Ellie and Joel, the main playable characters in 'The Last of Us'

Hold your comment, your pithy tweet, your caustic Facebook post: I'm not saying that video games cannot tell amazing stories. Those of us who play them regularly enough know that games have long been adept at articulating affecting narratives through a medium that began by smacking a dot back and forth, by shooting a basic model of a spaceship from the sky, by murdering sentient mushrooms with your plumber's crack. Games evolve on what feels like a weekly basis, and while this progression is inherently partnered to advances in technology—from interface innovation, to orchestral scores and fully voiced scripts, to shinier graphics and more gruesome goriness—their storytelling power is something that's existed far longer than near-perfect photo realism and Hollywood-comparable castings.

But there's an obstacle, isn't there, between your games-oblivious proverbial man on the street and the acceptance that what can be seen strictly as playthings—and I do feel that the verb we use, to "play" video games, is a problem in communicating their contemporary complexities to those who still see Sonic and Mario in their mind's eye—are capable of moving us, constructing lasting memories based on story, the fate of the player-controlled avatars on screen, above and beyond how we maneuverer them from place to place. I don't need to list examples—you'll hopefully have plenty of your own, as I do mine.

But, assuming we even need to, and I feel we do: how do we explain this to that naysayer, that dismissive guy, those who are too quick to dismiss our art of choice as folly, trivial, meaningless beside literature, the theater, and cinema? I see stories everywhere, every day: in sports reports, in the weather forecast, in the wooden train track layout my two year old assembles in readiness for me breaking my ankle on later. It might be explicit, but it could be expositional, environmental, and games take all these approaches and more to constructing compelling plotlines, many of which are amendable by the player's own decisions—which surely makes them all the more impactful, doesn't it?

A screenshot from 'Uncharted 4: A Thief's End'

When it all comes together right, absolutely. But even strictly linear gaming experiences can wrap you up in moment-to-moment situations of stunning significance, as vivid as anything told on paper or celluloid. Naughty Dog's rightly feted The Last of Us is but one case in point, albeit one that itself riffs on Cormac McCarthy's The Road for inspiration.

"The wonderful thing about games is that you can tell great stories with even the simplest vehicles, and in a variety of ways," Gabrielle Kent tells me. Gabrielle is the author of the Alfie Bloom fantasy novels for middle-grade children and also a senior lecturer in the computer game department at Teeside University, where she directs the Animex International Festival of Animation and Computer Games. She previously worked in the games industry, on racing titles for Atari, Accolade, and Midway.

"Over-complexity of control systems can put players off taking on non-essential tasks, which can result in them missing out on additional story," she continues. "Thomas was Alone had very simple controls and made me care about geometric shapes with basic mechanics. So developers must find a balance between challenging and testing the player and engaging them in the story. The Last of Us employed a variety of excellent storytelling methods, but I do know some non-traditional gamers who loved the story but had to abandon the game due to difficult combat sections."

A screenshot from 'Life is Strange,' a story-driven game that puts the player in charge of decisions that affect both their own fate and those of many others

So one thing that video games need to do in order for people who don't regularly play them is provide a way for those unfamiliar with standard interfaces to break through what can be an intimidating skill barrier. We've seen a number of very passively interactive titles emerge, such as Telltale's The Walking Dead and Tales from the Borderlands, and DONTNOD's Life is Strange, which provide tension through putting certain decisions on a tight timer, but generally don't test the player's eye-to-hand-to-screen reactions like, say, Gears of War or The Last of Us does. Those require a degree of capability with squeezing one button to aim and another to fire, while simultaneously moving from cover to cover, or lending support to fallen allies. There's a lot to process going on, and that can certainly interfere with the story happening on the sidelines of any given firefight.

"In Uncharted 4, though, I've observed that there are some sections in which you can just dart between cover and the non-player characters with you will take care of the enemy characters. This is very interesting, as confident gamers can leap into the fray, but those who struggle more with combat aren't forced through a trial by fire."

