All images by Giles Clarke/Getty Images Reportage

In 2010, a magnitude seven earthquake hit the tiny Caribbean nation of Haiti, killing hundreds of thousands of people. Support flooded in from around the world, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie donated $1 million, Sean Penn set up a relief organization. But then the eyes of the world turned away from Haiti, to other horrors, other disasters.

Veteran photographer Giles Clarke has been visiting Haiti since 2011, running photography workshops for film students at the Cine Institute—Haiti's only free-tuition film school. His latest series "Waste in Time" documents the lives of 2000 Haitians he discovered working on a massive government-owned dump, just outside of Port-au-Prince.

You've shot all around the world and, obviously, scavenging is central to the economy in many poor communities. What made you want to shoot this dump in particular?
The difference about this one was the fact that the dump used to be a water source. This is where it's sort of symbolic of the Haitian corruption... I think it is 163rd worst country in the world in terms of corruption. The worst thing about it is obviously the the trucks that come there are all government paid and yet there's no regulation of what they dump. There are no medical providers, you see it in the pictures, people are just working in the most horrific of conditions.

How did the Haitians there respond to you photographing their lives?
It's not somewhere I was welcome to start with. It's hostile. But I went back a few times and eventually I became somewhat accepted and I began shooting. Many of these people are under 18, with some on the run from authorities. There's simmering gang violence, there's a lot of drug taking. It's a version of hell on earth but it's also a source of income and home to well over 1,500 people.

The Caped Crusader walks the rooftops of Gotham in 'Batman: Arkham Knight'

Rocksteady saved Batman from the depths of video game hell. While that statement is quite deliberately hyperbolic, when you take a minute to think about it there's more than a moderate amount of truth in it. Long after we'd all experienced the delights of Batman Returns or Batman: The Video Game, there was a constant stream of garbage that no one in their right mind would ever claim as good. It's why most "Best Batman Games Ever" lists often throw some extremely average titles into the mix. You run out of choices very quickly.

This, however, is why London's Rocksteady Studios deserve even more credit for the love, care, and attention they gave DC's finest creation, introducing a digital vision worthy of The Dark Knight and going as far as to win over the Call of Duty generation. The Warner Bros.-affiliated company's Arkham franchise—counting 2009's Arkham Asylum, 2011's City, and 2015's Knight (Batman: Arkham Origins being the work of Warner Bros. Games Montreal)—is one of gaming's most popular*, and a huge reason for this is the understanding the Rocksteady team has for the license. And this can be seen right across the three versions, the three visions, of Gotham it has presented to us since 2009.

Crime Alley, as seen in 'Batman: Arkham City'

No area of Asylum, City, or Knight has been created without ensuring essential elements of Batman are expertly woven into the mix. Be it the nods to Jason Todd or Hugo Strange in Asylum, Crime Alley in City, or the numerous Easter eggs relating to other DC characters in Knight—including a giant billboard for Lex Corp—Rocksteady found a way to make each a joy to exist within but also littered with landmarks that leave little doubt as to where you currently are. It's a world you've known and loved for years, skillfully brought to life from the latest minds to be given the keys to the city.

That's no easy task either. Aside from competing with dozens of other interpretations and what fans summarize in their head, Rocksteady had the added obstacle of establishing Gotham as not only suitable for play, but also believable as a functioning city. Every road, feature, and district had to effortlessly connect with the next, so that the original neo-gothic adaptation based on the darker side of America could be re-imagined as a space more than fit to house a game.

Batman inside the Asylum

It starts with Asylum, a far more claustrophobic and suffocating setting than its successors, but one that remains incredibly unique. Treated as an island off the coast of Gotham, Rocksteady's version of the home for the criminally insane is pitched perfectly. Allowing for the dark, tense, and, frankly, disturbing moments that many of the best Batman stories embrace, Asylum is harrowing in places, largely due to the environment you find yourself in. The prison is not an enjoyable place to be, every corner potentially housing a threat or challenge.

This is juxtaposed, though, with the mini open worlds that connect the individual wings together. The contrast is striking, especially when you first realize there's more here than just tight corridors—it's more evidence to how smart Rocksteady was in its approach. It's all pieced together exquisitely and, furthermore, completely designed to incorporate every Bat-gadget that's at your disposal. From the grappling hook—constantly impressive given how the trilogy is built, so that you never actually have to set foot on the ground—to the line launcher, nothing has been ham-fisted or squeezed in. It fits, because each part has been meticulously thought out.

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Related: Watch VICE's new episode of 'Open Worlds,' made possible by NVIDIA, featuring 'Batman: Arkham Origins' with freerunner James Kingston

The next step was always going to see Gotham treated as more than just a pretty view, and Arkham City was an instant triumph. Constructed with the idea of letting you "become The Batman"—and honestly, who didn't suspend their disbelief with ease at least once?—it's a blueprint in how to build a playground without sacrificing years of lore and history, because everything's here: the aforementioned Crime Alley, GCPD, the Monarch Theatre, ACE Chemicals. All feature, and all exist to further the experience. You can brood on a clock tower or glide through the skies if you want, actively taking watch over Batman's domain. And guess what? You'll see crime ravaging the streets that you can swoop down to stop. You're not just playing someone else's game. You're stepping into someone else's shoes. That's just not possible without a living, breathing Gotham.

Which brings us to Arkham Knight, the perfect showcase as to why Gotham's sole purpose is to bring a comic book character out of the pages. City's buildings and layout were undoubtedly put in place to allow Batman's more visceral qualities to come to the forefront. Whether you're descending from above to take an opponent unawares or flying over rooftops to further the story, this was the in-your-face Batman so many of us have loved reading about over the years. Knight ramps this idea up even further, creating a playspace that's specifically fashioned to allow a new addition to the series, the Batmobile, space to shine. Other games may have introduced the car in order to advertise such a fact on a box, but none have made it feel so seamless and important as to what is trying to be achieved.

Even the geography of the roads and streets is a wonder to behold, giving you the opportunity to speed around Gotham as competently as any racing game. Certain disdain may be thrown its way in terms of questionable stealth sections using the heavily armored vehicle, but chasing Firefly or ploughing through scenery that explodes on impact is a unique and exhilarating feeling that could have so easily gone wrong. It's just another example of how Rocksteady rarely screw up, unlike other developers who've had the same template to work with. They devised worlds that felt like Nickelodeon cartoons and vehicle sections that were borderline insulting. Just go spend a few minutes in the long-forgotten Rise of Sin Tzu.

The Batmobile comes out to play in 'Arkham Knight'

The exception to this rule is actually Warner Bros. Games Montreal. The Canadian team took what Rocksteady had carved out and ensured it didn't drop the ball, 2013's Arkham Origins not only adding further proof of how beautiful Arkham City is, but also how much mileage it's possible to get out of this world. Winding back the clock and showing a different side to the locale—the game is set five years before the events of Asylum—the real appeal is the areas you fondly remember. Much like your own hometown, you know the quickest routes and position of important monuments. You don't just walk around it. You live it, the added snow making sure while Origins might be considered the weakest of the Arkham games, it's still a memory lane joy.

The ultimate praise, however, even with countless missions, thugs to punch in the face, and iconic villains to track down, is that there's as much to take away from the Arkham verse simply by exploring what it has on offer. A simulator by any other name, each version of Gotham can be delved into as a spectator, holding a sense of satisfaction and entertainment that most games struggle to achieve at all. Rocksteady has proven time and time again that they're world-building extraordinaires. The fact they managed to do that while dealing with something as truly special as Batman is just the clichéd icing on the cake.

(*Colossal PC version screw-ups aside.)

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Photo via Flickr user Slava

All Rebecca Chamorro wanted was to get her tubes tied.

The 33-year-old mother of two from Redding, California, was pregnant with her third baby, and she and her husband decided they didn't want more kids. So she consulted with her doctor, who offered to do a "tubal ligation"—a routine procedure that involves sealing off the fallopian tubes to prevent fertilization—immediately following her cesarean section scheduled for January 2016.

Then the hospital stepped in. Mercy Medical Center Redding (MMCR), a Catholic facility owned by national healthcare giant Dignity Health, barred Chamorro's doctor from doing the procedure. The reason? A religious-based ethical directive that deems it "intrinsically immoral" for Catholic hospital staff to partake in sterilization procedures.

Now, with her newborn baby, Chamorro sits at the center of a civil rights lawsuit against Dignity Health that raises big questions about patient autonomy and access. The lawsuit, originally filed by American Civil Liberties Union in late 2015 and updated after Chamorro gave birth, gained major support last week from the influential California Medical Association (CMA), which represents 41,000 physicians in the state. In court papers, the CMA argued that Dignity Health's religious-based rule against postpartum sterilization undermines the doctor-patient relationship, forces "substandard care" on female patients, and violates a California legal doctrine that bars corporate interference with medical decisions.

"This is an excellent example of where a doctor and his or her patient make a sound, reasonable medical decision, and they cannot carry it through because of a corporate policy," said Dr. Ruth Haskins, president-elect of the CMA, which has petitioned the court to join the lawsuit.

Plus, she added, it's illegal. "Corporations cannot make medical healthcare decisions—and that's exactly what's going on here."

In the roiling debates over women's reproductive rights, tubal ligation might seem not as big of a flashpoint for controversy as, say, the Affordable Care Act's contraception mandate. But getting your tubes tied has proven a big issue in Redding. Months before Chamorro's suit was filed last December, a patient named Rachel Miller won her own fight against Dignity Health, compelling the San Francisco–based, Catholic-affiliated nonprofit to allow her to get the procedure after the ACLU threatened to file a sex discrimination lawsuit.

