"I don't know why I get paid this much either, it's crazy!" Photo by Jon Feingersh/Getty Images

I vividly remember the valedictorian from my high school class saying he was going to Princeton to "study the stock market." It was the most mad I'd ever felt in my life. For one thing, "the stock market" is not a fucking major; also, this guy was basically blowing an opportunity to study under Toni Morrison that I'd never get studying English at a state school in Florida. Being the insufferable 16-year-old that I was, I yelled out, "Asshole!" which promptly inspired him and his girlfriend to unfriend me on Facebook. I don't regret it, though, because if I've learned anything in the past ten years, it's that the Wall Street Guy may be the single American professional archetype it's socially acceptable to despise.

In fact, the only people who seem to catch even more shit than Wall Street bankers these days is a similar but somewhat more exotic species: the hedge fund bro.

The task of the hedge fund manager—if we're being formal—is to find places for rich individuals and institutions, like pension funds and universities, to put their money. If you don't live in a big city like New York, you may not know any of these guys, but they're some of the wealthier and more influential people in the country. Former (and possible future) First Daughter Chelsea Clinton's husband Mark Mezvinsky, for example, is deep in the hedge fund game, though his firm has had a rough go of it lately after one of its funds invested heavily in Greece of all places. In theory, hedge fund guys (they are almost always men) are supposed come up with strategies that don't depend on the whims of the stock market; traditionally, that's meant taking both long and short positions, which is to say betting on some things and against others.

But in the last decade or so, as the number of hedge funds has ballooned, managers have begun flipping the script.

Some Americans seem to dislike financial professionals because they appear to get filthy rich performing nebulous alchemy that serves to make rich people richer. When it comes to hedge funds, that first part is beyond dispute: According to an annual ranking released on Tuesday, the top ten hedge fund managers in the world took home more than $10 billion last year. But the crazy part is that five of the top 25 earners in the field actually lost their investors money. That revelation comes amid a growing effort by activists to get public pensions to ditch hedge funds, which typically charge exorbitant fees and often deliver returns that aren't any better than sticking money in an index fund and forgetting about it. Every year, there's a three-day conference to celebrate the industry, but the Wall Street Journal described the latest iteration, which just wrapped up, as "anything but festive."

"The hedge-fund model is under challenge," one manager remarked on Wednesday. "It's under assault."

If the hedge fund bro is increasingly reviled by activist types and growing less and less useful to the One Percent, does that mean he'll vanish from the Earth? I asked Mark Melin, an alternative investment practitioner and adjunct professor at Northwestern University, to walk me through what the future holds for some of the most privileged men in America.

VICE: I think the idea of the hedge fund guy is mystifying to a lot of people. What does he do all day? Is he just shaking hands and collecting cash?
Mark Melin: A fair amount of it is networking, but a lot of that happens after work. They read a lot of research. They do work hard. They're very well informed about what's going on. They're looking at the world for opportunities that most people don't necessarily see. The win percentage on that could be spotty. I have a personal hobby of trying to find bands before they become popular, trying to find a band that can jump above the rest. I'll get a couple wins, but I'll get way more losses.

So what they do every day is try to figure out where the markets are going, and there's a lot of communications between hedge fund managers. They look at the positions of one another. They're trying to figure out how to maneuver within the markets, is the bottom line.

So how did things go wrong for these guys?
The quote that best sums it up is, "Hedge funds aren't hedging." Hedge funds were designed to be a counterbalance to the stock market. But what's happened recently is that hedge funds have been exposed as nothing more than long exposure to the stock market. In my opinion, 2008 was a disaster for a lot of hedge funds, be a valid reason to invest in them. But the majority have failed to be independent of the stock market, which was their original purpose. Now there are different groups and pockets where there's truly non-correlated performance—I expect those strategies to do much better in this environment. But strategies that are long only are going to have increased difficulty going forward.

But "hedge" is in the name. How is it still a hedge fund if there's no hedging?
Bingo. Hedge funds are there because they provide a counterbalance. The Wall Street banks have been promoting ones that don't hedge, and that's wrong. There are some incredibly smart people who work at banks, but in general, they are promoting strategies that are long only. I know it's touchy picking on the banks, but I think it's appropriate.

I'm still trying to figure out what a hedge fund is if managers can take any sort of position they want. Do they only accept money from rich people?
You're touching on a very valid point. To a certain extent, these people have been told that the hedge funds could beat the market. I come from a world of non-correlated hedge funds. This managed futures CTA world, which is a very niche category. But in my eyes, if you're correlated, you're not a hedge fund. So you're speaking my language when you ask that question. A lot of the hedge funds have been sold as being able to beat the market, which you can't do statistically. No one consistently beats the market. But sometimes you've gotta question. When you are being told that you can consistently beat the market, that's an unsupported claim.

And yes, most of these hedge funds are––by regulatory definition––not allowed to accept money from non-accredited individuals. It means if you're not wealthy, or you're not a professional, you can't participate in a hedge fund.

So if people are being told they can beat the market, but hedge fund managers aren't, why do they keep getting paid big fees to manage money?
I don't think there is a valid reason. If a hedge fund doesn't deliver a performance that's not correlated to the stock market, there's no reason to invest. I think pension funds should be invested in ETFs and low-cost exposure to the stock market. When stock market crisis hits, these non-correlated investments deliver performance.

Wait, do hedge fund managers even have to disclose their rates of return?
Here's the issue: Certain hedge funds are required to report all of their returns. In fact, certain hedge funds have their returns audited by a regulator and are pretty safe. But most get exemptions from having to do this, which I find just absolutely noxious.

Someone recently told me he thought only about 5 percent of hedge funds beat the market last year. How is that possible?
You've painted the question so it's an either/or. Again, I think there are certain sectors in the hedge fund industry that are gonna benefit. The non-correlated hedge funds will survive. There's a lot of stuff the general public doesn't see. I read bank research every day. They are noting some difficulty coming up. This time next year, we will have experienced another crash. So the need for not correlated hedge funds is definite. I think what's gonna happen is we'll see a market shake out, and hedge funds that don't hedge will not be as popular in the future. Pensions funds have workers retirement savings in their hands. They have a fiduciary responsibility.

How they make investments in some of these hedge funds just boggles my mind. I've been in these meetings. Hopefully, if we can put hope into this conversation, despite it being a four-letter word, these pension funds will reduce their investments in long-only pension funds and go to very low-cost exposure to the stock market. This idea that pension funds can beat the stock market is just wrong.

No matter what happens in the hedge fund industry, young guys with business degrees are going to want that job because the money's amazing, right?
They get a two percent management fee—do the math. What's interesting is that when you have a smaller hedge fund, like $100 million, those guys have to actually perform. So in order for them to make a go of their business, they have to deliver returns to investors. Once they get bigger, they can just live off the management fee.

So once you get to a certain level, like a teacher with tenure, you can basically never lose your job.
It's a weird, self-perpetuating system where once they get big and their name is well known, the banks recommend them to pension funds. Once you get to that stage, it's like people don't look at the performance. I've always wanted to confront this situation a little bit––the fact that people are investing people's retirement savings in the hope that some guy's gonna beat the market.

And how did we arrive at the famous two and twenty standard—two percent of the total assets as fee, plus twenty percent of profits—again?
Look, it's a business, so people take as much as they can get. I used to be in the business of recommending hedge funds, and some of the smaller guys would take fifty percent of the profit. But they were like cowboys, they would bring in sixty percent one month, either way, plus or minus. When people deliver performance, it used to be that was prized. This two and twenty thing is now being questioned, quite frankly. Any pension fund that's paying two and twenty is not doing their job.

So people are paying tons of money for something that doesn't really work? Are they just assuming they must be getting the best possible service if there's a big fee? Is it a status thing?
I don't think that what you describe is that far off. I think there's valid reasons going forward is the funds that actually hedge.

This interview has lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

A workshop at an arts and mental health festival, Changing Minds, at London's Southbank Centre

After I had a mental breakdown in 2011, the years that followed were a revolving door of various doctors and departments that all tried to give some sort of meaning back to the life I felt I had already lost. I tried a few medications, several kinds of therapy, and sat in more psychiatrists' offices than I can count. Nothing seemed to work particularly well—or at least it didn't work well enough.

In the end, my recovery was dependent on a few things. Medical intervention, in some ways. Supportive family and friends, of course. But, importantly, on my better days, I wrote, churning out hundreds of pages of creative writing. Whether it was objectively good or bad was irrelevant, as the therapeutic benefits were undeniable.

The clichéd link between creativity and mental health is nothing new. What is, however, is not the overly simplistic idea that creative people are more prone to mental illness, but the reverse—when ordinary people with symptoms of mental illness engage in creativity and the arts, there's a chance they're more likely to get better. It's an idea that's gaining interest in both the arts and mental health sectors alike.

When 23-year-old Nicole de Leiburne started experiencing symptoms of anxiety, she was frustrated that all her local doctor could offer her was a prescription. Instead, she turned to creative outlets such as filmmaking, photography, and writing as a way to understand her issues, and later set up mental health organization Don't Just Stare. "I found it a way of feeling confident in myself again, and it made me feel like I had a purpose," she explains. "The arts make people feel like they're worth something and part of something. I think that is the key to better mental health, not necessarily labeling things with 'therapy' or 'anti-depressants.'" Since 2014, the group has run talks and events in London and Brighton about how engaging in creativity can benefit mental health. And they're not the only organization exploring the growing mainstream interest between mental health and the arts.

Earlier this year, the Southbank Centre ran a two-day festival called Changing Minds, entirely devoted to exploring what creativity can do for mental health. The festival's senior programmer for literature and spoken word, Ted Hodgkinson, tells me that the festival was created from "a kind of awakening going on" in terms of arts and mental health. "It was one of those moments where there was an opportunity for us to help to create a space for a conversation that was on the cusp of happening," he says.

Similarly, Paul Monks, director of CoreArts, an arts and mental health charity in Hackney that offers creative courses to those with enduring mental health issues, agrees that although there has always been an acknowledged link between mental health and creativity, it's become more prominent recently. He tells me he's noticed a general rise in the number of health service providers looking towards creative therapies. "I have been going to arts and well-being conferences for twenty years, so the discourse has been there all the time... but as part of a wider trajectory of making the arts a part of how health trusts work, that's new."

But does it actually work?

According to a report released by London's City and Hackney Wellbeing Network, which looked at hospital readmission rates of CoreArts members between April and September 2015, 97 percent of the 113 people who took part were well enough to stay out of hospital during their time on the creative program, compared to 17 percent in the year before they joined. Though this doesn't take into account other factors that may play into someone's recovery—like other medication or therapy they might be using alongside of it—it does seem to suggest there's a strong link between art and mental health.

Although art projects like this cost money to fund in the first place, there's some evidence they can actually save on healthcare costs in the long run. The same report predicts that the reduction in hospital admissions that creative therapies at CoreArts has helped support has saved the UK's National Health Service approximately $575,000 in costs in that same six month period.

So why aren't more people being offered things such as art or creative therapies?

"The focus isn't on the creative work but how you can process your feelings and how you look at yourself."—Rachel Boyd

It seems whether you're offered creative therapies often depends on two things: where you live, and how ill you are. Rachel Boyd, the information manager for mental health charity Mind—which has been campaigning against the "postcode lottery" around access to mental health services—says that "for a lot of people it's not on their radar." Creative therapies are often only "available in hospital settings so have to have a crisis before they can get access to them." Add this to an ever-mounting crisis in the mental health sector, and you've got a situation where many people are wanting to engage in the arts as an aid to mental health, but aren't in a situation to do so.

That said, there is pressure for more investment in the art-based therapies, and it's coming from a variety of avenues. The push for greater accessibility to the arts from school-age onward is one important step, which campaigns like the petition to include expressive arts in secondary schools are attempting to achieve. There's also the example being set by mental health charities, too—Mind, for example, invested about $60,000 in artistic projects last year through its Creative Therapies fund—and large-scale arts and mental-health events, such as the Southbank Centre's, are showing that people are eager to look to other options to take instead of, or alongside, traditional clinical methods. But as with any strive for change, it begins with the individual.

