among public defenders that they may harbor the same hidden biases about race and ethnicity that are frequently attributed to police and prosecutors.

A growing body of research has attempted to draw links between "implicit bias"—beliefs that unconsciously drive decisions and behavior—and the racial disparities that cut across every stage of the criminal justice system, from arrest to charge to incarceration to release. One study found that black defendants in Connecticut had bail amounts 25 percent higher than comparable white defendants, and another found black defendants drew sentences 12 percent longer in federal courts.

Much of that research is focused on prosecutors, jurors, and judges, the triad that puts people away. But scholars are beginning to discuss how it also affects the work of public defenders, to the surprise of many. "I figured: We understand racism, we know our clients, we get it," says Jeff Adachi, the elected public defender of San Francisco. But now Adachi is one of the converted, running twice yearly all-day sessions for his staff in which they discuss how unconscious prejudices can sneak into their work. "It's like waking up from a dream," Jacobs recalled. Discovering research that correlated skin tone with the harshness of sentences "just made me sick." He remembered times in the past when he defended immigrants. "I'd think, well this case isn't as important as that of an American kid. It was a feeling of, they're just going to plead guilty, so why should I bother?"

" might manifest in whether the defender believes in the guilt or innocence of the person they're representing," says Phoebe Haddon, the chancellor of Rutgers University-Camden. "Or their assessment of their fellow counsel, the credibility of witnesses, whether to take a plea bargain."

Haddon and the American Bar Association are developing videos to push judges, prosecutors, and defenders to discuss bias, and the first features a string of judges in a rare show of penitence. William Missouri, a black retired circuit court judge from Maryland, says he studied his own sentencing patterns and found "I was biased against my own people." He looks stricken. "Being accused of bias is like a knife slicing your skin; the cut may be shallow, but the hurt is deep."

It goes beyond race: Cheryl Cesario, a former Chicago judge, admits that being Catholic meant that when Catholic defendants came before her, "I would expect more from them."

Data is scant, since multiple factors create sentencing disparities, but many defenders believe one of the main consequences of "implicit bias" is how much time they spend on cases. Their offices tend to be poorly funded and inundated with far more cases than they have time to handle. "They may expend more effort on cases in which they believe their client is factually innocent," Professors Song Richardson and Philip Atiba Goff wrote in a 2013 article for the Yale Law Journal.

If they are interpreting "ambiguous evidence," a "judgment of guilt may be cognitively easier to make because of the strong implicit association between blacks and crime." The surrender to implicit bias is exacerbated by stress, exhaustion, and speed—"exactly the context in which public defenders find themselves."

The research is still mostly theoretical, and the concrete suggestions tend to be vague. The video for judges suggests that they try to be more humble, slow down their work, and do more self-examination. Videos and other materials for public defenders and prosecutors will be released by the American Bar Association later this year. The association encourages all lawyers to take the Implicit Association Test, an online tool developed at Harvard University.

Anecdotally, increased awareness has emboldened more public defenders to raise the issue of unconscious bias more explicitly in the courtroom, as Jacobs did at the recent murder trial. Another defender in Adachi's office, Demarris Evans, told a judge she felt his refusal to release her client on his own recognizance was based on the fact that he was a tall black man. The judge threatened to hold her in contempt of court.

"If we don't see it in ourselves," Adachi said, "we're not going to be effective at our jobs."

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

Read: 'Hystopia' Imagines an America Where JFK Lived and the Vietnam War Never Ended

On Tuesday, Donald Trump lofted a pretty nuts idea during an interview with Fox News that he believes Ted Cruz's dad, Rafael, helped Lee Harvey Oswald plot the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Politico reports.

Rafael Cruz was allegedly recognized in a photo handing out pro-Fidel Castro pamphlets with Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans in August 1963, just a few months before JFK's November assassination by Oswald. Of course, this all comes from a National Enquirer story, and we all know how chummy Trump and the Enquirer are.

The photo was unearthed from the Warren Commission's report on JFK's assassination, but Cruz campaign communications director, Alice Stewart, guaranteed the Miami Herald that the Enquirer's got the wrong man, and Rafael isn't the person pictured.

It's just "another garbage story in a tabloid full of garbage," Stewart told the Herald.

The Enquirer, on the other hand, says it hired photo specialists to analyze actual photos of Rafael Cruz participating in a pro-Castro rally in 1959 with the picture of Oswald in August of '63. The paper insists it's unmistakably Ted Cruz's father.

"There's more similarity than dissimilarity ... it looks to be the same person, and I can say as much with a high degree of confidence," said Enquirer source Mitch Goldstone, president and CEO of ScanMyPhotos.

Rafael Cruz did support Castro, distribute pro-Castro propaganda, and was a devoted Marxist, but that doesn't necessarily mean he snapped one day and sought to murder the president.

Trump, during his Tuesday phoner with Fox, said that Cruz's dad "was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald's being—you know, shot. I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous ... What is this, right prior to his being shot, and nobody even brings it up. They don't even talk about that. That was reported, and nobody talks about it.

"I mean, what was he doing," Trump went on. "What was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death? Before the shooting? It's horrible."

Photo via Flickr user Alexander C. Kafka

The Ministry of Justice has recently revealed that there have been six murders and 100 suicides in prisons in England and Wales over the course of the last year. These figures are the highest on record for 25 years and make for uncomfortable reading when combined with the fact that assaults in prison totaled in excess of 20,500 in 2015 (an increase of 27 percent from the previous year), and reported incidents of self-harm among prisoners rose to more than 32,000 (an increase of 25 percent).