According to court papers, Chamorro's frustrations began last fall when she consulted with her physician, Dr. Samuel Van Kirk, about doing the tubal ligation. It's a common procedure embraced by millions of women (there's a version for men too), which only takes a couple minutes to perform while the patient is still in the delivery room. But Dr. Van Kirk had been denied by MMCR dozens of times in the past, just like he was with Chamorro. Like many of Dignity Health's California facilities, the hospital abides by "ethical and religious directives" set down by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. It's a 43-page handbook of rules and guidelines that forbids abortions and assisted suicide, and allows sterilization for men and women only in cases requiring treatment of "a present and serious pathology" with no simpler options possible. Dignity Health oversees both Catholic and secular hospitals, but all of them are required to comply with these company-wide policies.

Unable to get the procedure done at MMCR, Chamorro (who declined to be interviewed) had nowhere more realistic to go. Redding, a city of nearly 90,000 located on the Sacramento River in Northern California, is home to multiple hospitals, but Mercy Medical is the only one that offers maternity services. The nearest facility that permitted the procedure and that covered Chamorro's insurance was at least 70 miles away.

Watch: VICE meets University of Arizona's slut-shaming campus preacher.

According to Elizabeth Gill, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Northern California, it's a problem that other patients have experienced as well, as Catholic hospitals have grown into the nation's largest group of nonprofit healthcare providers, according to the Catholic Health Association of the United States. While not-for-profit health networks like Dignity Health have garnered millions of dollars in federal and state funding, Gill says that the ethical directives have effectively cut off patients from some healthcare options.

"There's a real conflict between women getting basic healthcare and these religious directives," Gill said.

Related: Hospital Regulations Are Forcing Women to Steal Their Own Placentas

The Dignity Health lawsuit is one of the latest in the ACLU's legal campaign against Catholic hospitals. Last December, the civil rights group filed suit against Michigan-based provider Trinity Health Corporation, and in 2013, it went a step further, suing the actual bishop authors of the religious directives on behalf of a woman who was denied treatment at a Catholic hospital in Muskegon, Michigan, while she was having a miscarriage. In Chamorro's case, which was filed in San Francisco Superior Court, she's joined as a plaintiff by an advocacy group called the Physicians for Reproductive Health.

The plaintiffs accuse Dignity Health of discriminating against Chamorro based on her gender, and also violating California medical laws that bar using non-medical criteria for approving sterilization surgeries and that restrict corporate meddling in medical decisions. After the suit was filed, Dignity Health's lawyers shot back with a strongly worded response, calling the lawsuit "an unprecedented attack on a Catholic hospital." They argued that Dignity Health has the right to religious autonomy, and that Mercy Medical Center Redding isn't running afoul of California's bar on the corporate practice of medicine "because the decision not to provide ethically prohibited medical services is the practice of religion, not medicine."

In January, days before Chamorro went into labor, a Superior Court judge ruled in Dignity Health's favor, denying Chamorro's request for a preliminary injunction ordering the hospital to do the procedure. Judge Ernest H. Goldsmith wrote that the plaintiff is "unlikely to prevail on the merits" of the case because the sterilization policy also applies to men, and that Chamorro could get the procedure done at another hospital. It's a tentative ruling that gives vindication to Lori Dangberg, vice president of the Alliance of Catholic Health Care, which represents Catholic healthcare systems and hospitals in California.

"I think it gets down to our First Amendment right to be able to provide services to the community that is aligned with our ethical and moral values," said Dangberg. "We make that known. It's not like it's some secret. Physicians understand when they have practice privileges in our hospitals what we do and do not allow."

But Haskins, of the California Medical Association, thinks that the sanctity of patient care is being compromised by the religious rule against postpartum tubal ligation. Since Chamorro wasn't able to get a postpartum tubal ligation, Haskins says this now presents limited options. There's birth control, or there's an interval surgical procedure—a tubal ligation scheduled separately from childbirth, which carries higher surgical risk, leads to time away from the newborn baby, and costs a lot more.

"Not only is it not reasonable, but it's not safe, it's not healthy, and it's not medically appropriate," Haskins said of the Redding hospital's ban on the procedure. "To take somebody who's in need and send them to another hospital disrupts the doctor-patient relationship in a way that is really not OK."

Follow Peter Holslin on Twitter.

Barbara in residence at her bus stop. All photos by Karen McLeod

At first glance, Penge is just like any other slab of suburban London. There's the usual array of chicken and charity shops on the main street, while rows of solid Victorian houses coexist next to equally solid 1960s tower blocks. It is archetypal commuterland, a place that exists mostly to be passed through.

Yet one thing sets Penge apart from other nowhere towns in the area. Venture down Croydon Road, and you've got a reasonably good chance of finding Penge's poet laureate, Barbara Brownskirt, in residence at the 197 bus stop. Indefatigable, prolific, and utterly unpublishable, Barbara is the comedic alter-ego of writer Karen McLeod, and according to McLeod, a "manifestation of bitterness, anger, lesbian cliché, railing against her lot through poetry. She might be rubbish, but she doesn't know it."

Having published her acclaimed debut novel, In Search of the Missing Eyelash, in 2007, McLeod—who has a background in performance art and a lifetime connection to Penge—began to develop the character as both a homage to suburban sadness and a slightly mocking antidote to the pretensions of literary performance.

By the time Barbara was fully formed, McLeod had started to feel uncomfortable with some of her other work. "I'd written an act where I was to appear as an escaped patient from the Maudsley Hospital, deluded enough to believe she was Virginia Woolf," she says. "She wrote odd poetry and barked 'Woolf' a lot. I realized I wasn't comfortable portraying someone with mental health problems for comedic purposes, so I started thinking about what kind of character could evoke both pathos in an audience and yet be comedic."

So McLeod set her eye to observing the lonely, wandering souls in the street, stumbling "in their out-of-time raincoats and sensible shoes" and thinking, Who are you? Who do you go home to at night? What does your day consist of?

McLeod also drew on colorful elements of her own youth to construct the personality of her new performative alter-ego. She'd performed in her 20s as a "Victor/Victoria," a woman impersonating a man impersonating a woman. This fascination with appearance and the multi-layered consequences of dressing up led McLeod to create Barbara.

"I decided in a queer world of performance, where drag and elements of it are used all the time, I would do their opposite. Go drab rather than drag, lonely rather than fabulous," she explains.

Barbara's hair is hidden under the hood of jacket—hair being, as McLeod outlines, a major feminine signifier: "Take away a woman's hair and makeup, and you are immediately stripped of any obvious gender." She found an A-line brown skirt in the thrift store, bought some small lace up canvas shoes, and flesh-colored knee-high socks and got started writing the worst poetry she could.

Barbara was to be a tribute to everyone McLeod had seen in years studying performance art at college and attending scores of spoken word poetry nights: all the dreadful pieces, stop-motion films, and chronically self-indulgent poets ("The worst poets always seemed to be the ones who would always have ten more poems to read"). She became fascinated by the way audiences get stuck, unable to leave when someone truly awful is onstage—the writers who have their 15 minutes and plan to relentlessly milk every second.

That feeling of being a captive in the relationship between performer and audience was a significant element in developing Barbara's persona, with her 21 volumes of unpublished poetry and absolutely unshakeable belief in her own brilliance. I wonder if there isn't a worry that it must have pissed off a few of the more over-earnest elements of the amateur performance crew, who might think it's a bit of a dig?

"I'm not so sure if anyone who's seen her has taken offense in that way," says McLeod. "I think she is understood as a fringe performer where art, politics, poetry, and theater coincide. I've mostly performed alongside other cabaret/literary performers who are really established and so not of the same ilk as the kind of performer who Barbara is sending up."

She admits, though, that some writers hate the idea of Barbara Brownskirt, though they haven't watched her perform, "as they think she is ridiculing poetry, when really she is a send up of a certain type of over-confident, narcissistic performer who thinks the world needs their poetry above all else."

You get the impression that's not a delusion that would last long in Penge. It's a chunk of suburban sprawl that's difficult to explain to outsiders, an unclassifiable smush of London and village. "I honestly love Penge. I grew up here in the 70s and moved back after living abroad in the late-90s," says McLeod. "My family is just around the corner, and I can walk down the street and say hello to people who have lived here for years. I like the fact it's working class and a bit rough in the center, but up the hill is the arty world of Crystal Palace. It's still vibrant, gobby, and not too homogenized, yet."

Barbara has recently played shows at the Royal Albert Hall and is booked for Latitude Festival. Does it ever feel at times that Barbara has slightly overtaken McLeod's own life?

"She's been more in-demand that me," she says. "I think as an alter-ego she's somehow saved me from feeling unheard. Maybe that's where she came from, a place of ultimate frustration that I wasn't producing the art I wanted. But I'll always have one eye on proving that Karen McLeod is the lead writer of this dual existence. In the end, we'll see who's the most popular."

Follow Barbara Brownskirt on Twitter.

All screenshots feature combat from 'The Easter War,' or 'World War Bee,' and are courtesy of CCP

It's rare for a video games hack to be writing about a war. Generally speaking in this space, "war" is just a euphemism for competition whether it occurs within the industry—see EA's "war" with Activision, back when Battlefield 3 was gunning for Call of Duty, as an example—or between players in-game over short, brutal multiplayer matches.

War in gaming is very rarely viewed like its real-world counterpart: a conflict that is long, brutal, and costly and in which both sides will use everything from hi-tech weapons, to propaganda, to espionage to take down their enemies.