"Everyone can be creative," Boyd suggests. "The focus isn't on the work but how you can process your feelings and how you look at yourself. It's useful if people think of it as tools they can use, not skills they have to already have."

Nicole de Leiburne, founder of Don't Just Stare, agrees, saying, "Creativity is a general thing. Any human on this planet can be creative... There's art in cooking, there's art in singing, there's in dancing, there's art in so many things."

It's too simplistic to suggest the arts can solve the mental health crisis in itself or eradicate the need for medication and therapy, as successful routes to recovery will vary depending on each person, his or her preferences, and his or her own mental health problems. However, with a growing push for using creative means to help traditionally clinical problems, there's some hope that the future will see more funding and debate into how the arts can—and do—improve the mental health of so many of us.

Photo via Flickr user Dank Depot

Barely six months ago, Toronto had only a handful of medical marijuana dispensaries to speak of.

Now, you can hardly walk a block without spotting at least a few of them, and neighbourhoods like Kensington Market are fast becoming veritable green light districts. While there's no official tally, consulting firm The Big Toke believes the city is currently home to around 121 pot shops.

But, as was the case in Vancouver, local officials are finally catching on to the dispensary boom and they're freaking out about it.

Mayor John Tory, who last weekend wandered into a Kensington Market dispensary—some of which have massive lines to get through the door—penned a letter to the city's licensing department this week asking for a report on how to potentially license and regulate dispensaries.

Calling the influx "alarming," Tory said "this proliferation brings with it potential health risks for individuals who patronize dispensaries where the substance for sale is completely unregulated. It also affects surrounding businesses and communities, who have valid concerns that must be addressed—in particular, concerns about access by minors."

Tory then asked the city to work with Toronto police and use "whatever enforcement mechanisms are currently available" to deal with the issue. In response, the Cannabis Friendly Business Association is hosting an emergency meeting next week, to deal with what it anticipates could be a major crackdown, including fines, raids, and closures.

Lisa Campbell, chairwoman of Women Grow Toronto, told VICE she's hoping there will be a constructive conversation about regulating recreational versus medical dispensaries instead of having knee-jerk policies put in place.

"I think before any fines go out we need to have a conversation about how will dispensaries be regulated in Toronto and what practices are we going to use," she said. "Are we going to look towards Vancouver's model or other models like Victoria which are kind of more progressive or inclusive?"

Vancouver is currently in the midst of its own crackdown; 28 of around 180 dispensaries have shut down since the city implemented its new licensing scheme (through which they're charging $30,000 per license for non-compassion clubs) and bylaw enforcement officers have handed out a reported $20,000 in fines. The municipality has also banned edibles and restricted dispensaries' proximity to schools and community centres.

But some say the rules are way too strict.

"The dispensary crackdown is heavy-handed, discriminatory, and unjustifiable. Dispensaries are doing no harm, operating based on supply and demand," pot activist and Cannabis Culture owner Jodie Emery told VICE, noting that kids can buy candy where cigarettes are sold but "we don't shut down corner stores."

She said the city can "definitely" expect to be facing legal challenges from dispensary owners.

Victoria is also regulating its pot shops but with far less expensive licensing fees ($4,000-$5,000).

When it comes to licensing, Campbell said "we need to make sure it's not just rich people and gangsters that can afford a license," but she believes the city should be able to tax those who are making big profits. She also said decluttering of the concentration of dispensaries in certain areas might not be a bad idea.

"Having a lineup down the street is not a good look."

Toronto being an "international city" Campbell also explained that we should look to adopt a unique model. In Barcelona, for example, there are recreational and medical clubs and private members cooperatives.

Dispensaries in other parts of the province are already being burned by the legal grey zone.

Jason Allen, owner of The Niagara Dispensary in Niagara Falls was arrested and charged with possession and trafficking earlier this week. Allen said in a Facebook post the dispensary is a non-profit and that he's now struggling to pay legal fees. Meanwhile, the city of Hamilton is trying to shut down a federally-regulated licensed producer.

The confusion has prompted Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne to express her own concerns.

"We're in a tricky grey area right now, because we know that the federal government is going to be moving forward with legislation, but there hasn't been that discussion."

Tory is asking the city's licensing committee to have a dispensary-related report ready for their June meeting, while the municipal health board is expected to have a similar discussion at the end of this month.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Check out Peter Bagge, David Liljemark, Ruben Dahlstrand, and Flu Hartberg in other places.

Illustration by Marta Parszeniew

This article originally appeared in VICE UK.

A few years ago, I found wellness. My body felt like a burden, and the food I ate didn't seem to energise me or push me on: it dulled my edges, left me foggy, soft and slow. So I made a change. I got rid of the chocolate bars, microwave meals and cakes. I read about plant-based diets, and stopped eating meat, fish, dairy, eggs and anything too processed. I heard tales about soy milk and hormones and toxicity, so I tried to cut that out too. Every dinnertime, I sat back in my seat and watched everyone else tuck into their meals, content in the knowledge that I couldn't eat, so wouldn't eat. I thought about food all day; I woke up at night thinking about sausage rolls, pizza, roast chicken with crisp, lemon-rubbed skin. Food friends and foes drew into two distinct camps in my mind, and I saw ill-health at every turn and in every mouthful. I became fearful and thin. I had found wellness. I was not well.

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At the end of January 2015, while most of us were still barely roused from the post-Christmas stupor, Ella Mills (née Woodward) was breaking records. Her cookbook, Deliciously Ella (after her recipe blog of the same name) sold over 32,000 copies in the first week of sale alone to become the fastest selling debut cookbook of all time. Since then, she's gone on to release a second book, Deliciously Ella Every Day, open a Notting Hill deli, and capitalise on her credentials with a paid-for online service (£35) where you can find health tips and weekly food plans.

Ella Mills is at the crest of a wave. Over the last few years, health has become a national pastime. From bone broth to spiralizing, gluten-free and raw food, to the ubiquity of Nutribullets, juice cleanses and avocado toast, this is a food culture centred now on what it claims to be nutrition. It's over a decade since the publication of Nigella Lawson's game-changing cookbook How To Be A Domestic Goddess, which topped the book charts with her brand of warm, homely indulgence. The food books that top the charts now couldn't be further from that. Of the bestsellers in Amazon's Food & Drink category, 18 out of the 20 are cookbooks with a focus on healthy eating and dieting. The language of some of the our most beloved food writers has gone from flavour and feasting to cleanness and lightness.

On Munchies: Ruby Tandoh Won't Judge You for Ordering a Cappuccino with Extra Chocolate

It's "wellness" that's on the menu in this new generation of cookbooks – a term so happily imprecise that it's perhaps easier to frame in terms of what it isn't than what it is. It's not a cold, clinical, kind of health – nothing like big pharma, drugs and unsympathetic GPs. Nor is it brash workout videos, all messy and sweaty and hot. The diet books of our parents' generation were all tacky evangelism and shouty miracle claims. But our health is more muddled now – we live in an age of "obesity epidemics", horse meat scandals, and fears over hidden food nasties and carcinogenic additives. "Wellness" lifts us above this food chaos. Why not unclutter our diets and go back to basics? This is the salvation that wellness promises: no new science, no cutting edge technology, no fads, but a look backwards to a simpler time. Wellness is the start of a return to Eden, and the first snake to be cast out is gluten.

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As early as 1968, alarm began to spread about a potentially toxic ingredient smuggled into the food we love. It was declared responsible for symptoms ranging from migraine to upset stomachs, burning sensations, palpitations, numbness and weakness. Some began to avoid it personally, steering clear of restaurants where it might be lurking in the ingredients list, while others went further, pushing for it to be declared unsafe by food regulatory authorities. The panic came accompanied with medical studies, research by esteemed scientific journals and lobbying from high profile lawyers. The ingredient was connected by scientists, of varying levels of repute, with ADHD, diarrhoea, depression, acid reflux and obesity. It was an epiphany: finally an explanation for the cocktails of unsavoury symptoms that doctors had left undiagnosed in so many for so long.

So far, so familiar. The symptoms are just like those laid at the doorstep of gluten today: the bloating, sluggishness, weight gain and general ill health, the hyperbolic claims made for its toxicity, the money invested in (and profited from) the elimination of it from our diets. But this mystery trojan horse wasn't gluten at all. Forty years prior to the gluten panic, it was MSG at the heart of a looming public health disaster. The thing is, the myth of MSG sickness has since been thoroughly debunked. There was no illness. There was no need to overhaul health legislation or remove MSG from baby food. It was the power of panic.

Ella Mills, aka Deliciously Ella. Photo via Instagram.

Coeliac disease, in which individuals may suffer diarrhoea, bloating and acute abdominal pain, is a real and serious condition which affects roughly one percent of people in the UK. A less severe manifestation of gluten intolerance called Non-Coeliac Gluten Sensitivity (NCGS), is said to exist in roughly five percent of the population. For people who suffer from either of these or allied conditions, avoiding gluten is not just a lifestyle choice but a health imperative. But where does that leave the remaining majority? If you read any of the most popular wellness books or blogs, you could be forgiven for thinking that the case against gluten was clear cut. In her debut cookbook, Get the Glow, nutritionist-to-the-stars Madeleine Shaw calls it "sandpaper for the gut"; Amelia Freer, author of Eat Nourish Glow, lays the blame for everything from "head fog" to joint pain at the feet of gluten. There is at no point in either of Deliciously Ella's cookbooks any explanation for why we should ditch gluten if we're not sufferers of coeliac disease or NCGS. Yet her entire diet centres on the elimination of it.

And then there are the Hemsley sisters, who found fame, a cafe in Selfridges and a Channel 4 cooking show through their wellness credentials, and who have boasted that the GAPS diet is a huge inspiration for their gluten-free brand of health. The GAPS, or Gut and Psychology Syndrome, diet is a pro-"detox", highly restrictive, gluten-free regime, popularised by a Dr Natasha Campbell-McBride. The diet purports to treat everything from autism to bipolar disorder, while advocating the ingestion of hydrogen peroxide in order to "cleanse" the gut, encouraging the feeding of raw eggs to infants and inspiring a distrust of medical professionals. The Hemsleys have wisely never endorsed the specifics of the GAPS diet, but I'm left wondering why they'd ever consider the claims of this highly contentious (and largely unsubstantiated) diet a good basis for their philosophy of healthy eating. We deserve facts, figures and thorough research not just from the Hemsley sisters, but from all of the wellness authors and bloggers who promise health transformations in the wake of a gluten-free diet. Good research into health and nutrition is slow, rigorous and far from the evangelism of things like the GAPS diet, and wellness writing should reflect that. And yet all we're ever really told is that, if we do cut gluten out, we'll lose weight, have better skin and shinier hair. It seems like a miracle.

The problem is, as Alan Levinovitz explains in his book The Gluten Lie, that there is not necessarily any benefit to cutting out gluten unless it's medically required. If gluten is not a personal health risk – and that's for a medical professional to assess – a gluten-free diet won't necessarily help you at all. And this crusade against gluten might not just be fruitless (and expensive – according to Levinovitz, gluten-free products average at 242 percent more expensive than their gluten-containing versions), but actually harmful. Nutrition is an impossibly complicated and contested field, and rarely do we agree upon what is and is not good for us. In the absence of certainty, the safest and arguably most healthy approach to nutrition falls back on variety – of food groups, macronutrients, ingredients. When cure-all good health is promised via the exclusion of whole food groups, that might be to go against the grain of one of the few nutritional sureties we have.

So what if a few people needlessly spend a bit more and get nourished a bit less, chasing after a gluten-free miracle that may never come? That needn't affect the rest of us. Except it does. The language used in wellness circles doesn't just point to the ostensible effects of gluten on our health – it soars clear of dietary science and straight into another realm altogether. On popular wellness blogs, the gluten I've heard about is "evil", "poison", "contaminating" and "toxic". There's even a leading Australian gluten-free site called glutenisthedevil.com. This isn't just about nutrition, it's about morality, and when food becomes imbued with this kind of scandalising language, the dinner table becomes a minefield.