I teach at a prison, and in a welcome break from covering a three-week "motivation" course that has so far involved little more than watching the terrible prescribed video clips, Hulk Hogan talking about his divorce being the most bizarrely inexplicable, I am supervising the prisoners' library visits. In between stopping the inmates from trying to turn hardback dust jackets into roaches, I spoke to some of them to see what they made of the bleak prison welfare statistics, and what—if anything—they think needs to be done about them.

'ANY OF THAT SHIT, AND I'LL PACK THEIR BAG FOR THEM'

Gary, 23, has been in and out of prison since his late teens and is currently back inside for a breach of his license conditions. He tells me that while he'd clearly rather not be in prison, he doesn't consider it a big deal at this point and has built up a series of coping mechanisms to keep his head in a decent place. He tells me that of all the self-harmers he's been in a cell with, all have had this problem prior to entering prison, and typically it's connected to drug use and homelessness. What Gary is saying is anecdotal, but it does chime with what I've observed: Problems seem be be exacerbated rather than created while in prison. I ask whether he has ever witnessed any self-harming in the cell. "No chance. Any of that shit, and I'll pack their bag for them. Get out of my cell you rat!" This may seem harsh, but according to Gary, it's basic survival—he says he's got his work cut out to look after himself. He doesn't have the time or energy to get sucked into anyone else's drama.

"If they can't be arsed to feed us proper food, I don't think there's much chance of them sorting out counselors"

Gary is prone to occasional hyperbole, and I'm convinced that he'd at least try to help someone out who was self-harming. I notice a couple of thin white scars on his forearm, and while I don't press him on whether he has ever self-harmed—the scars could, of course, be nothing to do with that—I ask whether he thinks the prison could do more to help vulnerable inmates. "Yeah, they could, if they gave a shit. But look, if they can't be arsed to feed us proper food, I don't think there's much chance of them sorting out proper counselors and shit. We're just numbers to them, and it's better to accept that and just get through it whatever way works for you."

Gary's library loan: Japanese Tattoo by Sandi Fellman

'I KNOW A FELLA WHOSE CELLMATE KILLED HIMSELF IN THE NIGHT'

Nick, 40, is awaiting sentencing having pleaded guilty to his part in a conspiracy to supply Class A drugs; he is frustrated because two other members of the gang are currently still pleading not guilty, meaning that he can't be sentenced and gain access to the kind of prison jobs and courses that will help speed up a potential move to an open prison. Nick isn't surprised when he hears the latest murder and suicide statistics, and he goes on to explain his experience of suicides.

"I've known suicides, probably four or five, and in most cases, it's people you could have seen coming a mile off. I knew a fella whose cellmate killed himself in the middle of the night. He woke up to a dead body on the top bunk. He was a write-off for months after that. Generally, though, if you're not directly involved, no big deal. Every man for himself."

Nick's library loan: Ooh! What a Lovely Pair: Our Story by Ant McPartlin & Declan Donnelly

'FIRST-TIMERS SHITTING THEMSELVES MIGHT DO SOMETHING STUPID'

Philip, 30, has been sentenced to 30 months for assault. In the weeks since his sentencing, he has become involved in the prison peer mentoring scheme and is currently in training to be a listener (a friendly point of advice and shoulder to cry on for prisoners who don't want to go through official prison channels). I ask Philip what motivated him to take these courses. "It looks good on your record and can supposedly help with the judge, although obviously not in my fucking case," he laughs.

If I can help first-timers out then I'll do my best. Most of the screws won't, that's for sure

This prompts laughter around the table, and it becomes apparent that in what is a still an incredibly macho environment, the notion of talking through your feelings is seen as a sign of weakness, and schemes such as the peer mentoring and listeners are viewed more as a means to an end for better wages and lighter sentences. It's even suggested that people have trained as listeners in order to better facilitate selling drugs.

This is all a bit depressing, but Philip does say that he's taken some satisfaction from helping out a few of the younger lads he's come across via the peer mentoring. "First-timers proper shitting themselves are exactly the kind of kids who might do something stupid. If I can help them, then I'll do my best. Most of the screws won't that's for sure."

Philip's library loan: I Am Zlatan by Zlatan Ibrahimovic

'GANG KILLINGS WILL ALWAYS HAPPEN'

Paul, 35, is being released next week after serving a short sentence for non-payment of fines. This will have been his fourth time in prison, and he tells me that the only time he has ever felt worried in this environment was when a prisoner was murdered, seemingly arbitrarily, in 2014. "I couldn't sleep for about a week, literally not at all. Don't get me wrong, prisons are fucking horrible places, and I hate screws, but up to that point, I'd always felt safe. Even though they caught the cunt straight away, it just completely changed the atmosphere. The screws were on edge. People didn't want to come out of their cells..."

I ask Paul whether he thinks anything could have been done to avoid the murder. "Honestly I think it was a one-off. I've never seen anything like it before. He was a proper nutcase and probably somewhere along the line wasn't diagnosed. I think gang killings will always happen, though. You can try and keep people apart, but if they're that desperate to kill someone, they'll always find a way."

Paul's library loan: A Clash of Kings by George R.R. Martin

Speaking to the men in the prison library, it's clear that their focus is by and large on their own welfare, and this is fair enough—it's a tough situation they're in, and their priority has to be themselves. It's also evident that they have limited faith in the prison service when it comes to prisoner welfare, and while this might not be such a big problem for people who know how to handle themselves inside, it's a pretty major one for young and particularly vulnerable prisoners. Michael Gove's prison project, which looks to give prisoners who study hard early release, has some pretty lofty aims, but it's hard to see how any of them can be achieved without first ensuring that the weakest and most vulnerable prisoners are safe and not in immediate danger from either themselves or others.

Saskatoon's worst nightmare. Photo via Flickr user Doug Dillard

Just in case you needed another reason to avoid Saskatoon, the city's wildly archaic 'adult services bylaw' derailed a Suicide Girl's performance scheduled for Sunday night.