EVE: Online is slightly different in this regard. Icelandic developer CCP's long-running space-opera MMO, in which players zip about a massive galaxy in spaceships, trading and building and fighting and destroying, has been turned into a warzone on numerous occasions—and these eruptions of violence bear stark resemblance to actual historical conflicts. Empires have fallen and risen, alliances have been forged and shattered, and thousands of players have taken part in epic battles racking up damage that's been valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars in real-world currency.

Obviously a crucial way in which EVE: Online's wars differ is that there are no actual fatalities. You can lose ships, status, money, but nobody's showing up at your house with a signed death warrant. But in many other aspects, watching a war unfold in EVE bears an eerie similarity to any other human conflict.

And as is the case in any war, only those with their boots on the ground—or in this case, the bridges of EVE's array of armed-and-dangerous spaceships—know the reality of the situation. For those watching at home, doing their best to follow the coverage, it's difficult to know what precisely is going on.

EVE: Online's current war (widely known as World War Bee, and also the Easter War) is being fought between two alliances—the Imperium (formerly CFC and collectively known as Goonswarm) and the Money Badger Coalition (MBC). Across the game and into associated online media channels, communication platforms are being flooded with propaganda, misinformation, and outright bullshit, making accurate coverage a real challenge—just as we see play out on the nightly news, where the stakes are higher but the methodology's the same. Every EVE-related missive posted on the web usually features a ton of comments railing against the author for taking sides.

There's one way around this, though—at least to the extent where information is coming from the proverbial horse's mouth, rather than it already having been digested into so much slop. Go straight to the people in command of the opposing forces.

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Related: Watch VICE's film on competitive gaming, eSports

"One of the things that's difficult from a media perspective is that any public statements that are made are part of the game itself," says Alex Gianturco, a.k.a. the Mittani, the head of the Imperium. "It's an attempt to write the history, to get the narrative taken up by the publication of the highest status, to seize control of the conventional wisdom. That rarely has very little to do with the reality on the ground within the game."

In a way, EVE's metagame trolls the very people trying to cover it—both for the game's audience and any curious onlookers. It's a problem that even those who have taken it upon themselves to chronicle the game's history have had to contend with. Andrew Groen, a journalist and self-styled EVE historian (who has written a book on the game, Empires of EVE, documenting its greatest wars), says that accurate reporting requires any interested parties to take every metagame statement with a skip-load of salt.

"This exact problem is why I write history rather than current events in EVE," he tells me. "The narrative and the storytelling in EVE are so important to the leaders in the game that it is very deeply spun. Every narrative in the current setting is always somebody's narrative. You can't take it at face value."

The proof of what Groen is saying can be found by casting an eye at some of the material published since CCP fired off a press release at the beginning of April, advertising the war taking place in its game.

PC Gamer has posited that the war started over a Kickstarter for a book about a recent conflict in EVE called the Fountain War. Since the crowdfunding initiative was backed by and would have financially benefited the Imperium, these reports contend that the war was ignited by other players in the game becoming pissed that the Mittani's crew was trying to monetize their experiences.

But according to Peter Farrell—a.k.a. Elise Randolph, one of Pandemic Legion's leaders (a faction aligned to the MBC)—the Kickstarter had very little to do with the start of EVE's current shenanigans

"I'm sure some of the thousands of players involved are really happy to see the Imperium fall because of the Kickstarter," Farrell says. "But none of the people in the fleet commander channels are here to punish a failed Kickstarter."

Gianturco is in agreement with Farrell—though that's one of the few things the Imperium and MBC do agree on.

"There's a link you can check out on pastebin," he says. "There's a thread of leaked enemy comms channels that date back to last December, that show you how it started."

"Like most real wars, the one currently raging in EVE is taking place due to a perfect storm of events, rather than a single cause."

"The war began because a guy in the game named Boson Dubstep found a backer named Lenny Kravitz," he continues, "and Lenny wanted to be a player in the metagame—kind of like the Iron Bank in Game of Thrones. Bosen realized this—check the thread—and used the money out of Lenny's wallet to hire mercenaries to attack the Imperium."

Farrell and Gianturco's comments back up a report on Rock, Paper, Shotgun that points to a conflict between virtual gambling site I Want Isk ("Isk" being the in-game currency of EVE) and Space Monkey Alliance (a faction within the Imperium) as a crucial tipping point. When SMA welched on an amount it owed to I Want Isk, one of the site's bankers (a character named Lenny Kravitz1) decided to finance some mercenaries to hit them and things just spiraled from there.

But even though the IWI/SMA grudge has more credibility than the Kickstarter reports, opining that one event sparked off a war of this size is kind of like saying that World War I was started solely due to the fact that someone decided to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Like most real wars, the one currently raging in EVE is taking place due to a perfect storm of events, rather than a single cause.

"The war started because the Imperium seemed a bit weak, and many people were fiscally motivated by wealthy in-game bankers," Farrell says. "Once enough people got involved, other parties felt more comfortable joining in the fray. People like to fight the biggest empire ever, not anything more than that."

"When people think that you're weak or that you're losing, anyone who has always wanted take their shot at you, they feel safe to do so," says Gianturco, going on to call bullshit on CCP's statement concerning the war, advertising it as "the best time to join EVE" since it's likely to feature a ton of epic battles.

"What we've seen from official statements from CCP about the cause of the war has no relation to the actual cause or even the start date of the war," he says. "There is an attempt something that's been happening as far back as early January as a big pile of massive battles shot out through press releases in the hope that people will rush to join the game, while serving Goonswarm up on a platter."

The Imperium, he says, has been combatting the MBC by avoiding the temptation to engage in huge fights. Rather, it has deployed a Fabian strategy—abandoning its territory in the face of superior numbers, moving all of its major assets and ships out of harm's way, and slowing down the game. Basically, the intention here is to make the game a grind and as unappealing to play as possible.

Of course, this could simply be more spin. However, Gianturco's statements are backed up by one of his more prominent enemies.

"The Imperium are, in fact, trying to make the war more boring and slow the pace down," confirms Farrell. "But that is solely because the MBC has a tremendous amount of momentum, and their military strategy is to just wait for the MBC to tire themselves out, and resort to in-fighting."

"MBC is probably a month or two away from causing catastrophic damage," he says. "If this dynamic changes, or if the Imperium reacts in a strange way, then the war can carry on smoldering for upwards of six months."

Continued coverage of EVE's war is going to be tricky. While it's helpful to have leaders on both sides sit down and confirm one or two details about the causes and state of the conflict, following it from the outside while remaining accurate looks to be impossible. Between the metagame and media trolling, though, it's apparent that the war for the game's narrative is as important as any territory or resources that can be won through gameplay itself. The winning side gets to write a pivotal chapter the game's 13-year history and, as Orwell once succinctly pointed out: "Who controls the present now controls the past. Who controls the past now controls the future."

VICE Gaming attended the 2016 EVE Fanfest in Reykjavik, Iceland, and will be running content from that amazing gathering of EVE fans from around the world very soon.

Follow Nick Cowen on Twitter.

Having a watermelon is basically like having a kid, right? Stock photo via Getty

Having and raising a child is the strangest thing that will happen to most people in their lifetimes. A growth develops inside your body and then pushes its way out in an unimaginably painful way. The doctor hands you a double handful of wailing flesh and tells you it lives with you now. It's then your responsibility to teach the thing to walk and speak and pretend to be a person the way you have been pretending for years. Somehow, it's something lots and lots of people want, this smaller version of themselves that will grow its own hates and angers and loves. You'd think that in 2016 we'd have a better way of making more people, but here we are.

The argument for maternity or paternity leave is that the arrival of a child is a rare and incredibly stressful occasion and dealing with it warrants a break from work. There's also the idea that a society so advanced its citizens can summon pizza to their door by simply tapping a button on a phone should make sure that parents in that society are not forced to abandon their newborns to jobs that probably aren't all that important in the first place. Maternity leave is one of those things that Europeans get but Americans don't, like government-provided healthcare and not being shot, and there's been a push lately to give US workers the same sorts of paid leave that their counterparts across the Atlantic already have.

You wouldn't really know about that push if you read only the New York Post, which in the past week has gone on a trollish tear, publishing op-eds from two women who say that they should get maternity leave for adopting pets and for doing nothing in particular. Let's take a look at what Meghann Foye from the "meternity" camp has to say:

There's something about saying "I need to go pick up my child" as a reason to leave the office on time that has far more gravitas than, say, "My best friend just got ghosted by her OkCupid date and needs a margarita"—but both sides are valid.

And here's "pawternity" leave fan Lindsay Putnam, who is also the Post's feature editor:

I couldn't help but think that, just as Jameson was getting used to me, he feared I, too, was abandoning him. The guilt continues today: While my co-workers with kids walk out the door at 6 PM, no one seems to care that I also have a child at home waiting for dinner.

Obviously, dogs and margaritas are fine things, but they are not children. A friend can nurse her sorrows without you; you can leave a dog unsupervised for hours and not worry about it dying. Adopting a dog is not a biological imperative, a dog does not come bursting out of your vagina—the list of differences goes on. As for the "sabbatical-like break that allows women and, to a lesser degree, men to shift their focus to the part of their lives that doesn't revolve around their jobs" that Foye talks about, that's a vacation.

The Post, in the oldest of tabloid traditions, is clearly serving up these kinds of essays as rage bait. The same day the "meternity" article appeared, one of the Post's own columnists tore it apart, writing, "If you've got a case of the sads, or sudden-onset reflectivitis, that's just a personality problem—not a reason to take off work."

Other takes at other places followed, including a thoughtful one from Laura June at New York's the Cut. "I came away wondering if the article wasn't somehow emblematic of the entire problem our nation has with mothers in particular, and parents in general," she wrote, "i.e. we aren't curious about their lives, we do almost nothing to support them, and we consider them an unwelcome burden on all fronts."