"I despair of the term 'clean eating'...it necessarily implies that any other form of eating – and consequently the eater of it – is dirty or impure and thus bad." – Nigella Lawson

I spoke about this purity fetish to Nigella Lawson, whose guilt-free approach to eating helped to reconfigure my attitude to food when I was at my most vulnerable. "I despair of the term 'clean eating'," she said, "though I actually like the food that comes under that banner. necessarily implies that any other form of eating – and consequently the eater of it – is dirty or impure and thus bad, and it's not simply a way of shaming and persecuting others, but leads to that self-shaming and self-persecution that is forcibly detrimental to true healthy eating."

Our diets become a moral issue when this is the food culture we foster, and gluten is just the start of it. "I wish people would recognise before saying, 'Hey, try this cool elimination diet – you've got nothing to lose,'" lamented Alan Levinovitz when I asked him about this modern cult of elimination dieting. "Nothing to lose? No, there's a lot to lose."

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Before my turn to "wellness", my eating disorder had looked very different. If wellness is about loving food, caring for your body and nourishing yourself, eating disorders supposedly stand at the other end of the spectrum – they're about volatility, deprivation and fearfulness. My bulimia was just that kind of textbook eating disorder. I've always loved maths, and the challenge of making sense of a chaotic world through the clarity of numbers. When depression came to me in my teens, this passion found an outlet in diet. My mind was a mess of numbers: how many calories had I eaten and how many purged; how much running equalled a Mars bar; my weight, twice a day; the number of days and weeks that it would take for me to become the person I wanted to be.

"Wellness" blogger Madeline Shaw. Photo via Instagram.

When I found "wellness", I thought I'd found a way out of the storm. What I was looking for was someone to say that there were things that weren't just OK to eat, but that they would actually be good for me. At the same time, I wasn't ready to float untethered from my world of food neuroses. Wellness was alluring precisely because of the restriction it promised. There's nothing left to be fearful of when the bad food is labelled "Bad Food", and when what's left is a miracle cure. I was looking for something like Deliciously Ella's books, which boast "counting goodness, not calories" in one breath, and deride "gross" convenience foods in the next, to weave a precarious path between diet regimes and a love of food. Clearly I wasn't the only one drawn to the comfort of a prescriptive diet: in the introduction of her cookbook, "wellness" expert Madeleine Shaw describes teenage years spent calorie-counting, anxiety, disordered eating and binging, all of which she left behind on England's dismal shores when she jetted off to Australia and there, in the sun and surf, discovered wellness – via restrictive diet and exercise – and was cured.

Wellness doesn't cause eating disorders. But when we advocate, and even insist upon, a diet so restrictive, moralising and inflexible, and market that diet to young women, and then dress it up as self-care: just how responsible is that?

It seems clear-cut: eating disorders are messy and unhappy, and wellness is a way out of that anxiety and disorder. But between the lines of the wellness cookbooks, I read a different story, and it's not just gluten in the firing line. In Madeleine Shaw's first cookbook alone, the vocabulary used to describe countless foods, and the way they make us feel, suggests a less accepting view of health: "junk", "sluggish", "bad", "foe", "cheat" and "fat" are all words she uses. She also reminds us that our friends might try to sabotage our diets, but that we must learn to ignore them. Ella Mills begs us to treat ourselves when the craving takes us, but that given enough time, those treat foods will begin to seem "kind of gross, actually."

It gives rise to a kind of all-or-nothing approach to nutrition where all the delicious nuance of cooking, eating and pleasure is brusquely swept aside. When I asked dietitian and advocate of the Health At Every Size campaign, Michelle Allison, about this dichotomy, she explained: "There is no third option presented by diet culture – there is only black or white, good or bad, dieting or off-the-wagon... And many people flip between the two states like a light switch, on or off, for more or less their entire lives." Nobody sums up the totalitarianism of wellness better than Deliciously Ella herself, though. "It's not a diet, it's a lifestyle." And that's just the catch.

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Wellness doesn't cause eating disorders. But when we advocate, and even insist upon, a diet so restrictive, moralising and inflexible, and market that diet to young women, and then dress it up as self-care: just how responsible is that? When I subscribed to wellness, it gave me the means to rationalise my food insecurities, whilst glossing over my fear of food with the respectable veneer of health-consciousness. My illness was hidden in plain sight, and what's more – it became some thing to be proud of.

Orthorexia is a preoccupation with "right" and "wrong" foods. Although it doesn't yet have an agreed upon diagnosis among clinicians, a spokesperson at beat, the UK's leading eating disorder charity, told me that there has been an anecdotal increase in the number of people who suffer from the disorder in the recent years, and explained that "this may be exacerbated by the emphasis on what is termed "healthy eating", which may prompt people to go beyond taking care and moving into fixation or obsession." Some consider orthorexia an eating disorder, while others place it closer to OCD, but regardless of its diagnosis, its symptoms – anxiety around "Bad Foods", dietary inflexibility, a concern with physical health at social and emotional expense – seem to be on the rise.

The diet industry may just have orchestrated the most successful, and valuable, food rebranding in recent history – as of 2014, the UK gluten-free market was worth £175 million.

Of course there are some people who can dedicate their lives to good health and still be mentally well, just as there will always be people who suffer from disordered eating, "healthily" or otherwise. But when wellness balloons beyond the individual, swelling from personal lifestyle choice to sweetheart of the diet industry bolstered by supermarkets who see kale, coconut oil and chia seeds as a great profit opportunity, that's a problem for all of us. When the pursuit of health becomes obsessive and fearful, that's not healthy. Still worse, it's becoming more and more clear that the wellness we chase might not even want us back.

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"Until just over four years ago I was a sugar monster, and I mean a total addict," recounts Ella Mills, Deliciously Ella, in the opening sentence of her first cookbook. The implication is of course that if she – a self-avowed ex-sugar fiend – can find good health, anybody can. This is a wellness for everyone. In her record-breaking book, with its story of goodness, healing and transformation, it's fitting that she would set the scene with the scapegoating of an unnatural, unhealthy, drug-like "other". 

White sugar is anathema in wellness circles. We know that eating too much sugar can damage our health, so it'd be understandable for the wellness industry to advocate that we eat less sugar, and less often. What is less understandable is why wellness food writer, and somewhat ironically titled "The Yes Chef" Tess Ward " clear of anything white" or 'refined', putting her trust instead in a kind of benevolent Mother Nature that I'm not sure really exists. She recommends 'natural' sugars such as raw honey, blackstrap molasses and coconut palm sugar, though what makes these so much more natural than the sweetness wrought from sugar canes remains unclear.

We can't take it as gospel when Madeleine Shaw derides the "empty calories" in sugar – the very calories that keep us moving, breathing and surviving. It's also not clear why, just because maple syrup contains some valuable nutrients, we must omit cane sugar from our diets altogether (least of all considering that the former costs over five times as much per gram). If the end goal really is just good health, why does the focus seem to be less on reducing sugar intake and more about promoting expensive, less accessible forms of it? As Alan Levinovitz confirms, "the biggest difference between forms of sugar is their price and the foods they appear in." If health food advocates take us down only the most expensive and exclusionary paths to health, we ought to question their integrity. When wellness guru Amelia Freer says that sugar is "a drug that makes us fat," she says it all. Because, as so often happens in a world that reveres thinness, a conversation ostensibly about sugar, and wellness, has become one about fat.

Chef and author of 'The Naked Diet' cookbook Tess Ward. Photo via Instagram.

Fat is as the heart of wellness, though you'd never guess it by the way the industry brands itself. Tess Ward is quick to point out that her "Naked Diet" isn't a diet diet, but a lifestyle diet, just like the how that Madeleine Shaw separates her calorie-counting past and her gluten-free present. Again and again, Deliciously Ella shuns any claim that her diet is about "deprivation". Wellness isn't a diet, we're told, but something clean and sustainable, far from the baseness of 'diet talk', weight-loss and bodies.

And yet throughout these books – the very same ones that tell us to locate our self-worth not in how we look but in who we are and how we feel – there is a consistent, entrenched fear of fatness. When Deliciously Ella allays our fears that "things like avocados and almonds will make you fat," she leaves that foundational anxiety around fatness intact as a valid concern. When Madeleine Shaw boasts that her lifestyle tips can create a "leaner, healthier physique," you could be forgiven for wondering where her "be your own cheerleader" pep went.

In the very same books that tell us to locate our self-worth not in how we look but in who we are and how we feel – there is a consistent, entrenched fear of fatness.

If the only "good" food within wellness is the kind that won't make you fat, wellness doesn't look so different to dieting. And with dieting having been proven not only ineffective (an astonishing 97 percent of dieters regain at least as much weight as they lost, within three years, belying the ruthless optimism of the industry); but often also groundless (Health At Every Size is an organisation working to fight the claim that all fat people are ill); and even dangerous, maybe the wellness industry isn't quite so magical after all. The diet industry may just have orchestrated the most successful, and valuable, food rebranding in recent history – as of 2014, the UK gluten-free market was worth £175 million, and its popularity continues to boom. The biggest wellness myth might be that it was ever really about wellness at all.

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Where do we go from here? A clue might lie in a study conducted in the mid-60s. In this study, a group of women – some Thai, the rest Swedish – ate a spicy rice dish, made with flavours and ingredients familiar within Thai cuisine. Scientists found that the Thai women – who hadn't been as thrown by the spiciness of the food as the Swedish women – absorbed nearly 50 percent more iron than the others. When participants were fed puréed meals (comprised of the kinds of foods they knew and enjoyed), they absorbed on average 70 percent less iron than they did when fed those same meals in their more appetising, unpuréed, format. The pleasure that these women anticipated, and then relished, in their food actually helped them to be more nourished than when they received the same nutrients in a less palatable package. It was a startling result, and highlights what wellness so often overlooks: that when we separate pleasure from nutrition in our diets, we end up less nourished – physically and emotionally – than ever. Enjoying your food, it turns out, is good for you.

In grounding health in rules and restriction, rather than pleasure and intuition, wellness misses a trick. And it's not even clear that the perfect idea of health the movement strives for is a worthy end in itself. The World Health Organisation advises that health is "a resource for everyday life, not the object of living," a crucial caveat that the wellness industry routinely ignores. Even if we do choose to prioritise health in our lives, that health doesn't need to be complicated.

There are infinite routes to good health outside of the dogmatism of wellness and clean eating. Reacquaint yourself with the sweet, heady scent of onions caramelising in butter. When your birthday rolls around, make your own cake, and hold tight to your right to treat yourself with that same kindness as often as you need it. Feel buoyed by the knowledge that food is on average safer, more plentiful and more nutritious than ever before in human history. Trust that your body knows what it needs, and when you get a hankering for chips, chocolate or courgette, look to that craving: the rumble of your belly is not a saboteur. Remember above all that you will be nourished not only by the food you eat, but by the pleasure you take in it.


If you don't trust me, take it from dietitian Michelle Allison: "Eating a wide variety of foods, trying new things, and taking pleasure in food is good for you. Combine that with the structure of regular meals and snacks, and make an effort to include most food groups at your meals, and you are covered." Eating well really is that simple. The key to good health isn't hiding in a fad diet or an elimination regime. You won't find it, as if by magic, at the bottom of a pack of chia seeds or as a prize for weight loss, gym time or a detox. Eating well is eating intuitively, with pleasure and without shame. Whatever the wellness industry may tell you, you have the secret to wellness already. You've had it all along.

Follow Ruby on Twitter @rubytandoh

Some resources for eating well without "wellness":

Health At Every Size – "supporting people of all sizes in finding compassionate ways to take care of themselves".

The Ellyn Satter Institute – resources for a model of healthy eating based on pleasure and "eating competence".

The Fat Nutritionist, aka Michelle Allison, is a registered dietician and HAES advocate supporting a holistic, empowering approach to food and feeding
.

The Gluten Lie, by Alan Levinovitz – debunking some of our most stubbornly popular food myths
.

Glenys O – a registered dietitian enabling health within a framework of competent eating and, crucially, without dieting.


Ruby's next cookbook, Flavour, will be released in July. Special preorder book packages will be available from late June, with profits from these sales going to UK eating disorder charity beat.