The famously conservative, Donald Trump–endorsing Post might also have another agenda: to make the idea of paid leave of any sort seem superfluous. Even the Post would never criticize the notion that new mothers need time away from work, but when New York State passed a sweeping new paid family leave law earlier this month, Betsy McCaughey, one of the paper's right-wing columnists, called it "reckless" and a "liberal pipe dream" that was "part of an alarming national trend of fixing social problems by looting workers' paychecks." (The Post routinely criticizes other policies meant to help the poor, including the $15 minimum wage.) Publishing Foye and Putnam's columns can be seen as a way of advancing a similar, if sneakier, point: Isn't it silly that coddled white-collar workers want time off to walk their dogs and go on Eat, Pray, Love–inspired drinking junkets?

Maybe, but that's the point of paid vacation days. They're yours to do what you like with—to find yourself, to Netflix and chill, to (in Foye's case) write a novel about a woman who fakes a pregnancy to get a cheeky vacation. The core problem, which you probably won't find much discussion of in the Post's op-ed pages, is that many people can't take a vacation, period. As of 2015, nearly a quarter of Americans didn't get any paid time off at all; only 13 percent of workers get paid family leave, forcing many low-income women to return to their jobs two weeks after they give birth. Meanwhile, some UK companies are offering "pawternity" leave, and a few businesses now offer unlimited vacation time—but these are cushy benefits accrued by people working for shiny tech startups and other in-demand professionals who have the leverage to demand such perks.

It's easy to slam Foye and Putnam for dismissing having a kid as being on par with having a dog or a vague sense of existential dread. But it's also frustrating to watch them make impassioned cases for time off for "pet parents" and workaholic women without making any connections to the wider world. You don't deserve a break because your dog needs to be housebroken or you're burned out—you deserve a break because everyone does.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

Troy Smokes and Teddy Thompson, who grew up in New Haven's crack-ridden projects in the 1980s. Photos by the author unless otherwise noted

When Troy Smokes started shooting hoops for Baltimore's Coppin State University in 1988, friends from his hometown of New Haven, Connecticut, would cram into beat-up cars and drive to Maryland to watch. During his sophomore year, the caravan returned—this time in souped-up foreign cars. The crew ran around his campus with wads of money, chasing girls and a good time.

"We're hustling," Smokes recalls being told. "Cocaine... You'll never guess who's running the projects."

When Smokes came home to the Elm Haven housing projects, better known as "The Tribe," he saw a man called "Smash," his comic book–reading buddy from sixth grade, getting his hair braided on Dixwell Avenue, bodyguards all around.

Smash was the new boss on the block.

It'd been eight years since Smash was sucked into the foster care system and the friends separated, but the 20-year-old drug lord recognized his middle-school pal. Their friendship picked up not far from where it left off, but instead of comic books, the two began flipping through drug money. Like magic, Smash could turn $200 into $600. He'd buy motorcycles on a whim, and the two friends would go riding. For all Smokes could tell, there was nothing to it.

No wars, no worries. Just fun, easy money.

During the crack epidemic of the 1980s and 90s, some young men of color seeking a way out of urban poverty got deep in the drug game. But while the occasional player saw their fortune skyrocket, many were shot down by competitors, arrested and incarcerated, or simply fell back into blighted neighborhoods.

For Smokes, the good times continued until one summer night in 1989, when he noticed Smash was weirdly jumpy. As they walked the block, two of Smash's enforcers came up to him. Smokes remembers them saying, "This guy is around the corner. Do you want us to go kill him?'"

"'Yea,'" replied Smash. "'If he's over there, go kill him.'"

Then Smash held out a gun to Smokes and said, "'Whether you're with me or not, they're going to come for you.'"

"The Tribe" projects in New Haven in 1986. Courtesy of Library of Congress

"In some ways, New Haven's story is like the story of many cities in the 70s and 80s," says Michael Sierra-Arevalo, a doctoral candidate in sociology at Yale University in New Haven whose work focuses on gangs and urban violence. "You throw pervasive unemployment and economic deprivation on top of the persistent racial and geographic disparities... and you have what amounts to a tinder box of social ills. Crack was the match."

The resulting explosion of the crack-cocaine market hit many New Haven residents with addictions they couldn't afford, while landing others positions of extravagant power. Ambitious young men like Smash jockeyed for control of lucrative sales turf that, once obtained, was defended by force of arms.

Another trafficker from the era, Teddy Thompson, recalls how when New York street dealers began trying to move in on New Haven's market, the local crews bared their teeth. "They were getting shot and killed, put in body bags and being sent back to New York," he tells me.

On the summer night that Smokes was offered the gun, a Jamaican crew was trying to take control of the Tribe, he says. Smash fought back and, after a week of bloody struggle, the Jamaicans relented. Smash kept his hold on the Tribe, only to be hit a year later with two homicide charges. "One he did," Smokes says, "and one he didn't."

But even after seeing his friend and mentor go down, he was unfazed. "Money is a drug itself," he insists. And he was hooked.

The 20-year-old dropped out of college and began trafficking cocaine in bulk out of New York and into New Haven and Baltimore. Profits came fast, and over the years, so did a small fleet of roadrunners, he says: the Infiniti Q45, the Nissan 300ZX, a Sterling, a couple of Mercedes, and few Japanese motorcycles. Smokes also bought two CD shops, a clothing store, a barber shop, and a rim shop, each of which brought in legal profits, he claims.

But the real money was under the table.

Smokes recalls how a nine- or 12-year-old kid working as a lookout for a street dealer could bring home $500 a week. A dealer's runner could make double that. And on a single good day, dealers themselves could rake in north of $25,000 before lunch. Smokes was even higher on the food chain, dealing exclusively in weight (that is, bulk trafficking).

According to Assistant Police Chief Achilles "Archie" Generoso of the New Haven Police Department, the majority of these profits weren't coming from the wallets of inner-city addicts but funneled in from Connecticut's suburbs, some of the wealthiest in the country. White buyers came into New Haven on the I-91 and I-95 highways to pick up bundles of the powdered party drug to resell in suburban bars over the weekend. Their money filtered up through the hierarchy of street dealers, lieutenants, and captains, pooling in the pockets of linchpins who held open the coke faucets flooding the city's projects.

Assistant New Haven Police Chief Achilles "Archie" Generoso

As a trafficker in both New Haven and Baltimore, Smokes was loaded. But for all his money and sports cars, there was no chance for escape. After a decade of trafficking, he had become an essential node in the distribution network run by a Baltimore street "family" whose name he couldn't (and still won't) divulge. Knowing too much to simply tip his hat and ride into the sunset, Smokes insists he had only two ways out: either in the back of a police cruiser, or a hearse.

In 1998, Smokes got the cruiser. Charged with conspiracy to distribute, his attorney made a deal with the prosecutor that got him five years, of which he served two and a half, he explains. While inside, he read Visions for Black Men by Na'im Akbar, along with Makes Me Wanna Holler by Nathan McCall, and spoke with Black Muslims who urged him not to return to his former life. When he was released, Smokes was taunted for "falling off"—quitting the drug game—but swallowed his pride, earned a degree from Quinnipiac University, and rose to be a director of logistics at ICON International, Inc., a finance company in Stamford, Connecticut.

Today, New Haven's drug game is both less profitable and at least somewhat less violent, but the city's streets are no fairytale. Guns are routinely drawn over real or imagined affronts, and a single instance of violence can still erupt into a retaliatory chain of killings. While the FBI and NHPD busted up the city's most aggressive crews, the vacuum was filled with younger, more fragmented ones. Some of these claim allegiance to Bloods, Crips, Pirus, or Brims, though sometimes they have little if any connection to those gangs, according to Sierra-Arevalo.

Monterey Place, the mixed-income townhouse community where the Tribe once dealt

The Elm Haven housing project in which Smokes grew up has since been torn down, and in its place stands a neighborhood of mixed-income townhouses where the distant wail of police sirens is easily drowned out by the din of wind chimes. Much of the Tribe's residents has dispersed across New Haven. Many of those who, like Smokes, chose the rougher path either lost their lives or, like Smash are locked up in prison and therefore invisible.

"We lost out on a generation of brilliant men," Smokes says. But he's trying to save a few from the next.

A biker, Smokes founded M-pire MC, a charitable motorcycle club, which recently gave 15 local high school girls in New Haven tickets to see Rihanna in concert. For the boys, the group raffled off a March Madness themed paraphernalia including a pair of Nike Jordans. "When you spend years doing negative things," Smokes says, "you've got to balance that out."

By way of his own children, Smokes hopes to further even the balance.

"You watch The Godfather enough times, what Vito wanted more than anything was for his kids not to have to live the life that he led," he says. His youngest son is now in private school, his oldest is about to finish college. He tells them not to feel as if they're missing out on the action of the streets. "A lot of it is bullshit," Smokes now says of that life.

"When you don't have to see the inside of a jail cell or the other side of a gun," Smokes says, that "is where life really begins."

Daniel Shkolnik is an associate editor at the Daily Nutmeg in New Haven, Connecticut.

If you leave out the novel he co-wrote under a pseudonym where an attractive woman plays professional ice hockey and sleeps with a lot of different men, Don DeLillo's Zero K, out today from Scribner, will mark the author's 16th novel. It's no great prophecy to say that Zero K will be respectfully and honorably received: Over the past half-century, DeLillo, who will turn 80 in November, has created a reputation in American letters that's as close to unimpeachable as one can imagine. Born in 1936 to south Italian immigrants in the Bronx and rigorously educated by Jesuit teachers, DeLillo worked as an advertising copywriter before quitting to drift about the city. For the most part, drifting meant going to theaters in order to absorb the latest waves of excellent contemporary European cinema, reading modernist literature, and, eventually, composing a novel. He lived in Midtown Manhattan in the mid 60s and paid $60 per month in rent. DeLillo's first novel, the slightly overstuffed but grimly hilarious Americana, whose WASP protagonist drops out of his well-paying job in network television to go on a Godardian road trip into flyover country with a squad of misfits, was published in 1971.

From then on DeLillo would lead an existence that's all but unimaginable today: He has made a living purely as a literary novelist, teaching no classes whatsoever. In the 70s, he would publish a total of six stylistically rigorous and tonally bleak novels to modest critical success, but it was only in the 80s, in the wake of a Guggenheim fellowship spent in Greece, that DeLillo would fully come into his own as an artist, stepping out of relative obscurity to become one of the primary figures in American fiction. The Names (1982), a dazzling, elaborate, meditative thriller centered on the nature of language and political terrorism in the Middle East, broke things open. There followed White Noise (1985), focused on the mutations in perception of family and death occasioned by relentless exposure to all-seeing, all-saying television. After Libra (1988), a fictional biography of alleged JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, no serious reader could deny that DeLillo possessed a vision of America—violence-riddled, commercial-saturated, radiant with dark humor—whose range, acuteness, consistency, power, and beauty were rivaled by few, if any, of his contemporaries.

It's a blessing for authors to write one masterpiece, let alone four, and their lesser works can reveal just as much about them as their greatest.

The publication of Underworld (1997), a multi-tracked 800-page chronicle of American society that aimed, gloriously and successfully, to embrace in retrospect the entirety of the Cold War period that had recently passed, marked the ultimate ascension of DeLillo into literary godhood, as well as the beginning of his relative decline. DeLillo's too fine of a sentence-maker to ever write a truly bad book, but the end of the Cold War seemed to have stripped him of much of his timeliness, most of his drive, and almost all of his sense of humor. Compared to the masterpieces of the 80s trilogy and Underworld, the novels DeLillo has published in the new century have been terse and delightless affairs reminiscent of the 70s novels in their restrictive tone and vision, yet drained, now, of any profound social relevance. Which is fine: It's a blessing for authors to write one masterpiece, let alone four, and their lesser works can reveal just as much about them as their greatest. But there was no chance that the pale composition of The Body Artist (2001), the futurist sculpture of Cosmopolis (2003), the accomplished but limited Falling Man (2007), or the denuded Point Omega (2010) could rise beyond mere competence and permanently shift a reader's vision.

Unfortunately, though hardly unexpectedly, DeLillo's latest novel continues this streak of stark, monastically joyless novels. The aimless protagonist, one Jeffrey Lockhart, is whisked into the wastes of ex-Soviet Central Asia to meet with his estranged father, Ross, a finance billionaire who has channeled much of his fortune into the development of the Convergence, a vast underground cryonics project: For the right (unfathomably high) price, men and women will have their bodies frozen so that they might be revived in a future where technology permits them to live eternally. Ross's wife and Jeffrey's stepmother, Artis, wasting away from terminal illness, is to enter the deepest level of the project whose name matches that of the novel, and the drama of Zero K centers on Jeffrey's struggle to accept her entrance into the frozen system as well as that of Ross, who, though still healthy himself, decides to join her, extending an offer to his son to join them. It's a promising story, and the master metaphor of preservation lends itself to entrancing speculations: not just on the internet, where data, often personal, is frozen indefinitely to be potentially retrieved, but on art itself. Much as the Lockharts' surname spells out their emotional reticence, Artis's given name is a more-or-less blatant indication that the reader is intended to envision art, DeLillo's in particular, as another mode of cold containment and storage for future use.

Bland and blandly self-aware, still sulking over his parents' divorce and his mother's death, Jeffrey casts up what arguments he can against the impending frigid disconnection, but it soon grows clear that his author's will is closer to those who construct and justify large, forbidding, rigorous, complex structures than to those who seek to exit them or offer alternatives. The various bot-like advocates who call the Convergence home, their visions of withdrawal and transcendence animated by a pessimistic reading of ever-intensifying global disasters, possess a conviction that Jeffrey, on his own or in conjunction with his New York girlfriend, Emma, and Stak, the Ukrainian war orphan Emma adopted, proves unable to match. DeLillo, in his late period, has preserved much of his mastery of individual words, but his gift for shaping compelling individual characters (as opposed to loquacious system functionaries) out of those words has diminished greatly since the days of Libra and Underworld: In spite of the maudlin ending tacked to the end of the novel, its language, plot, and lack of character make it clear that the coldness has won out.

Lord save us from demanding more from our idols than they can give—still, I can't help but confess that I miss the old DeLillo. A book like White Noise didn't just freeze the life of its time so that later readers can access it through a pale blue filter; in its reverence, comedy, and seriousness about death and TV, White Noise could thaw out the present day, grant a young reader fluency in the reality surrounding his or her own, entirely current life. Though no one can write like Don DeLillo, he's inspired countless younger aspiring writers, each searching for a way to represent a national reality whose senseless violence and conglomerate delusions seemed beyond literary representation—to believe that words still could be found to encompass, clarify, and in some measure redeem the kooky desolations of American society. In light of this, it perhaps seems more important to discover and develop new gifts rather than to mourn the elder's decline. Cryonics and minor novels aside, it's already clear that DeLillo, through his masterpieces, will endure; the open question is who else can follow his example in living forever.

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Syphilis in the making? Maybe. Photo by Flickr

The Canadian government is asking doctors to ration anti-syphilis drugs as supplies are running dry due to what Health Canada says is combination of manufacturing issues and a rise in national STI rates.

This is the first installment of Accidental Internet, a new column by artist Eric Oglander and writer Gideon Jacobs. Every month, Eric and Gideon will be presenting a collection of artful images and poetic text that they've found while mining the depths of the web. The idea is to find small pieces of unexpected and unintentional beauty amidst all the noise. VICE asked the collaborators to interview each other about the project to explain the concept and the plan.

Gideon Jacobs: OK, we're recording... Hi Eric. How do we go about this? Where should we start?

Eric Oglander: Well, you initially came to me with the idea for a VICE column called Accidental Internet because we're good buds, and you were familiar with my project, Craigslist Mirrors, in which I collect photographs of mirrors for sale on Craigslist. I asked you to write the preface to the publication I just released via 8 Ball Zines, and we've had a bunch of conversations about the project—where it's going, where it's been. So, I guess you could say the idea of Accidental Internet was born out of those chats.

Gideon: I also think we share an interest in taking practices and methodologies that are established in the "real" tangible world, and applying them to the "unreal" digital world. Take photography itself as an example: I think we both see it as a practice of capturing or selecting moments/perspectives that already exist. In this sense, photography is a curatorial medium—the art of choosing what to save and present from a totally huge but inherently finite pool of moments. You know what else is a huge but inherently finite pool of stuff? The internet!

Eric: But for this project, I'm gonna be the one mining the internet for pictures, while you're going to be the one mining it for text. So, how does this fit in with your work as a writer?

Gideon: Well, although I'm a writer, a lot of my projects, like that fake Instagram road trip I just did, could be considered "internet art," I guess. Also, I worked as the creative director of Magnum Photos for a while, so my interest in photography always leaks into my writing. This is all to say that, although I'll be finding snippets of poetic writing, I'm gonna treat it like a photographic process. It will still be like searching for diamonds in the rough, or maybe better put, resonant frequencies amidst the noise. It's basically a collector's mentality—sifting through junk to find something that is undervalued. I know collecting is something you relate to, both as a photographer and a sculpture.

Eric: Yeah, collecting has always been a huge part of my life. Going to countless garage sales and estate sales with my mom and brother were very formative experiences. I've always been attracted to the unique and the antique, and all my sculpture work revolves around found objects—things that weren't created as art, like say, tools, and presenting them in some artful way. You and I recently went to a lecture about outsider art, and then ended up talking about how much we tend to fetishize unintentional beauty. We're calling this project Accidental Internet but really it could have been called "Unintentional Internet Art" or something.

Gideon: Totally agree. So, we're going to be searching the depths of the internet—places like Craigslist, Yelp, Reddit, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, etc. etc.—for stuff that we find beautiful, compelling, or interesting, that was not created with the intention of being beautiful, compelling, or interesting.

Eric: Nailed it. I think we're good.

Gideon: Cool. That was fun.