Trayvon Martin. Photo released by the Martin Family

I'm sure there are people out there who would claim that the gun George Zimmerman used to kill Trayvon Martin in 2012, a weapon he's currently hawking on the internet, is a symbol of the Second Amendment or Standing Your Ground or whatever. But as a black man in America, I see it as a trophy representing the hate and terror that has been thrust on African Americans with impunity since well before the founding of this country.

It was widely reported on Thursday that Zimmerman was auctioning his notorious "Kel-Tec PF-9 9mm" on GunBroker.com, with a starting bid of $5,000 and a note claiming "many have expressed interest" in owning the firearm, which was described as "a piece of American history." Of course, it wasn't long before the site took down the listing amid a great deal of criticism. Zimmerman is now trying to sell it on unitedgungroup.com, where it has reportedly received bids (some of them obviously jokes) as high as $65 million.

The auction ends in a few days, and though it's attracted a bunch of trolls with names like "McShootface," I have no doubt there are people across America who would pay top dollar to hang this thing on their wall.

Thinking about the sale of this gun, I'm reminded of whites collecting souvenirs after lynching black people. And when I say "souvenirs," I'm not talking about the starfish key chains and booty-shaped shot glasses you get at Myrtle Beach. I'm talking about the ears, toes, and genitalia of human beings. As detailed in historian Harvey Young's excellent "The Black Body as Souvenir in American Lynching" essay, when 2,000 white men, women, and children came together in Georgia in 1899 to burn Sam Hose alive, there was a dash for the black man's body parts. The crowd took everything they could, and the folks who couldn't nab corporeal keepsakes settled for parts of the tree to which the man had been tied for his final moments.

As the Springfield Republican newspaper reported at the time, "Those unable to obtain ghastly relics directly paid their more fortunate possessors extravagant sums for them. Small pieces of bones went for 25 cents, and a bit of liver crisply cooked sold for 10 cents."

This, of course, sounds hauntingly close to what Zimmerman is doing with this auction—which is to say, trafficking in black death.

On its own, the man's handgun is nothing special: just a hunk of metal. (As Harvey writes in his essay, a souvenir is "incomplete in itself.") To be valuable to the people who covet them, objects like these require an "accompanying narrative furnished by its possessor in order to fill in that which is missing and to allow the fragment to reflect the event or experience of which it is a part."

In Zimmerman's case, when the inanimate gun is paired with the narrative of a dead black child mourned by black people all over the world, it becomes something so much more to those who view the killer as a patriot and children like Martin as super predators. Owning the weapon that took Martin out offers Zimmerman's admirers a token of racial dominance, borne out not only in the shooting but in the killer's subsequent acquittal on criminal charges.

As Harvey writes in his essay on lynching souvenirs, items like these "not only fix the black body within a historical moment, but also transform it into a captive object to be owned, displayed, and, quite possibly, traded." By making the gun that dealt the deathblow to Martin available for purchase, Zimmerman is commodifying the life of Martin in a way that stinks to me of a slave auction. And the fact that Zimmerman has the audacity to attempt such a sale is a reminder that he enjoys privileges that were—at least, according to the courts—taken from Martin lawfully.

UnitedGunGroup.com

Although some might say my drawing a line between lynching souvenirs and this auction is a stretch, I think there's no other way to look at Martin's killing—or many of the other high-profile killings of blacks that have taken place since then.

To this day, it's impossible for me to think about Martin's premature death and not jump to the murder of Emmett Till, the teenager who was lynched in 1955 by two white men for allegedly whistling at a white woman. Till's murderers were ultimately acquitted—just like Zimmerman. But the connection goes deeper than that. As legendary activist Walter White once put it, "Lynching is much more an expression of Southern fear of Negro progress than Negro crime."

Martin hadn't committed any crime when Zimmerman approached him with a loaded handgun, except being a young person of color. But it's that fear of black people, nurtured by the criminalization and demonization of the black body that dates back to slavery, that not only justifies these killings in the eyes of their perpetrators, but also helps justify them in the eyes of people thousands of miles away. I can't help but suspect Zimmerman's gun has real appeal in some corners of white America because it represents racial triumph at a time when a black presidency has threatened the traditional order.

And although most high school history books might have you believe that lynch-like slayings of blacks stopped thanks to the civil rights movement, the truth is they've just taken different forms. In 2011, a group of white men and women murdered a 49-year-old black man James Craig Anderson by beating him and running him over with a Ford F-250 truck, reportedly screaming "white power." The three white murderers of James Byrd, who was tied to the back of a pickup truck and dragged for three miles through the streets of Jasper, Texas, in 1998, even had some personal effects appear on an auction site last year.

... the fact that Zimmerman has the audacity to attempt such a sale is a reminder that he enjoys privileges that were—at least, according to the courts—taken from Martin lawfully.

But the persistence of lynching goes beyond the private sector and stretches into the state. Back in the day, terrorists paramilitary groups like Ku Klux Klan were organizations where lawmakers and police could dole out murder and intimidation outside the standards and practices of the law. But today, with the rise of mass incarceration and the militarization of our police departments, many people consider extrajudicial shootings—which were brought into sharp focus after Martin's shooting, even though Zimmerman was not a police officer—as picking up where lynchings left off in the 1950s by institutionalizing them.

There were more than 5,000 lynchings in the US between late 19th and early to mid 20th centuries, with roughly 70 percent committed against blacks. According to the Guardian, there were a staggering 1,134 police shootings last year, of which blacks comprised a wildly disproportionate amount; black men, in particular, were nine times more likely than any other group to be shot by officers of the law. And according to the Washington Post, black men made up 40 percent of those who were unarmed when they got shot and killed by the police in 2015.

This is not to say that all police shootings are unjustified. But when so many black people are having their lives taken from them at such a disproportionate rate, often with zero consequence for those who pull the trigger, how could we not see it in the shadow of this country's bloody racial history.

Watch Wilbert, the author, investigate the tragic rape and murder of 11 black women from Cleveland:

Of course, there was a lot more to lynching than the simple act of murder. It was often a social event that attracted thousands of onlookers who celebrated with picnics and chronicled the occasion on postcards. In a way, contemporary police killings in America recreate the same sort of spectacle. Although massive crowds aren't present at the moment of the act, the tragedy usually makes it to computer and television screens by way of grainy cellphone footage or, in Trayvon's case, the haunting screams for help heard during a 911 phone call. The shared experience of watching Eric Garner getting choked out or hearing what many believe were the last words of Martin is a reminder to blacks everywhere of exactly how little our lives are worth in this country, and a signal to some whites that the others are being kept in line.

The commodification of deaths via souvenirs and trophies brings us full circle, diminishing black lives even after they've been stolen and using our pain as a weapon. So it's only fitting Zimmerman has suggested that when he finally sells the gun, he will use the proceeds to fight Black Lives Matter, the human rights movement born out of the rage over his own acquittal for killing Trayvon Martin.

As much as we'd like to throw up our hands at the Trayvon Martin tragedy and fallout—from the shooting to the acquittal to the grisly souvenirs—as some sort of aberration, the truth is this whole saga has been incredibly American. It's really just one drop in the bucket of black blood that has been building up since the dawn of the republic.

Follow Wilbert L. Cooper on Twitter.

Greetings and frozen felicitations.

My name is Nicholas Gazin and I am VICE's art editor, but I also review frozen food weekly. Some is good, some is less good. Most of it is the pits.

Whereas most frozen food consists of one dish or food item, the makers of these following products attempted to produce complete meals that you cook all at once in your microwave. Meats, noodles, vegetables, grains, and sometimes a horrendous pudding or brownie, all bombarded with microwaves for the same amount of time. The results are typically abysmal, but some were good. Most weren't though.

Kid Cuisine: Chicken Breast Nuggets

The blue plastic food tray was beautiful next to the yellow food. The chicken nuggets were flavourless and un-crispy. The macaroni and cheese was flavourless, and the "cheese" was sort of runny and yellow. The corn was flavourless and in a pool of warm, thawed ice. The (also warm) pudding with sprinkles was pleasant and full of stray macaroni.

Grade: D-

Hungry-Man: Salisbury Steak

Hungry-Man makes three varieties of TV dinner, but I chose the Salisbury Steak because it's a stereotypical TV dinner dish and because it looked the grossest.

The plastic serving dish was able to sit in the oven for 35 minutes without melting, which I found odd. (Side note: Did you know that Salisbury steak was first created by a medical doctor named Dr. Salisbury? He was an early champion of low carb diets.)

I'd just eaten a Kids Cuisine and was prepared for something high in sodium and low in flavor. It was high in sodium, containing 1300 mg of it, and it was also rich in flavor. Unfortunately, I didn't like that flavor.

The mashed potatoes were acceptable and like actual food. The green beans were also not unlike food. The twin steaks were bathed in a mushroom-gravy swamp. The flavor was awful and memorable. The brownie was flavorless and only offered its comforting warmth as consolation.

GRADE: F

Luvo: Chicken In BBQ Sauce

I'm not familiar with the brand Luvo, but they sent me a giant, styrofoam container with a package of dry ice and a variety of free frozen foods, so now I'm eating them.

While last week I mused on why Amy's has yet to make Jewish food, it also occurred to me that I hadn't seen any soul food around the frozen food aisle, which I've become way too familiar with. Luvo, however, makes soul food.

This one has chicken, collards, and grits. Inside the box is a sealed paper bag with what feels like a huge block of ice inside. You microwave it for seven minutes in the bag and then carefully cut it open. The instructions on the box tell users/eaters to "shimmy the contents onto the serving plate." I just turned it upside down, like dumping out re-usable diapers, which is why the presentation of my meal is poor.

The chicken tasted pretty great, not too sinewy or soft. The barbecue sauce was very mild. (Typically, I find that frozen food featuring sauce tastes like what it feels like to drown in a corn syrup lake.) The grits were a plain heap, but adding hot sauce and some finely-grated cheese helped. The collards were stellar and came with corn, onions, and peppers. Everything was spiced mildly, but not bland.

I've eaten a couple frozen TV dinners and none even came close to resembling food. I would eat this again. I do wish the bag contained a little brownie or pudding thing inside it like other TV dinners, though. Otherwise, this was the best complete meal-style frozen food I've tried yet.

I would buy a few of these a week if they were sold in my supermarket.

GRADE: A+

Luvo: Orange Mango Chicken

I'm blown away by these Luvo things. This one was pretty good. The chicken was great. The pieces of mango felt slightly slimy, but I didn't mind. The quinoa and brown rice was great. The broccoli was slightly sweet, probably from the mango.

I'm still mostly impressed with how they figured out how to make microwaveable chicken that comes out this perfect. Considering that all the elements in this meal were cooked in the same bag for the same amount of time, the contents of the steamy bag should have been like goop. But nope, great food.

GRADE: A-

Amy's: Enchilada With Spanish Rice & Beans

The rice was like rice. The beans were like beans. The enchilada was like rice and beans in a little floppy tube.

Corn was also a component. Thank you, corn.

Corn: You're welcome, Nicky. I love to be in your body.

GRADE: A

If you work for a company that produces frozen food and would like to send some to Nick Gazin to review please contact him at nick.gazin@vice.com

Visit John Malta's website.

Photos by Robert Cooper

Hundreds of men surround Father Saba, waiting intensely. A combustible concoction of alcohol, adrenaline, and (Orthodox) God-knows-what-else roars through their veins and crawls into their sweat on this hot spring day. The men focus on the black leather ball the size of an award-winning squash. in their priest's hands. They are crouched, ready, and eager to explode. A group begins to chant, "Lelo, Lelo, Lelo." Out of nowhere a literal cow emerges from the crowd and walks up to where the priest stands as if the animal understands something holy, of sorts, is about to happen. One of the men kicks the interloping animal, and the cow disappears back into the throng. A pistol cracks, and Father Saba tosses the 35-pound, jet-black cowskin ball into the air. This is how Lelo, an annual Georgian bloodsport, begins: with a ball and a bang.