Below is the first installment of Accidental Internet:

"I was born an entertainer, I didn't chose to but it chose me. Or at least that's what they keep saying to me. I have to admit it, I'm a bit of a star in the surroundings. People come from all places just to watch me stand still as they capture a bit of my soul with their cameras. I don't mind, after all, I am an entertainer. I am an entertainer, and it doesn't take much of work to do. I just have to be myself, or what they tell me about myself. What I like most about my job, is the children, I always enjoy watching them looking at me with great awe and I surely try to make their coming worth a while. You see, i thrive on their innocence, in their ignorance as they thrive in my lack of intimacy. I don't really mind, after all, I am an entertainer." (Reddit)

"The day I made a deal with my brother. I can feel you. An uneasy feeling. I dreamt of you one night. Theres no need for details. Sorry if I offended you. Thanks for inviting me over for dinner even tho the feast is bitter. It was good in the beginning. I love what you've done with the place. I hope I wasn't expecting to much from you. I know you're saying "you ask for to much" yeah yeah why wont I start doing. Same old story. All I won't is a movie deal hey you keep the play money. I write, Direct and act in with who I choose." (Craigslist)

"Karma is strange. "What goes around, comes around" is the old saying. What did I do to deserve this?? my life, my dream, my whole world has been taken away, and I don't understand why. Evil people like Adolf Hitler and Charles Manson are allowed to have their dreams come true. All I wanted was my life back, my family back. And that's too much to ask for? So now, I'm sitting here behind a school on a Saturday. I have no where else to go. No one even cares. I am diabetic, so maybe if I go drink enough soda, I will just fall asleep and never be heard from again. Doubt anyone would ever notice." (Reddit

"The rules here are simple, hang out with your own race. Take care of your bunkmake and he will take care of you. Don't act all hard and don't talk shit. Share your newspapers, books, and other valuable commodities (cigarettes), and others will do the same to you. Keep yourself clean and watch out for the rats. Old advice you learned as a kid applies here: Do unto others as you would have them do onto you. If you have nothing nice to say, shut up. Sharing is caring. Always ask for permission." (Yelp)

"I don't know if you are coached into such a game, as a hunter looking for Deer. Yet I can tell you this, not on this board not on my watch, as an American. I will not let any one disgrace this nation, for sport or common usage not recognized by God himself, as the strong hold we bond and come together as a great nation. It is fertile to our young people, to our neighbors, to or military, to one another, as Americans." (Craigslist)

"She'll then usually end the story by saying, 'It only takes a few moments of your day to change someone's life for the better.' The part that gets me is, it must be obvious to everyone else that this never happened, but these stories are always covered in comments from people saying, 'You're so kind.' and 'The world needs more like you' or idiots who are also liars who say something like, 'Happens to me all the time. It's why I'm thankful I know .'" (Reddit)

"maybe i just entered the wrong circle. what i mean to say is that maybe i just tried to fit in to a new set of people without noticing that i'm triangularly shaped while i'm trying to 'puzzle in' my figure for a box. maybe i just had the wrong look on the map that's why when i turned my car into another road it feels like cliff or a dead end was rudely waiting for me to fall.definitely, all of my maybes are true. i am certain that my life before was controlled by other people. i was like a puppet and the social anxiety is my savage ventriloquist. and now that the strings inside of me are broken and cut into thin strands, i can freely move just like the bird set free." (Tumblr)

"Why can't I just have someone cuddle me and play in my hair and get fed up with me being sad and tease me until I smile and tickle me silly to keep it there and then cuddle me more afterwards I don't get it." (Tumblr)

Gideon Jacobs is a writer and artist based in New York City. You can follow his work here.

Eric Oglander is an artist based in New York City and the king of Craigslist Mirrors.

Photo via Flickr user Tanjila Ahmed

Last October, Camila stepped off a plane in Los Angeles, just moments away from reuniting with her long-distance boyfriend, David. She and David had met backpacking in Ecuador, but she lived in Chile while he lived in the United States. Now, two years later, they were ready to commit: Camila had been accepted to a masters program at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and David considered proposing marriage.

But Camila never made it out of LAX because US Customs and Border Protection agents, who had flagged Camila for making multiple extended trips to the United States, took her into a room for questioning. (Camila and David's names have been changed to protect their identities.)

"They went through my wallet and my luggage and then my cellphone, all my emails and my photos," Camila told me over Skype. "They saw I'd been to Colorado, so they asked me to show them photos of Colorado and saw photos of a marijuana dispensary."

Then the officials asked her, under penalty of perjury, if she'd ever smoked marijuana. "I said I'd tried it in Colorado. I thought it was normal—everyone in Colorado smokes, and it's not illegal there," Camila said.

While Colorado has legalized weed, the federal government has not. And since possession, sale, and trafficking of marijuana are all federal crimes, admitting to any of these—even without being convicted—can be a deportable offense for non-citizens. So immigration officials detained Camila in a room in the airport for 15 hours and then flew her back to Chile, banning her from ever returning to the United States.

Cases like Camila's have become increasingly common in recent years as more states legalize marijuana, according to immigration attorney Scott Railton.

"A number of states have legalized for medical and recreational use, but the federal law says marijuana and all its derivatives are still a prohibitive substance," Railton told me, referring to the Controlled Substances Act. "It's a real issue for non-citizens because of the authority of the federal government in their cases."

Railton, who has written multiple legal articles about immigration penalties for marijuana use, explained that immigration law is tough on all controlled substances. The Immigration and Nationality Act specifically denies entry to the US to foreigners who were "convicted of, or who admit having committed... a violation of the State, the United States, or a foreign country related to a controlled substance."

And while Camila's case may have been the practice at its zenith, Railton says it's perfectly legal. Federal policy grants Department of Homeland Security officials the right to check phones and laptops without warrants, as they did with Camila's photos.

"They can also ask you questions under oath," Railton said, explaining that if an individual does not respond to the questions, he or she can be immediately removed from the country. "And it only requires an officer at the border or consulate to make a determination that someone is inadmissible for them to be removed."

Watch: Inside Deportee Purgatory

Railton, who works in northern Washington near the Canadian border, said the issue is particularly prevalent in his region since weed is legal in the state, and people are frequently questioned entering the country. Not only do officers ask people to admit to using drugs, but he said they also stop legal immigrants from entering who say they intend to work in marijuana fields, deeming the work part of drug trafficking, a prohibited activity under the Immigration and Nationality Act. Officers can also deny admission to individuals who say they plan to visit dispensaries, Railton told me.

Railton noted that even carrying a medical marijuana card could be enough to provoke questioning from Customs officials that could lead to deportation.

"Customs and Border Protection on occasion will search a person's wallet. Do not travel internationally with a medical marijuana card," he advised in a recent presentation for the Northwest American Immigration Lawyers Association. "The issue could come up at checkpoints, or if volunteered. The card itself is not proof of a controlled substance violation, but it may lead to questions that establish inadmissibility."

Marijuana advocates like Morgan Fox, communications director of the Marijuana Policy Project, say cases like Camila's highlight the need to end federal prohibition of marijuana.

"People from anywhere in the US can go to a state where marijuana is legal and responsibly consume a substance that is safer than alcohol without fear of arrest. Yet foreign nationals face discrimination, deportation, and travel bans because their behavior is monitored by, and subject to, federal law enforcement to a much greater degree," Fox told me. "This is just one more reason why federal marijuana prohibition needs to end, and marijuana needs to be removed from the Controlled Substances Act."

Representatives from Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not immediately comment on marijuana arrests of non-citizens when contacted by VICE.

For Camila, the cost has been both personal and professional: Since she's indefinitely banned from the United States, she and David have broken up; she also had to turn down the opportunity to get her masters in the States. There is one option for her to return to the United States—she can apply to the federal government for a visa waiver, where she can argue the reasons she should be allowed reentry—but obtaining legal counsel to complete the waiver application is costly, and the government rarely grants waivers to individuals who have been removed in the past year or two, immigration experts told me.

"I was deported for being honest with the officers. I've never been in this type of circumstance. I've never committed a crime," Camila told me, welling up with tears. "It makes no sense."

Follow Meredith Hoffman on Twitter.

Photo via Instagram user peter_pdp

Update: Alberta has ordered all of Fort McMurray to evacuate as an out-of-control wildfire moves in on Canada's epicentre for oil and gas development. The town's regional district issued the mandatory evacuation order at 6:20 PM local time.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Read: It's Now Pretty Much Impossible for Republicans to Stop Trump

After losing to Donald Trump in the Indiana primary, Ted Cruz has officially suspended his campaign, essentially leaving the Republican nomination to Trump.

"I said I would continue on as long as there is a viable path to victory. Tonight, I'm sorry to say, it appears that path has been foreclosed," the Texas Senator said on Tuesday. "Together we left it all on the field in Indiana. We gave it everything we got, but the voters chose another path."

Cruz, whose campaign hit a high note during the Iowa caucuses in February, lost seven consecutive primaries before his ultimate defeat in Indiana, where Cruz garnered 37 percent of the vote compared to Trump's 53 percent. He did not say whether or not he would support Trump's candidacy going forward.

Some of the types of pressed pills of E that are currently on the Scottish market (all photos courtesy of Scott)

It's no secret that Europe has a rich history with ecstasy. As one of the epicentres for dance music culture and home to a known hub of ecstasy production, the Netherlands, it has had an undeniable connection to the club drug. But since the dawn of the new millennium, levels of MDMA in pressed pills sold within the continent were actually decreasing.

Trump Tower isn't anything special. Sure it's monolithic, carved out of glass and marble, the kind of phallus Ayn Rand would have loved, but that could describe half of Midtown Manhattan. It's that nowhere part of the city just north of Times Square, where the buildings are monuments to old money, the sidewalks are wide and patrolled by doormen, and the delis are overpriced.

Donald Trump has made a habit of giving his primary night speeches here, and it's easy to see why—the skyscraper is to Trump what Chicago is to Barack Obama, and what that ranch in Crawford, Texas was to George W. Bush, the piece of land that serves as the locus of accepted mythology surrounding his presidential campaign. It was here, in the brightly lit, marbled lobby of the Tower, that Trump addressed the press on Tuesday night, making his first appearance as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.

As expected, Trump won Indiana's GOP primary by double digits, and in the process made it essentially impossible for any of his remaining opponents to stop him from getting the 1,237 delegates he needs to win the nomination. There will be no contested convention, no long slog through the final primaries this spring—Trump will be the GOP pick for president, simply because more Republicans voted for him than for anyone else.

Texas Senator Ted Cruz, the last serious Trump challenger, conceded this fact around 8:30 PM, an hour and a half after networks announced his bumbling Indiana loss.

"Together, we left it all on the field in Indiana. We gave it everything we've got but the voters chose another path," he told an audience of weepy volunteers in Indianapolis Tuesday night. "So with a heavy heart but with boundless optimism for the long-term future of our nation, we are suspending our campaign."