As it descends from the sky, the ball looks like a giant leather pumpkin. It's stuffed with sand and sawdust, a concoction that is then drenched with holy wine and sewn shut. All the players are full of wine too, and their belligerence is almost palpable in the hot afternoon sun. When the the ball hits the ground, a hellish sort of chaos immediately erupts as the crowd swarms and begins attacking itself. Many of the women, children, and elderly gravitate outward, away from the center of the scrum, forming a kind of circle. Most of the men do the opposite, creating a cluster of perpetual collision that will continue for the next several hours as they dive after the black ball, trying to carry it to a makeshift "goal post" that will end the game.

Each year on Orthodox Easter—May 1 this year—a battle rages on the paved road that passes through Lanchkhuti, a town in Georgia's Guria region. The game, if you can even call it that, is an amalgamation of rugby, a battle, and a mosh pit. The violence is intimate, but not personal. It's fitting that on a day when Georgians are celebrating a resurrection, they play a game that makes them feel alive.

There are no rules to Lelo. There are a few vague customs. The goal is to get the heavy leather ball to one of the two small rivers, or "lelos," which sit on opposite ends of the town like goal posts. The game doesn't end until this happens. Each riverbed is an equal distance from the town's center, where Father Saba starts the match. For three centuries, Georgian men have been chasing after the Lelo ball, sometimes getting seriously injured and occasionally even dying in the process. In the future, Georgian men will likely die in its pursuit. This is understood by all who play; this is tradition.

During the Lelo match, the town is divided by an imaginary line that is ingrained in the minds of the residents of Lanchkhuti as if it were a canyon. Only the residents of Lanchkhuti and those from the neighboring villages know who is on which team, though people from all over Georgia come to play. Anybody—be it your brother, your mother, your son—whose home is on the other side of the line becomes your enemy. One side or team is called Upper, the other is called Lower. There are no uniforms, nothing to mark which side the player is from.

Between the two rivers is Lanchkhuti's main thoroughfare, which closes every Easter for Lelo. Bus stops, residents' yards, and even people's porches are considered part of the field of play, giving the sport an urban warfare vibe. If a player wants to derail the momentum, he might toss the ball into a fenced-in area. By simply standing in the road, you become part of the game; you are playing. If you don't move out of the way, you will be beaten, trampled, tackled, offered red wine from a plastic bottle, or all four at once.

When the priest ignites the game, the ball is rarely seen by the human eye. Those who find it often find themselves instinctively clutching and grasping for it. They are consumed, crushed against the pavement, stuck at the bottom of the human pile with little chance of escape. Last year a middle-aged man died this way. His name was Gocha Pirtkhalaishvili and he suffered from a fatal heart attack while trapped inside a mass of players.

According to tradition, at the end of the match the ball is left on the grave of the most recent person in the town to die since the previous Easter. This year the ball was placed on Pirtkhalaishvili's tombstone. Next year a new ball will be made, and a new game will begin. Despite the occasional tragedy, there isn't much talk of making Lelo safer. Everyone I spoke to during this year's match said the true meaning and spirit of the game is "about tradition," even if that means there's the occasional unintentional human sacrifice.

There is also more strategy than one would expect/ The older, more experienced players drive the younger ones, many of whom are afraid (and thus constantly drinking) into battle. At this year's Lelo spectacle, VICE noticed two different leaders in particular driving the momentum of the match: Gela "the General" Pirtkhalaishvili and Nona "the Queen" Chkhaidze.

Nona "The Queen" Chkhaidze

Chkhaidze is 65 years old. Both her grandson and her daughter came with her from another village to embrace the chaos of Lelo. During the game, she held her own, standing just behind the men carrying the ball, the most dangerous place to stand. At one point, she literally pushed players forward and ordered them where and how to move.

She said she was playing this year to honor her brother, who had recently died. "He loved this game so much," she said. "He is playing with us right now."

Gela Pirtkhalaishvili, "General" of the Lower Team

"I've been playing this since childhood, and I am one of the leaders," Pirtkhalaishvili, a massive blonde man in remarkable shape, told us. "We make rules: You cannot hit a person who has fallen. And when someone has fallen and is hurt, everyone holds their hands up in the air. We are controlling all of this. We also developed a strategy of how to steal the ball from the opponents."

"The General," as he seems to be known as in the town, spent most of the day chasing the ball and shouting orders to his teammates until he was red in the face. His leadership paid off and his Lower side won for the first time several years. The Queen was defeated.

"I feel perfect. As long as I'm alive, I'll always play this game," Pirtkhalaishvili said once the game ended. "But is not safe. We are all crazy—that's why we play. We play because of our self-pride. We have warrior's blood, but we are not invaders like the Mongolians. We are defending something and this game is a kind of reproduction—defeating an enemy. There are times that I am afraid, but that makes me stronger. I feel a responsibility for my ancestors when I play."

Dato Kilasonia, Vice President of the Lelo Federation

"Lelo could be 3,000 years old, possibly even older," said Dato Kilasonia, Vice President of the Lelo Foundation, which helps organize the Easter event. Other accounts say references to the game first appeared in a 12th-century poem. "We have the same genetics as our ancestors. That's why we still play Lelo. It is an ancestor of rugby. Since Georgia became a Christian country, people have been playing Lelo at religious events.

"Many years ago, Georgians would play Lelo to warm up before going into battle. Even today the Georgian army plays Lelo. This is one of the three oldest games in the world. If a man dies playing this game, his family feels that he died in battle, and that he sacrificed himself."

Koba Pirtkhalaishvili, a 64-Year-Old Veteran Lelo Player

The history of Lelo, as you can imagine, includes plenty of legends.

"Several years ago the ball fell into a well and several men jumped in after it," Koba Pirtkhalaishvili, a longtime Lelo participant, told me. He also told me his favorite moment: "There was a man named Solomon who was extremely tall and very strong. Nobody could take the ball away from him. So one clever lady took a razor blade and cut his pants. They fell down to his shoes. So when Solomon leaned down to pull his pants up, they took the ball away from him."

Archpriest Mirian Pirtkhalaishvili

Not everyone is satisfied with the status quo of the game.

"I have never played," said Mirian Pirtkhalaishvili, the village's archpriest, who watched as another priest started the game hours earlier. "I think there should be at least some rules, and it should be a more civil game.

"For instance, one year they wanted to honor a very old Lelo player named Kosta Oragvelide, so they asked him to officially start the game by throwing the ball. When they handed the ball to him, it was so heavy that the old man couldn't hold it and he fell on the ground. All of the players then jumped on top of him to grab the ball. He ended up with four broken ribs and was never able to walk again. He died not long after."

At the end of the game, after the Lower team had won, a young Georgian in his late 20s was laid out in the middle of the road near the river, smoking a cigarette. His leg was clearly broken and a group of passersby were trying to convince him to put it on the curb to elevate it. The young man was too tired, in too much pain, and simply refused to move. We offered to carry him to a taxi and take him to the hospital, but he politely declined. Instead we handed him a beer, which he accepted. Before walking away, we asked, "If you knew this was going to happen, would you still have played?"

"Of course," the young man replied as he sipped on his beer and took a drag of his cigarette. "And I'll be back here next year too."

See more photos below.

Follow Will on Twitter. See more photo work from Robert here.

"I love it," Alldread says of the Guinness record. Photo by Jess Desaulniers-Lea

Michelle DuBarry (also known as Russell Alldread) is an icon and activist in Toronto's gay village and needs no title, though he has many, including the Empress of TICOT (Imperial Court of Toronto.) Still, he was surprised when his friends notified him that they'd secretly sent his info to the Guinness Book of World Records who presented him with their reply—the title of "World's Oldest Performing Drag Queen."

Over the past seven days, America witnessed five mass shootings that left three dead and 19 injured. The attacks bring the US mass shooting body count so far this year to 106 dead and 372 injured. That means more people have died in American mass shootings in the last four and a half months than were killed (by most estimates) in Ukraine's brutal protests between fall 2013 and fall 2014.

Meanwhile, Europe suffered one mass shooting this week, albeit an especially bloody one. Early Sunday, a group of bikers and locals were hanging out in an abandoned brewery in the Russian town of Chelnokhovo, not far from Moscow, when some of the bikers reportedly insulted 27-year-old Ilya Aseyev. Taking offense, the man allegedly left and returned with a firearm at about 6 AM, killing five people. That assault brings Europe's mass shooting body count so far this year to 18 dead and 55 injured in 15 incidents.

The shooting in Chelnokhovo wasn't just deadlier than all of this week's American mass shootings combined—it was also the deadliest such attack in Europe in 2016. But while the attack was horrific, justice (dubious as that term may be in Russia) was swift; two female witnesses spared in the attack helped police identify and arrest Aseyev within the day. That makes for a stark contrast with the aftermath of many American mass shootings, where the authorities seem to have trouble identifying potential suspects, and all too often never make an arrest at all.

The United States has a notoriously high rate of unsolved homicides: 211,000 such cases accumulated between 1980 and 2015, with almost 5,000 more added annually. (Citing FBI statistics, NPR reported last year that about 64 percent of all homicide investigations nationwide go unresolved.) You might expect mass shooting cases, including those with no deaths, to be easier to crack given their visibility. But according to David L. Carter, a criminologist at Michigan State University and an expert on homicide clearance rates in America, it's not that simple. The method and scale of a violent crime doesn't necessarily determine how hard it is to solve; mass shootings are still prone to all of the complications that have stymied police investigations increasingly since the 1960s, when national clearance rates on homicide cases were more like 90 percent year on year.

A decline in certain types of crimes of passion has increased the relative rate of stranger-on-stranger (or at least seemingly random) attacks, which are harder to investigate. That's especially true if you can't track down a perpetrator via powder residue, shell casings, bullets, or other forensics. Tension between violence-prone communities and the police, the emergence of "no snitch" culture, and the fear of retaliatory attacks by the shooters can also hinder efforts to gather witness testimony. The result is pockets of virtual impunity with massive numbers of unsolved murders when compared to the rest of the country.

We can see many of these factors at play in America's mass shootings this past week. The first four incidents all basically line up with characteristics of "random" or "gang" violence. Last Friday at about 8:15 PM, one person was killed and four were wounded outside of a carwash in Detroit, Michigan. Then, around 9:10 PM, a street shooting in Montgomery, Alabama, injured four more. On Sunday morning, at about 2:30 AM, an altercation between two men in line for a food truck in Austin, Texas, left one of them dead and three women injured. And on Wednesday night at about 8 PM, another street shooting in Chicago, Illinois, wounded five more. Investigations in these cases have moved slowly, and may go nowhere given the context of the crimes.

That leaves one less opaque mass shooting on Wednesday night in Birmingham, Alabama. A man allegedly injured four of his children and killed their mother in her home—a case involving two parties who knew each other, as well as vocal witnesses. The tragedy was followed by the arrest of the suspect the morning after the shooting.

"There is a point when a community demands a response" to tricky but emotionally resonant shootings, Carter tells me—especially in the case of very public incidents with high body counts. The extra manpower and scrutiny in those cases may lead to higher clearance rates.

Conversely, some criminologists argue, investigatory failure just erodes trust in institutions, further limiting cops' ability to gather information.

Carter and company insist that this doesn't need to be a permanent predicament. Criminologists and ex-cops have suggested all manner of tweaks to policy and procedure, from changing protocol for investigations to better funding homicide units in poor communities (investigating murders is expensive) to overhauling the deployment and priorities of officers in murder hot spots. Whether any of these recommendations can increase the homicide clearance rate generally or the mass shooting clearance rate in particular remains to be see. But for now, America has to contend with the fact that there are large swaths of the country where you can unload a clip of ammunition from a moving car knowing there's a good chance you'll get away with it.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

In this week's edition of First-Person Shooter, we handed off two cameras to Camille Britton, a New York City-based Muay Thai Fighter who's been competing in the city's amateur circuit since 2013. She trains up to six days a week, twice a day, to regularly kick-ass during her fights on the weekends.

Camille's Friday leading up to her eleventh official amateur fight at The Queen's Theatre at Flushing Meadow Park was extremely busy. She "made weight" at her gym, visited a Buddhist temple to ask for good luck during her fight from the resident monks, and fought someone over eight inches taller than her. She also talked to VICE about how she got introduced to the sport, and how she gets psyched up before a match by taking a nap.