As Cruz's speech played across the lobby in New York, a small crowd of Trump's inner-circle supporters let out a quick "Trump! Trump! Trump!" chant. Cordoned off from the media by a rope, a few of them embraced, celebrating their man's logic-defying win. Reporters whipped out their phones and cameras, vining and tweeting what I guess has to be called a historic moment.

The Republican Establishment, with its mainstream conservatism, flamed out months ago, and now Cruz's bible-thumping, abolish-the-IRS approach had come crashing down too. What remained was Trump—an enigma swaddled in anger wrapped in reality-TV-bred populism, walking through the crowd to strains of the Rolling Stones' "Start Me Up," a song about a man getting an erection.

"It's been an unbelievable day, and evening, and year," he said at the podium, sounding like a man who, like everyone else, actually can't quite believe his electoral success. "I have never been through anything like this but it's a beautiful thing to watch, and a beautiful thing to behold, and we're going to make America great again."

He then went through his standard stump speech, toning the bombast down slightly for the occasion. The theme, as usual, was Trump victories, past, present, and future. He marveled at his own success in Tuesday's primary, and gleefully hyped his likely general election match-up against Hillary Clinton. When he pointed out that a recent Rasmussen poll found him two points ahead of the Democratic frontrunner nationally, cheers broke out across the room.

"We're going after Hillary Clinton," Trump declared. "She will not be a great president, she will not be a good president, she will be a poor president." He proceeded to preview some lines of attack against his presumptive opponent, accusing Clinton of treating coal miners "as if they were just numbers," and supporting the North American Free Trade Agreement—or, as Trump likes to call it, "the single worst trade deal in the history of the world"—that her husband signed as president.

Cruz, who Trump had dismissed as a "wacko" on Twitter just hours earlier, was now, in the real-estate mogul's words "one hell of a competitor" with "one hell of a future." (The Texas Republican, who held a press conference Tuesday afternoon to accuse Trump of being a "pathological liar," didn't say whether he would back the party's presumptive nominee.)

But Trump was in a forgiving mood, and even had kind words for Reince Priebus, informing the audience that he had just gotten off the phone wiht the beleaguered Republican National Committee chair. "It's not an easy job," Trump acknowledged, noting that Priebus "had 17 egos" to deal with at the start of the 2016 cycle. "Now I guess he's down to one," Trump added, grinning.

Dutifully, Priebus did his part as well, calling for the party to unify around its all-but-official nominee. It was clear, though, that in this case party unity means pushing the #NeverTrump holdouts to decide that well, OK, sometimes Trump, at least as an alternative to Clinton.

(Photo: Jamelle Bouie, via)

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US News

• Trump Becomes Presumptive Nominee as Cruz Quits
  Ted Cruz has ended his presidential campaign after losing all 51 Indiana delegates to Donald Trump. Cruz conceded that the "path has been foreclosed." Bernie Sanders insisted the Democratic race is still on after he won Indiana 53 percent to Hillary Clinton's 47 percent, although delegates were almost evenly shared.—The New York Times
• Obama Urged to Drink Flint Water
  Governor Rick Snyder is calling on President Obama to drink the water in Flint, Michigan, when he visits the city today. Snyder's spokeswoman said it would "reinforce" the EPA's message that the city's filtered water is now safe. Obama is set to visit residents affected by the crisis and speak at a local high school.—ABC News
• Stonewall Inn to Become National Monument
  The White House is ready to declare the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village a national monument recognizing the LGBT community. The bar is viewed as central to the gay liberation movement in the 1960s, and federal officials are looking at how to incorporate the area around it into the National Park Service.—The Washington Post
• 35 Million Airbags Set to be Recalled
  Takata Corp. is expected to announce a recall of at least 35 million additional airbag inflators in US cars this week. It would more than double the 28.8 million inflators that must already be replaced after the Japanese company admitted a defect which can cause air bags to explode and fire off shrapnel.—The Wall Street Journal

International News

• Wildfire Causes Mass Evacuation of Canadian Town
  A huge wildfire sweeping through Alberta's oil sands region forced the evacuation of around 60,000 people from Fort McMurray—the entire population of the city. As firefighters try to get the fire threatening Alberta's oil infrastructure under control, officials said Wednesday will be a "more intense burning day" than Tuesday.—CBC News
• Philippines Hostages in Video Plea
  A new video released by the Islamist militant group Abu Sayyaf shows three hostages asking their governments to meet the Filipino group's demands. The Canadian, Norwegian and Filipino men were captured last September along with Canadian John Ridsdel, who was beheaded last week after a ransom deadline passed.—BBC News
• Car Bomb Blast Kills Turkish Soldier
  A car bomb attack launched by Kurdish militants near a military base in southeast Turkey has killed one soldier and injured five people. Four of the wounded were soldiers. Turkey's Deputy Prime Minister said the country had foiled 49 attempted suicide bombing or car bomb attacks since January.—Reuters
• Three Killed as Maternity Hospital Hit in Syria
  At least three people have been killed in a rebel rocket attack on a maternity hospital in a government-controlled part of Aleppo. It was the sixth attack on a medical facility in nearly two weeks of fighting in the northern Syrian city that has left more that 250 people dead.—The Guardian

Larry Wilmore (Photo: Clparish, via)

Everything Else

• Wilmore Says Obama Understood Use of N-Word
  Larry Wilmore has defended his use of the N-word at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, saying President Obama "knew what he was talking about." Wilmore described it as "almost a private moment with the president on stage."—The Daily Beast
• WhatsApp Back in Brazil After 24-Hour Block
  A Brazilian appeals court has overturned a 72-hour suspension of WhatsApp after a nationwide block triggered a day of outrage among users. The dispute relates to a demand that the company release information as part of a criminal investigation.—VICE News
• Canada Running Out of Anti-Syphilis Drugs
  The Canadian government is asking doctors to ration anti-syphilis drugs. Supplies are running dry due to what Health Canada says is a combination of manufacturing issues and a rise in national STI rates.—VICE
• Names of Military Movies Released by Pentagon
  The titles of Pentagon films made for the military have been released, although the films themselves remain classified. Throw a Nickle on the Grass—Have Doughnot is one of the weirder titles.—Motherboard

Done with reading for today? Don't worry about it—instead, watch Thomas Morton share the slang he learned as a tugboat deckhand on 'Daily VICE'.

Joe Corré holding a Nazi Sid Vicious doll

On November 26—the 40th anniversary of the release of the Sex Pistols' "Anarchy in the UK"—former Mayor of London Boris Johnson will strike a match and publicly incinerate about $7 worth of punk memorabilia at the gates of Buckingham Palace.

"That's plan A, at least," says Joe Corré, co-founder of Agent Provocateur and son of designer Vivienne Westwood and the late Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren. "The reason I'm inviting Boris to do it is because of his background burning money in front of homeless people.* We'll invite all of the punks from all over the UK—if there are any left—to come and burn anything that they want to burn, too."

Corré recently created a stink when he announced his intention to consign to his stockpile of historic bondage trousers and punk artifacts to the flames as a protest against the mainstream appropriation of punk culture. Specifically, it was Punk London—the official festival celebrating "40 years of subversive culture," supported by the mayor's office, the National Lottery Fund, and, according to Corré, the Queen herself—that fired his rage.

"Punk has been a tourist attraction for some time—it's nothing new. But this is the last nail in the coffin. It's finally shut," says Corré, when I meet him at his clothes shop, A Child of the Jago, to look through the collection of a lifetime.

"I remember as a little boy sitting under my mum's sewing machine, watching her make these things," says Corré, as he and his friend, the designer and model Daniel Lismore, pull items of clothing from vacuum packed bags. "I remember all the fuss when the police would raid the shop and take all the stock. I remember people getting arrested for wearing them in the street. I also remember, at a later stage, selling loads of the stuff I had in order to start Agent Provocateur and then buying it all back years later. It's something that's been around my life a long time."

The items that emerge—bondage gear, a pair of Johnny Rotten's trousers, a tiny swastika-sporting Sid Vicious doll—are enough to make even an honest man like myself consider theft.

"When I was a young boy, you couldn't keep me out of the Glitterbest offices—the Sex Pistols' office, my dad's office," he says. "I'd take everything: all the posters, the records, anything. I was just like a magpie. I kept it and hoarded it and loved it. It meant a lot to me."

And now, like the bloated corpse of a fallen warrior, it's for the flames.

"This is about burning something and seeing what kind of phoenix is going to rise from the ashes," says Corré. "If I can organize it outside Buckingham Palace, then it's going to be fucking dangerous."

Here, Corré takes us through the stories behind a set of the items destined for the flames.

TITS. SEDITIONARIES, CIRCA 1976–80

This is from Seditionaries. The chronology is that my parents' shop on the King's Road when it was first opened was called Let It Rock. It was all Teddy Boy stuff to start with. My dad used to go to Brick Lane and find old Edwardian waistcoats, drape coats, rock 'n' roll things, and we'd sell those in the shop. Then they changed from that into Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die, which was much more biker kind of stuff, and then after that it changed to SEX. They used to sell all the fetish gear, whips and chains and rubber, and everything, but also it was where this punk aesthetic started in terms of deconstructing clothes and wearing statements on your sleeve. There was a fusion of sex clothing and punk rock. Then SEX changed to Seditionaries: clothes for prostitutes, heroes, dykes, and punks.

LEATHER SKIRT AND TOP. SEX, CIRCA 1975

This needs bloody fixing. This is one of my mum's skirts, from SEX. My mum used to work with a lot of people doing homework—making stuff for the shop at home—and the bikers and the Hell's Angels used to do a lot of the studding and leather stuff. People with names like Red Baron. The flat was full of people like that.