What was your day like?
Camille Britton: Fight days are long days! I woke up at 9 AM thinking, It's fight day! I was nervo-cited (a mix of nervous and excited) because it was the morning and I wasn't fighting until 10 PM that night. I rolled out of bed, ate some breakfast, and headed to a Buddhist temple to pay respect and ask for good luck before heading to the gym for the pre-fight weigh-in. I am a Christian. However, with my gym I go to pay respect to where Muay Thai comes from. The monks are really nice people, and those who we can communicate with always remind us to keep our hands up when we fight. Then, my teammates and I drove over to the Queen's Theatre where I fought my bout. I then ended the night watching Game of Thrones with all my friends.

How long have you been practicing Muay Thai?
I've been practicing Muay Thai for a total of four years and competing for two and a half years now. I initially started kickboxing because I wanted to lose weight and be healthy. I met Justin Troy, who was a kickboxing instructor at the time, and I took private sessions with him for a bit. Then I learned he was a Muay Thai fighter. After Googling what Muay Thai was, I thought it was pretty cool. I followed him to Chok Sabai Gym in May of 2013 and the rest is history.

How do you get psyched up right before a fight?
I'm not sure what you mean by psyched. I don't listen to rap/rock music or anything like that. I actually like to nap, and if I do listen to anything, it's usually Gospel music because I want to feel completely relaxed and calm. There are moments where I will call my brother or my mom and they'll give me some encouraging words. I get the opposite of psyched, I guess.

Can you tell me more about the amateur fight night in Queens?
Weapons 9 Dead Serious Promotions presented The Warriors Cup 26 at the Queen's Theatre at Flushing Meadow Park on April 23. There were 15 fights, 30 fighters, and five title matches. My match was a full-rules title fight, meaning that elbows, knees, kicks, and punches were all included.

How do you "make weight"?
I eat healthy, eat clean. I stay away from fried foods, alcohol, and processed sugars. Making weight for me is never a painful process because at Chok we don't believe in depleting your body. Yes there is a dehydration process, but that's done usually the day before or the day of. My gym doesn't believe in cutting massive amounts of weight before a fight. Some gyms may, and to that I say to each his or her own.

Did you win your bout?
I fought a 5x2 (five rounds, two minutes each) and although I did not win, I couldn't have been happier with my performance! My opponent was eight and a half inches taller than me and had more experience. That being said, I went in there and performed like we were equal in height and experience. I implemented my game plan, and landed some great combinations and strikes. I was very relaxed in the ring, which was a first, and actually enjoyed my time in there. It was quite awesome! Losing always stings, but the outcome doesn't define you; I believe your performance does.

Ever have to use Muay Thai as a form of self defence?
Since learning my art, there has only been one instance where I had to defend myself against a drunk guy. It was over before it started. I struck him twice, and then ran off in the opposite direction. I called my boyfriend once I got home to process what had happened. There was no thinking in my actions; I just reacted. Hopefully he learned his lesson.

What do you like best about the sport?
I practice Muay Thai and I compete because I'm good at it. I love the challenge, and I truly appreciate the art. Muay Thai has become a part of my life and changed it for the better. I thank God daily for introducing me to Justin , who then introduced me to this awesome Muay Thai community.

Before , I wasn't in a great place mentally or physically. Now, I'm in the best shape of my life and I do things that inspire people. I met my partner, Joel De Jesus, who not only practices Muay Thai and is an amazing athlete, but also supports me and my goals as well. I know I can't compete forever, but I'll be tied to this until the very end, whether that means teaching or coaching. Muay Thai really is life. I'm blessed!

Follow Julian on Instagram and visit his website to see his own photo work.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

He probably wasn't quite the right man for the job. A couple of years ago Armadeep Randhawa, a 30-year-old with a short stint as a cannabis courier, made one mistake that unravelled a Plymouth drug gang's entire operation. Randhawa was just sentenced to 16 months in prison on Friday the 13th of May for his part in the group's weed-dealing business, but we've got to go back further to understand how the police ended up with their hands on about £960,000 worth of cannabis along the 228-mile journey to Plymouth. He'd been doing well so far, all things considered. According to later court testimony, the gang that he was moving drugs for had been getting on with things since March 2013, making regular cannabis deliveries from the Midlands to Devon's southwestern coast.

Then things changed, rather quickly, on the 17th of September in 2013. Someone in the city had died, and the trailing cars of their funeral procession drove through Plymouth. Randhawa spun his car around in an illegal U-turn near the funeral cortege, and a police officer spotted him. "Randhawa did a manoeuvre close to a funeral procession and PC Bulley went over to speak to him and give him advice on his inconsiderate driving," said acting detective inspector Paul Weymouth, a senior investigating officer in what became known as "Operation Boom." "Most people slow down when they see a funeral cortege, but he was being disrespectful. We had no idea about who the other people were."

PC Gavin Bulley pursued Randhawa, mostly to scold him for violating the minor traffic regulation, and pulled Randhawa's Ford Mondeo over outside the city's infamous North Prospect housing estate.

At that point, it may have crossed Randhawa's mind that having a bag with 3.6kg of cannabis in his car could be a problem. Particularly, that keeping said bag on the backseat of the car may have been the biggest issue. Randhawa was reportedly arrested immediately, once Bulley smelled then recovered the $57,000-worth stash of drugs, according to the Crown Prosecution's representative in court. But it turned out the car didn't belong to Randhawa, and when police looked it up, the Mondeo linked back to a man called Stephen Beighton—a childhood friend of Randhawa's—who lived in the West Midlands.

Stephen's brother Robert, however, was a Plymouth local—and known to the police. Bulley, the PC who'd pulled Randhawa over, had directly dealt with Robert before, and that pushed police to track the car's past movements. One by one, the pieces of the gang's plan fell apart. The cops used number plate recognition cameras to build up a virtual map of the 24 trips Randhawa or Stephen Beighton had made in the Mondeo, and used a crude estimate to presume the group may have moved cannabis worth about $1.2 million in six months of known activity. Mobile phone records looped other guys into the drug network.

In total, six men were named and charged as part of what a judge termed a conspiracy to supply a vast quantity of cannabis: the two Beighton brothers, unlucky Randhawa, David Ford, Anthony Eversfield and James Jones. Appearing in court at varying times since first facing a judge in March 2015, they all admitted the charge to supply the class B drug. Randhawa's sentencing on Friday has heralded the end of the whole case—poetic, considering how the police investigation started.

Watch: The Hard Lives of Britain's Synthetic Marijuana Addicts

Here's how things look likely to go for everyone involved. Eversfield, 43, was given a 12-month prison sentence suspended for 18 months—which means he won't have to go inside, but must do 180 hours of unpaid work and pay a total of £750 . The judge basically said he avoided doing time because he's the sole carer of his 16-year-old daughter, although Eversfield admitted in court that he let dealers use his house as a meeting point for drug and cash exchanges.

For their part in orchestrating the operation, Stephen Breighton got a 30-month jail sentence and his older brother Robert three years and three months. Ford was jailed for two years, which would have been his lot had he not poured freshly-boiled water over his ex-housemate while he was out on bail in a "row over an open window." He'll spend another two years in jail for that, too. Finally, Jones got an 18-month sentence suspended for 18 months and his own 180 hours of unpaid work. His main role, according to his lawyer, had been to "accept the drugs and pass them onto others for money."

Randhawa's lawyer made the case that his client was a "vulnerable and weak person who allowed himself to be used by his co-defendant Stephen Beighton," but that wasn't enough to keep Randhawa from a jail sentence. He may not have been the right guy for the job, but will likely be thinking about it for quite a while.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Salim's* teenage life hasn't panned out like most kids in his suburban London neighbourhood. For starters, he's an asylum seeker. But there's a bit more to it. "The Taliban killed my father," he tells VICE. "I didn't have any choice because they tried to kill me as well. They tried to force me to join them. I refused, so they tried to kill me."

Salim's 19 years old now, and fled Afghanistan for Britain in January 2010. Last year he got news that the Taliban had murdered his mother and sister and that his brother had been abducted—charities trying to track his brother down still don't know whether he's alive. "The village elder who gave the news was very clear that the Taliban was still asking for Salim's whereabouts," says his social worker Olivia*, who was in the room when Salim was sat down for the brutal update.

And so Salim lives, wanted by the Taliban, on borrowed time. There's some complicated law around asylum cases, which is worth clarifying. The vast majority of children who flee Afghanistan aren't given full asylum when they arrive in the UK. Instead, they're granted what's called a "temporary right to remain," which expires when they turn 18. After that, they've got to apply for permanent asylum or choose to leave. If their asylum claim's rejected, they can file two appeals. Salim's currently waiting on the outcome of his final appeal. If it's turned down, that's it. He'll be heading back to Afghanistan.

"Every day I think that the Home Office is going to pick me up and send me back," he says. "I'm always worried. I think a lot about my family. I think about how they died—the pain they suffered when the Taliban killed them." He pauses. Salim is a polite, reserved guy—the kind of well-mannered young man mums always seem to like. But his mind constantly flickers back to the brutality of his tormentors. "Unless you come face-to-face with them, you can't really understand what they're like. You don't know how it feels to be scared of them. You don't know what it's like when they try to kill you."

There's been a back-and-forth on cases like his in this country. In May 2015, the UK passed a ban on deportations to Afghanistan because the country was considered too dangerous. This amnesty didn't last. The Home Office won an appeal in March 2016, reopening the deportation flight path. When I ask the Home Office why Afghanistan's been deemed safe enough, with its strong Taliban presence, a spokesperson writes: "All cases are carefully considered on their individual merits, in line with the UK immigration rules and based on evidence provided by the applicant." They add that, "careful consideration is given to whether asylum seekers can internally relocate in the country they are returned to."

Stewart MacLachan, Legal and Policy Officer at Coram Children's Legal Centre, describes what this means in practice. The Home Office grants temporary protection to unaccompanied children on the basis that it wouldn't be safe to return them. But according to MacLachan, the government currently believes that "adults can return and relocate safely to Kabul, even if they have never lived there before."

An individual may, however, be granted asylum in the UK if they can prove they'd be persecuted for their political opinion, religion or family background. Normally the main source of evidence is the person's own testimony. That's often where the problems multiply. "In practice, people have their asylum claims rejected because of relatively minor credibility issues," MacLachan says. "For example, not remembering exact dates or timeframes relating to incidents in Afghanistan, or minor inconsistencies in details."

Sent to the UK by their relatives, Afghan children aren't often told all the complicated reasons behind why they're leaving. As a result, when questioned in court, it can often seem as though they're trying to hide information. Take Malem*, a 23-year-old with an incomplete understanding of his escape. He remembers that his mum arranged for him to flee when he was 13, after his dad was abducted by the Taliban. "We couldn't really go outside," Malem says. "You couldn't speak to anyone or spend time with anyone because you were scared of the Taliban. It was like spending your whole life in jail." But Malem was never sure why his dad was targeted and, having been loaded into a vehicle in the dead of night, he doesn't know who smuggled him into the UK.

The first thing Malem remembers about Britain is being dumped on the street and told to make his own way around London's sprawling suburbs. Once the UK Border Agency found him a foster home, things straightened out a bit: he went to school, learnt English and took up swimming. His claim for permanent asylum has now dragged on for over five years.

Like Salim, he's waiting on his final appeal. Ever since his protected status expired, Malem says he's been suffering from depression. In April he was reminded why he's desperate to stay in the UK after a Kabul suicide bomber killed at least 64 people, and he stumbled across a friend on Facebook mourning the death of his recently-deported brother in the blast.

The threat of returning to the Taliban's backyard has impacted Malem's physical and mental health. "After they tried to deport me two or three times, I was getting more and more stressed every day. So in the end I started self-harming. I've been self-harming for years now," he says. In the nadir of his depression, Malem became suicidal, according to his foster mum: "At one point I think he tried to jump out of a window. He just couldn't see the light at the end of the tunnel."