SNOW WHITE. SEDITIONARIES, CIRCA 1976-80

This is a muslin shirt from Seditionaries. There are lots of famous prints from that time. Things like Snow White with tits and cowboys with their cocks out. It was really about taking all of the references that were kind of sacred—Walt Disney, swastikas, images of pedophile victims, gay sex—and wearing them on your shirt.

FUCK YOUR MOTHER. SEDITIONARIES, CIRCA 1976–80

When you're a kid, you just wear what your mum gives you to wear. From an early age, I wore those clothes because that's what my mum gave me, but then later on, it was because I really liked it. It got a real reaction out of people.

I grew up in south London, mostly with all the immigrant kids. The media was completely against us and hounded us and hated us and drummed everything up into us being public enemy number one. I was in the house when the National Front came to smash our windows and encircle our flat. When I crept up to the windows, I saw all my little mates—all these immigrant kids—with the National Front smashing our windows! So it wasn't like you were just hated by the Establishment; you were hated by everybody.

YOU'RE GONNA WAKE UP ONE MORNING AND KNOW WHAT SIDE OF THE BED YOU'VE BEEN LYING ON. SEDITIONARIES, CIRCA 1976–80

You've got to decide what you think's good and what isn't any good. Choose which side you're on. On one side, you've got television. That's shit. Mick Jagger: He's a cunt. Then on the other side, you've got Eddie Cochrane, Christine Keeler, the Raw Power Society for Cutting Up Men, Rubber Robin Hood, Ronnie Biggs in Brazil, Jamaican rude boys, Bamboo Records. It's a list of what's good and what isn't.

SID VICIOUS DOLL, CIRCA 1980

I remember making these with my mum. We went down to Clapham Junction and bought a load of dolls. We sat up all night with these girly dolls and got a hot knife and scarred their faces. We had to melt their tits off too. She made him all the little clothes. We had to make hundreds of them. I might save this one actually.

BLACK BONDAGE TOP. SEDITIONARIES, CIRCA 1976–80

This was a really popular item. It was one of the classic looks: a black pair of bondage trousers and a matching jacket. That was invented by Vivienne. The whole idea of bondage came from the SEX shop and was transferred into the clothes. People today think they're wearing bondage trousers just because it's got a few extra zips. No they're not. I used to have a great pair of bondage trousers, leather and pinstriped, that I wore to death.

LEATHER BIKINI. SEX, CIRCA 1975

I haven't got issues. This is about making a statement. It's hard for people to understand why you'd want to burn, like, $7 million worth of stuff, so of course they try to find other reasons...

If there's anything that I feel really sad about, I won't burn it. It's a difficult emotional decision and I need a bit of time on my own.

JOHNNY ROTTEN'S TROUSERS

He never liked kids, Johnny Rotten. Or at least he never liked me—maybe because he didn't like my old man. He always got pissed off with this idea that my father used to push out that he had somehow created this group of urchins to be the Sex Pistols. Johnny always used to say "nobody created me," and I think he was fucking right. We couldn't have had the Sex Pistols without him. He was an amazing frontman. You've never seen anything like it. It'd make my hair stand on end just watching him. Later on, he fell in love with his ego a bit, but that happens to people, doesn't it?

*What he's referring to here is the allegation that Boris Johnson and David Cameron had to burn £50 notes in front of a homeless person to gain entry to the Bullingdon Club at Oxford University. However, this is allegedly a more recent initiation requirement and wasn't done in Boris's day. Still, the fact Boris has essentially taken a match to millions of pounds of taxpayer money for largely terrible schemes during his time in office serves as just as good a reason to invite him down.

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Photo by Allen Donikowski/Getty Images

For some parents, the words "Child Protective Services" send chills down the spine. In an effort to stamp out fraud and abuse, welfare outfits across the country have honed in on poor communities of color for decades now, critics claim, with almost any government interaction potentially leading to kids being removed from their homes.

Now big data is set make the dynamic even more intense—and racially charged.

In 1999, the foster care population in the United States reached a peak at 567,000. But due to both diminishing budgets and programs aimed at keeping children in their homes, that number dropped to 415,000 by 2014. The representation of black children in the foster system remains disproportionately high, however: Black children account for 24 percent of kids in foster care, while comprising just 14 percent of the general population of children in the US. And a burgeoning method for determining exactly which families get visits from child welfare caseworkers has advocates for low-income families worried the disparity will only get worse.

The new approach is called "predictive analytics," and it's taking the child welfare system by storm. Across the country, from suburban counties in Florida to major cities like Los Angeles, child welfare agencies are launching initiatives that take data points like race, parental welfare status, and criminal history, and a variety of other publicly available characteristics, and feed them into an algorithm that assigns each child a "risk" score. That score is then considered when determining whether a caseworker should visit a family.

The government officials spearheading the predictive analytics movement argue that it will help bring necessary services to vulnerable families and save lives. Civil rights advocates counter that it will just reinforce preexisting biases against low-income families who depend on welfare programs to pay for housing and food, and are already subjected to a bevy of bureaucratic conditions to qualify for said benefits.

Marc Cherna, for one, believes that used correctly, predictive analytics can change the game when it comes to protecting young kids in America. He's the director of the Department of Human Services in Pennsylvania's Allegheny County, and under his watch, the county has reduced the number of children in foster care from 3,000 in 1996 to just over 1,000 children this year.

Cherna's agency was one of the first in the country take advantage of big data to help improve outcomes for families in the county, focusing on indicators that might help social workers keep families together by intervening early. County officials opened a "data warehouse" in 1999, which helped collect benefit and criminal records, as well as housing history. This summer, it will be one of the first counties in the United States to use predictive analytics with the launch of a program that helps screen which reports of abuse should to be acted on. Every time a report of abuse comes into the county, that case will be given a risk score; the higher the risk score, the more likely a caseworker will be sent out.

"Our practice has been that half of the calls we get, end up getting screened out," Cherna explained in an interview, adding that "screened-out" calls result in no immediate action being taken by the county. "When we looked at cases that led to fatalities or near fatalities and ran it through the system, almost all of them were very high risk. But some of those cases were screened out, four out of five never came to our attention, which shows us that there are cases that we're missing."

He noted that running previous calls through the system showed that the county has been investigating parents that have a very low "risk" of abusing their kids, according to the algorithm. Basically, the data suggest officials could be doing things a lot more efficiently.

"There's nothing in the predictive analytics model that our workforce doesn't already have access to in the descriptive way," said Erin Dalton, a human services official who's spearheading the predictive analytics work for Allegheny County. "What this does is help to reduce variation in decision-making and make it so that similarly risked kids are treated similarly."

Allegheny County is taking several steps to monitor the effectiveness of its program, including building out an independent evaluation tool to make sure the predictive analytics project is actually working. And officials have promised safeguards ad training to protect against prejudice. Dalton believes this is a much better system than those adopted by other counties, where private companies are poised to run predictive analytics without much in the way of independent evaluation. In Los Angeles, the Department of Children and Family Services—the largest such agency in America—is using software designed by SAS, the world's leading analytics software developer. But evaluations of that program's effectiveness have, so far at least, been done by the same company.

But even with the precautions Allegheny County is taking, critics argue predictive analytics will eventually lead to Minority Report–style monitoring, where families are investigated before any abuse occurs. "What you've got is computerized racial profiling," said Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform. "While that's not the intent of a lot of the people pushing this, that is how it winds up being used."

Wexler pointed to a recent federal report from the Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities, which trumpeted predictive analytics as a way to eliminate child fatalities by aggressively pursuing action involving "high risk" children. The commission recommended the national use of predictive analytics. And private companies are surely looking to get in on the action: One recent study projected the global predictive analytics market (of which US child services is obviously just a tiny fraction) will grow from $2.74 billion in 2015 to $9.2 billion by 2020.

When it comes to protecting kids, the technology is still in its infancy, but there some hints as to where it might go in the near future. In a Powerpoint presentation given to community members last month, Allegheny County officials demonstrated some possible uses of predictive analytics. One of them was a tool where every child born in the county was given a "needs" score at birth, based on their family history, race, and several other factors. These scores would then put the children on the radar of the Human Services department, which might offer voluntary services at birth or proactively reach out to families in the months following. To communities that have long endured extensive oversight by child welfare bureaucracies, the very idea of putting a "needs" score on a newborn is cause for alarm—especially if one of the factors determining that score is race.

"At so many of the decision points, the race of the child ends up mattering in terms of whether the family is going to be brought to court or a child is placed in foster care," said Kathleen Creamer, an attorney who works with families navigating with the child welfare system in Philadelphia. "If we're saying African American children are way more likely to end up in foster care, that means when caseworkers do a safety assessment at a home, they're just going to presume they're at a higher risk—mostly because the decision-making at the front end of these cases reflects such an implicit bias."

Proponents in Allegheny County insist they know the dangers here, and that the new technology should be given a chance to work. "I understand that people are afraid that if someone has a high score, we're going out to remove these kids. That is not the intent," said Cherna, the county official. "We are training that that doesn't happen."

But longtime advocates for marginalized kids and their families say the writing is on the wall.

"No caseworker wants to be on the front page of the newspaper as the who overruled the computer if something goes wrong with that family," Wexler said.

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Comic and co-host Emma Cooper. Photo by Jackie Dives

Hold up, internet. It's true that in almost any imaginable circumstance, the words "men" and "rape jokes" appearing in a headline together is a signal for women to run far, far away. Comedy is already a man's world, and adding discussion of one of the most traumatizing things that can happen to a person—something that happens to women with agonizing regularity—goes against conventional wisdom, to say the least.