Bizarrely, one of the few ways to survive, for young people forced to return to Aghanistan, is often to join an insurgent group for protection. Without alternatives available, Malem is worried he'd be forced to join the Taliban – who created his misery in the first place. "If they send me back to Afghanistan," he says, "it will be easy for the Taliban to target me. If they offer me anything I will have to accept it, because if I refuse they will definitely kill me. Just to save my life, I will have to do what they say."

*Names have been changed for safety reasons

@SamBright_Ltd / @ella_desouza

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Check out Akvile's website, Tumblr, Facebook, and Instagram.

Maxi More at Manor House

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

It's one of those true clichés. By day, London's Soho is a jumble of small-plates restaurants and men with trimmed facial hair and shiny shoes shuffling to marketing meetings. But later, out comes that ever-euphemistic night-time economy. The drug dealers, the club promoters, the twinks fanning themselves with G-A-Y discount wristbands. Loiter long enough on Old Compton Street, though, and you'll see the "night flowers" – as photographer Damien Frost calls them – rise. They're the men and women caked in theatrical drag, swaying haute couture headpieces and stage makeup.

Damien, originally from Australia, took a photo of one of these queens once a day for a year, either trawling Soho, where he otherwise works as a graphic designer, or heading home to east London, where drag exists in pockets of sweaty flamboyance, from the Resistance Galleries to Bethnal Green Working Men's Club. The photos in his book, Night Flowers, are 365 sublime flickers of rare and bright beauty against eerily dark backgrounds. We spoke to Damien about capturing flashes of late-night ephemera and how drag reminds us of London's colourful past.

VICE: Hi Damien. First off, No one in this book looks like traditional ITV-viewer friendly drag. Did you have any hard and fast rules about who constitutes a "night flower"?
Damien Frost: I'm not that interested in the chameleon disguise of men dressed as women. I want it taken further, where gender becomes less of a thing and you get this blurred line where women can do drag queen looks, imitating and reclaiming a grotesque version of a woman. And the best looks come from people who aren't focussed on the scene. If I saw someone great on the street, I'd take a photo because they stand out, but in the context of Sink the Pink , I'd try to find out what normality is then see what jumped out at me. I'm more interested in people who have made the outfit they're wearing, something they've spent a lot of time creating that looks like haute couture. Along with the makeup, it's a look they might never repeat again.

Miss Fit on Bourchier Street

The looks themselves seem impermanent. While shooting, how much did you notice a particular age range in your models?
In the few years I've been taking photos in the community, I've seen a lot of people stop doing drag. It's almost a rite of passage for people – maybe they're from a small town and so dress themselves in a way they couldn't back home. Maybe they just want to get it out of their system. But for others it's part of their identity. They commit hours of work before they go out and then they're judged on that look. It's hard work and a constant pressure to reinvent themselves.

With that pressure on, did you ever get people refusing to have their photo taken because they didn't feel they looked their best?
It's rare, but people will say, "Can you not take it from this side because my lashes have fallen off?" or "Can you not put my hand in the shot because I've not got nails on tonight?" Sometimes, though, I'll want to take a photo because their makeup has run.

You say in the introduction that you took photos in "seedy alleyways" – just how seedy did it get?
I was taking a photo of one of my subjects, Simon Shoots, and he said: "There's some guy jerking off over there." We were down this dark alley doing a photoshoot and this guy was behind us jerking off and watching us. Simon managed to keep his composure, every now and then shooting a glance over to make sure the guy didn't get any closer.

What was the reception like from the average passers-by?
People will shout "batty boy" and get quite aggressive towards the queens. Soho's not necessarily as safe and welcoming as you think, especially as the night gets later; people are more free with their abuse, I guess. I've not seen anything eventuate into assault but I do know people who've been assaulted for wearing drag. The thing I find interesting is people who hassle them asking, "What are you?" And the queen is like, "What do you mean, what am I?" and they go: "What are you? A man or a woman?" And they'll get really worked up, they just need to know what side of the fence everyone's on. What's great about the drag community is that nobody even asks that.

Felicity Furore

There were good experiences too, I hope?
Totally. We've even had Ian McKellen walking past taking photos of the queens, and when Bourgeoisie had a wig made of balloons people were trying to pop them for a laugh.

How does the interference with your subjects affect your work?
Well, it makes it hard for the queens to keep their composure and stillness, which I like the shot to achieve. That sense of calm can be difficult to maintain with distractions around.

Soho and east London are full of characters after-hours. Have you ever been tempted to document them in a similar way?
Not really. I mean, sometimes the drug dealers will ask "Take my photo!" but it doesn't fit in with what I'm trying to do. Plus, they give the queens a lot of grief, they're the most intolerant, and it's ironic in a way, like, go sell your wares somewhere else. The Night Flowers project was an accidental thing. I never intended to do a series of the drag community or queer community, but I now find it now harder to go back and look for less colourful or less extreme people to photograph.

The Infamous Boom Boom at Cirque

Playing with gender has hit the mainstream, but do you think this sort of drag will ever "cross over"?
TV shows like RuPaul's Drag Race and the Sink the Pink night on the festival circuit might not normalise drag, but they get it out more. And the more people are aware of it, the more we get used to it. That said, you still get a shot of electricity when a six-foot queen walks down the street at night and everyone's heads turn. I find that power to shock really interesting. They also do things that reference history of other people's makeup. So there's this conceptual look that Leigh Bowery and I like that lineage. Maybe a few people will get that reference but it keeps it interesting.

As for borrowing from previous culture, there's a big ongoing cultural conversation about when it's appropriate, if ever, to reference other people's cultures and histories via costume and dress. What's your take on it?
I'm a middle-class white person, but in the case of people painting themselves black, if they're not mimicking a black person in any other way, not doing the minstrel or mime thing, then it's just the colour that the face is painted. A lot of cultural appropriation happens innocently, a lot of people just want to incorporate things into their outfit. Julius Ruben in the book has a Maasai necklace and decoration that he's put into a headdress. He's part-Maasai so can do that and it would be a shame if someone else couldn't create something out of that, without it being seen as offensive to that culture.

Duo Raw on Ganton Street

What was your experience of photographing people on the fringes of an experimental subculture in a city like London, where so much money flows into certain areas and not others?
A lot of people I photograph don't live in central London where the clubs are – it's just too expensive. Everyone's always going to be pushed out to the fringes, or to smaller towns, and eventually they'll be pushed out when that becomes cooler. It's an ongoing battle with gentrification, but I think culture does survive because you work out a way to do it. The lack of money in the drag community maybe forces people to be more experimental with the materials they're using. So Bourgeoisie will do something with bubble wrap and packing tape that looks incredible.

Yeah, I noticed one of the models made an entire inflatable bodysuit using the same IKEA bedsheets I have.
Totally. I come from an art background and that's what really impresses me with the looks and the makeup: it's often a one-off artwork for the night. The clothing's impractical, the sort of stuff you only ever see on catwalks, but they manage it, just walking down the street.

Thanks, Damien.

Night Flowers is available now, through Merrell Publishers. Here are some more photos from the book.

Lolo Brow at Virgin Extrazavangzah

Meri Karhu at Virgin Extravaganzah

Yozmit on Shaftesbury Avenue

Imma Mess on Brewer Street

Crystal Star on Bourchier Street

@sophwilkinson

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Rewind ten years ago. The buildup to Germany's World Cup. Indie still a relevant genre. James Corden just a fat guy who no one's really heard of. You would have struggled to find black actors in lead roles on British TV. But the pressure of parliamentary debates on diversity, people kicking off in numerous thinkpieces and a sense that you can have more than one or two types of protagonist have moved things along a bit. With shows like Luther and Chewing Gum in the UK and Shonda Rhimes' Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder in the US, television channels and producers are starting to wake up to the fact that not everyone in this part of the world is white.

Enter Undercover, a six-part drama airing on BBC One in the UK. In one scene a picture hangs in the kitchen of the Johnson family home. Its banality—a family outing to the seaside, all blustery sea winds blowing through hair and a family dog cradled under the son's arm—is what paradoxically makes it interesting. You see a black family at the centre of what becomes a massively engrossing story, set centre-stage without their ethnicity somehow defining their characters.

Admittedly, a handful of shows such as Babyfather, Love Thy Neighbour and The Fosters have delved into the black British experience and addressed ethnicity and racism. But Undercover handles race in a way like no other right now. When the show debuted in April, lead actor Adrian Lester told reporters: "It would be so much more powerful if we did all the press for this show without once mentioning colour," yet its power lies in how it deals with skin colour. Here are black characters who don't just exist in relation to white people as the reliable best mate, or as criminals or replaceable background characters.

Instead Undercover's storyline revolves around the real-life British policing spy scandal, which saw police officers form relationships with women who were part of political activist groups, to infiltrate those organizations. The story follows barrister Maya Cobbina, played by Sophie Okonedo, as she's appointed the first black Director of Public Prosecutions—IRL, the most senior criminal prosecutor in England and Wales—while simultaneously coping with the realization that her husband, played by Lester, is an undercover copper who's been spying on her for the past 20 years.

In the first episode we see Maya walk through a Louisiana prison to visit her client Rudy Jones, who's facing the death penalty for a crime he didn't commit. As Maya makes her way down the corridor, she passes cells occupied by black men. They're shot with blurred facial features, their hands the only visible parts of their bodies poking through the prison bars and nodding towards the US criminal justice system's intertwined relationship with black men. This scene's a perfect example of how the show dishes out a masterclass in drama. It shows that some of the most powerful TV moments don't need dialogue, and trusts viewers to recognize when a fictional drama mirrors society's off-screen fractures.

Scriptwriter Peter Moffat, who was also behind BBC One's Silk, brilliantly introduces a fresh perspective to the well-tread police thriller narrative. His excellent script explores themes of betrayal, identity and police brutality, while challenging us to look at our own moral compasses as we watch Maya's husband blur the lines of deceit and protection to maintain a happy home life.

The show also boldly captures the theme of police brutality, in a fight scene between a black activist and a racist man. You see blood spatter across the walls of their prison cell and hear body parts being broken across the iron frames of the bed and door, before the violent confrontation ends with white police officers watching on as a black man struggles to breathe.

All the videos of police violence from the US that flickered across our screens last year may have left many of us feeling desensitised. But hearing a British police officer on Undercover cockily say: "hold it, it's not safe to go in there," as the activist desperately pleads for help serves as a reminder that America's problems can also be our own. You only have to look to the death in custody of Sheku Bayoh in Scotland for an example.

Much of the show's visceral pull comes down to Sophie Okonedo's incredible performance where, at the risk of sounding like a Women's Equality Party brochure, she makes Maya equally embody fearlessness and fragility. She's exhilarating to watch as the gutsy, no-bullshitting lawyer. And Okonedo's just as captivating in the show's more intimate scenes, delivering a tour-de-force of emotions—contempt, fear, heartbreak—when she realizes the extent of her husband's dishonesty.

And Lester as the deceitful Nick Johnson doesn't put in too shabby a showing either, playing a significant part in positioning Undercover as a worthy contender for one of 2016's most gripping dramas (so far)—and not just because of the cheeky glimpse of his arse in an early episode. His character's calculating and at times despicable, but Lester brings to life his moral complexity, eliciting an often frustrating level of empathy from the viewer.

Like all dramas that are rooted in real life events, Undercover has had its fair share of criticism. The real women who lived with police spies have called the show "inauthentic" and they're more than entitled to that view. But this is an hourlong full-on thriller with the intention to entertain the public, not a five-minute segment on the Victoria Derbyshire show—it does a damn good job within those constraints. When viewers watch the final episode on Sunday the 15th of May, to see how and if the tangled web of lies weaved by Nick and the police fall apart at the seams, one thing is for sure: the family dinners round the kitchen table and perfect pictures by the seaside are well and truly over for the Johnsons.

@IamTobiOredein

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Dual portrait of Katherine Dunn by Molly Crabapple

I discovered Katherine Dunn through a tattoo.

My Dunn initiators were conjoined twins, embracing each other in ink upon my friend's bicep. They were dark and pouty, and I could glimpse one twin's eyepatch when my friend brushed away her starlight hair. They glowered out at me, so secure in their place as Universal Freak Icons, that I felt like a moron outsider for not recognizing them.

"Who are they?" I asked.

"The twins from Geek Love," my friend answered.

Katherine Dunn is dead. She died on Thursday evening, at 70, from complications of lung cancer. Katherine Dunn's work, however, is so alive it bleeds.

I never met Katherine Dunn, the human. Geek Love, Katherine Dunn's creation, crawled through my eyes and into my brain furrows, as it did for a generation of young people, and changed how we saw ourselves.

The night my friend explained her tattoo, I bought Geek Love, then read it, in that fever of identification that Dunn initiates all go through. I learned the twins' names: Elly and Iphy. They were lissome piano players, joined at the waist, the star acts in the Binewski Family Carnival. I read about their parents (Al and Cristal Lil, who dosed themselves on radioactive elixirs in a quest to breed a family of freaks), and their siblings (Machiavellian genius Arty, telekinetic Chick, and Oly, the humpbacked albino girl who is the book's wry and heartbroken narrator). I devoured Dunn's story about the circus's rise and fall (Blood! Death cults! Tightrope Walkers! Amputations!) and when the end finally hit, and my eyes rose back from the page to the world, I was choked up like a child. Dunn's creatures were gone, but the world had rearranged itself in the time I spent getting to know them, and now I could face it with some steel in my spine. For jagged young horrors like me, Dunn's book was both a weapon and a home.

Geek Love is a weird kid Bible. Some disability rights activists have criticized the novel for using disability as a metaphor, with the "freakish" bodies of Oly, Arty, Iphy, and Elly standing in for deviance and social weirdness, but Geek Love is actually a celebration of difference. Not in that condescending, cutesy way, where "all colors to make up the rainbow." In Geek Love world, freaks might be heroes, or villains, but they live like giants. They are real as fire, leagues above the weak, mockable, hypocritical Normal Folks. Difference is power. As my friend Clayton Cubitt wrote, the thing that's strange in you is "sharp as diamond and jagged as a razor. Hone that, because that's the thing with which you'll cut the world."

Katherine Dunn cut the world. She was born in 1945 in the Pacific Northwest; her father abandoned the family when when she was two. After an itinerant childhood, she studied philosophy and psychology at Reed College, travelled to the Greek isles, had a kid in Ireland, then moved back to Portland. A photo of Dunn at 24 shows a lank-haired 60s beauty, complete with cigarette, Pucci print, and a mouth made to caressed sarcasm like a sweet.

In 2016, it seems most famous American authors are vat-bred in MFA programs, but Dunn had the sort of actual blue-collar background so often appropriated by artists looking for cred. She was a tough broad. She painted houses and wrapped candy on factory assembly lines. She waited tables at diners and manned the taps at bars. Her first two novels came and went, but in 1989 Geek Love tore its way onto the bestseller list, making Dunn a finalist for the National Book Award. For decades, she wrote a celebrated boxing column for Portland's PDXS, and even trained as a boxer. In 2009, a 64-year-old Dunn fought off a purse snatcher 39 years her junior. "It was a helter-skelter affair," Dunn told Oregon Live. "Getting a tetanus shot, it made me feel young again." In both style and choice of subjects, Dunn was a pyromaniac—lavish, gonzo, extreme. Women are still told that The Edge is a new place for us, that tiptoeing onto it makes us "brave" and "pioneers", so we forget that for decades—hell, centuries—women like Dunn have been swaggering around The Edge like they owned it.

Messed up as we were, we had our own mutant magic. We didn't have to cut off pieces of ourselves.

One night, after hours sitting on the floor drinking whisky, a journalist friend asked if I wanted to hear her favorite poem.

She whispered the lines:

your mother is probably the only one you've ever known
who really wanted to kill you
and your mother stopped cars on sunset boulevard
by the length of her legs and the Magyar in her cheekbones
though she claimed it was just good posture

These words stayed with me for years before I learned Dunn wrote them. Of course she did. Who else could?

"We can imagine that they—that amorphous systemic 'they—won't know we're equal until they know we're dangerous. More important, we won't know it either," Dunn wrote in a 1995 Vogue essay on the return of the Bad Girl. Its an important point—Geek Love's Binewskis might love harder and think sharper than anyone from the straight world, but you'd never accuse them of being nicer. Geek Love could be titled Geek Treachery, for all the violence (literal and metaphorical) and betrayal (petty and grand) that the Binewskis dish out on each other.

There are many bad people in Geek Love, but only one true villain: Miss Lick. An obese heiress, Miss Lick is both obsessed and repulsed by men's desire to fuck hot chicks. On a quest to "save" these weak and vulnerable women, she offers impoverished beauties vast sums of money in exchange for deforming themselves. Lick's eyes fall on Miranda, Oly's daughter. Miranda's one sign of Binewksi heritage is a tiny tail, which she earns a living showing off at a strip club. Lick has one goal: Miranda's tail must go. Oly is equally determined to save it.

Lick might as well be one of the middle school psychologists I got hauled before as a tiny, arrogant, at-risk teen. She shares their savior complexes and wholesome condescension, their drive to erase difference in the name of protection, to destroy the uncanny in favor of the unthreatening, the extraordinary in favor of the safe.

Safety ought not to be the point of life, but Geek Love never whitewashes the world's danger. Early on, the sight of the Binewski kids' bodies so horrifies a normal that he tries to shoot them dead. Yes, the intolerant can wound you—but that's not the whole story. The Binewski kids don't merely survive, nor do they merely flourish: Arty takes a harrowing revenge.

This was the gift Katherine Dunn gave me, and so many other freaks and queers and sluts who loved her. Geek Love showed us that perhaps we would never fit into the normal world, but that that world was pallid and lacking. We could count on ourselves, and occasionally, on each other. Messed up as we were, we had our own mutant magic. We didn't have to cut off pieces of ourselves.

Despite all the blood, Geek Love is a book almost entirely without victims. Freaks are tough, in Dunn's world. For a fucked up young person, there's no message more comforting. The place the world thinks you're broken is exactly where you are strong.

Photos by Shaniqwa Jarvis

One of the best places to break a hip-hop record is the strip club. Rappers don't just like tossing bands at the club; there, they can get immediate, first-hand glimpses at how dancers and other big spenders respond to the music. If no one's dancing or throwing money, things aren't looking good. The pipeline of a track moving from studio to club to radio to everywhere is well documented—legend has it that Gucci Mane would even drop records in the strip club the same day he finished them. Or, as he says in the first line of "Club Hoppin": "Started in Magic City/Ended in Onyx"—e.g. two of America's most infamous strip joints.

Southern clubs like these two in Atlanta—as well as the DJs that drop tracks there, such as DJ Esco (Future's official DJ)—have attained near-mythical status in hip-hop, enshrined by innumerable name-drops in songs. According to one Epic Records executive, strip club DJs have been "instrumental in breaking every artist out of Atlanta over the past five years." In New York, too, clubs have been partially responsible for breaking acts like French Montana and Bobby Shmurda. The whole process gives the strip club DJ and the dancers a surprisingly influential tastemaker status in hip-hop.

Armed with this knowledge, I channeled my inner DJ Esco and headed over to Sugar Daddy's Gentlemen's Club, a strip club in Long Island City to get the opinions of some of hip-hop's most important critics. I played three songs: "Feel No Ways" from Drake's Views, "Formation" off Beyonce's Lemonade, and, to switch it up a bit and pay homage, "Purple Rain" by Prince (RIP). After each song, I asked the dancers to share their thoughts on how the music affected the club's vibe. Their opinions differed wildly and even contradicted one another's takes on what went down. We discussed why customers always respond to Drake, which Beyoncé tracks make men feel guilty about being there, and the awkward silence that ensued after we played Prince.

"FEEL NO WAYS" BY DRAKE

Lily Marie, Dancer

I felt like this wasn't something that Drake would normally write. To me, "One Dance" is more of a Drake rhythm. I'm a Drake fan. Usually, when I listen to his music, I could close my eyes and get into it, but didn't really do it for me.

When they started playing it, the energy in the club got lower; it kind of stood still. Whenever I hear the song "Work" I start dancing. Same for "Controlla." All the dancers are singing it already, and we just started listening to it last week.

Pretty, Dancer

I like it. The girls were dancing, shaking their asses everywhere on stage to it. Honestly, everybody loves Drake. I was listening to his new album all day today, so I already knew . It doesn't matter if the song is slow, all the dancers love anything Drake does. He could even speak Spanish and the dancers would love it. When customers listen to Drake at any strip club, they always spend money.

I feel like a lot of the guys who come in here relate to him a lot, relate to the things he talks about, the girls he raps about. I'm pretty sure he's been to strip clubs and spent money. Whenever customers hear Drake, they don't want to look bad when there's a pretty girl on stage and they're not spending money. Because when Drake sees a pretty girl on stage, he's probably going to spend money.

Jessica, Bottle Waitress

I think this song is the epitome of a Drake song. The way he sings, the way he stops, it's the epitome of a Drake flow. The way he says "on purpose." I think it's a good strip club song, but it's not a song you're going to hear in a club setting without dancers. It doesn't have as much bass, unlike most songs in clubs without dancers. But in a strip club setting, girls can dance to it well. It's like a nice, chill, sexual song...Drake is good music to play in a strip club because there's a whole variety of Drake songs. You have the stripper booty-shaking songs that are more up-tempo, and then you have the more slow, sensual songs for girls, like "Practice." Drake makes everybody feel like the girl on stage is their ex that moved away.

"FORMATION" BY BEYONCE

Angel, Dancer

It's a nice song, I just don't like it. It's Beyoncé, everybody's going to go crazy besides me . My daughter likes it, but I don't. The beat is good for a club. I just don't like the lyrics or the concept. The only part I liked is the lyrics, "You mix that creole with that negro, get that Texas bama." Something about that line, I just love it. But the song doesn't give me that let-me-twerk vibe.

"Formation" isn't a good song to play in a strip club, unless all the guys are going to get in formation and throw some money. Half these guys think that her music is just heartbreaks and shit. Who the hell wants to hear about heartbreaks inside a strip club? I don't think guys like Beyonce. I think they'd rather just listen to Future, or ratchet music that's going to make them want to spend money. That's my opinion.

I remember back in the day, they used to play "Irreplaceable" in the club: "To the left, to the left, everything you own in a box to the left." Guys would actually get mad when girls would sing it. But "Single Ladies" was a good song to play in the club—guys used to throw money at that one. I have yet to see guys throw money to "Formation."

Stacey, Dancer

I think it's a great song for the club because it's a women's anthem, empowering women, and the strip club life is about women and sexuality... so if you play that in a strip club, the girls are going to go crazy. I don't think it's a song that guys would like, though. There was one guy dancing to it just now, but I don't think you would see a guy in the club going crazy to it. But they'll bob to it.

Any Beyoncé song that is upbeat is good to play in the club. Off her new album, "Formation" is probably the only good club song. often play "Single Ladies," "Formation," and "On The Run" because it's a women's environment. When it comes down to it, girls are going to dance on stage or be more entertaining when they hear a Beyonce song.

"PURPLE RAIN" BY PRINCE

Dennis, Customer

That was kind of awkward. It kind of threw people off. The ones who knew the song sung the words to it. It's not a go-to strip club song.

There were a couple that looked up and were like, 'What's this? What's that?" It was a state of confusion for a couple of minutes. And then the ones that knew, they was like, "Nah, that's Prince! Purple Rain!" So Snapchat and Instagram came out. It was good for the ones who knew, the ones who respect the art and the craft of this man. Even though it threw a couple of people off, it was a good throw off because it took them out of their comfort zone of trap music.

The dancers were still dancing. That's their job to dance. They're not going to stop dancing. That's always going to happen. But the ones who knew danced even harder because they understand what that song meant to them.

Vanilla, Dancer

I feel like they shouldn't play that in the club cause it's too slow motion. People are not gonna like that. I'm not a fan of Prince. Yes, I know who he is. I don't know any of his music... people are hyped up, they're drunk. They're gonna want to hear trap music at a strip club.

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