And so the story progresses even if the player isn't all that competent with a handgun. Having played through Naughty Dog's Uncharted 4, it is a game that demands dexterity on the As and Bs; but it's also very aware, more so than The Last of Us was, that this is blockbuster entertainment, like a big-budget movie, and when you pay your money you expect to see the ending. It's not a game that is going to grind you down, difficulty wise, unless you really want it to.

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"Dark Souls is also very interesting," Gabrielle adds. "It's brutally difficult, very unforgiving, and may appear to not contain much of a narrative. But it actually contains a lot of story, from hints in the dialogue of NPCs to the narrative embedded in the environment itself, much of which is left for the player to interpret in their own way."

In the Souls series, from Demon's Souls through to Bloodborne and now Dark Souls III, makers FromSoftware only very rarely place their hand on the tiller and steer the narrative a specific way. Environmentally, the player is relatively free to wander where they like, meaning that the environmental clues as to the events unfolding now, and in the past, can be discovered in any order. For someone unfamiliar with the series' deep and complicated lore, though—and I raise my hand, here—it can be overwhelmingly tough to parse a real sense of the story from initially unrelated objects, a bone here, a bell there. To those who've bowed out from a Souls game in the past because they couldn't manifest within themselves what this character's primary motivation is, I can relate.

"In games, it's so much harder to make the player feel for the character they are controlling, as you can't get inside their head in the same way you can with a novel," Gabrielle says. "You have to show how they are feeling in an external manner, and this might also conflict with the gameplay. For example, Tomb Raider writer Rhianna Pratchett wanted to show Lara Croft's first kill take a toll on the character emotionally. This was an impactful scene, but to progress through the game Lara must then go on a number of killing sprees. Obviously a writer would like players to see the characters' stories develop at a smooth pace, and a designer wants the player to remain engaged and challenged by the gameplay, sometimes it is hard to reconcile the two."

2013's 'Tomb Raider' was widely revered but still suffered from what Clint Hocking famously termed "ludonarrative dissonance"

Can that be improved, though? One of the very biggest criticisms of both the rebooted Tomb Raider franchise, developed by Crystal Dynamics, and Uncharted is that their protagonists kill indiscriminately without ever truly being painted as bad guys. Games designer Clint Hocking coined the term "ludonarrative dissonance" back in a 2007 blog entry, in response to 2K's dystopian shooter BioShock, writing that it suffered from "a powerful dissonance between what it is about as a game, and what it is about as a story"; that the ludic side, the playful aspects, clashed uncomfortably with the story at its core.

Hocking concluded in his post: "It seems to me that it will take us several years to learn from BioShock's mistakes and create a new generation of games that do manage to successful marry their ludic and narrative themes into a consistent and fully realized whole." I dare say, looking at Uncharted 4, as great as it is, and any title that declares that you simply must complete this essential quest but grants you the freedom to do whatever else you like instead (ahem, The Witcher 3), that we're still waiting for that generation of games to arrive.

But perhaps there's a different angle to take. Perhaps we shouldn't be looking to compare the stories told in video games to those of other mediums, at all? Says Gabrielle: "Literature, theater, music, and cinema have their own forms of non-verbal storytelling. However, video games are already progressing past these techniques to tell new kinds of stories by exploring paradigms of agency, modes of interaction, our connection to other players in multiplayer environments, and presence in virtual worlds."

"The advantage games have over books is that we can embed so much story within the environment itself," she continues. "We do this through background scene staging, set dressing, found objects, notes, signage, and advertising, and the condition of the environment itself. For example, look at the train ride and station at the start of Half-Life 2. It tells us a lot about what has happened to the world, from the signs to the brutality of the Combine. Players can look around these settings carefully and take in everything we are telling them about their world and situation—or, they can just dash through and get on with the missions."

And that's what gave BioShock its headache: its makers knew that the shooting came first for a lot of its players, so however much that violence appeared to be contrary to the themes at work, narratively—of self-determinism, destiny, and overarching notions of Objectivism—it was necessary. BioShock was not a story game—it was an action game first and foremost. So too is Grand Theft Auto V, but the way in which Rockstar's open-world crime caper can be played can have a fascinating influence on the events unfolding within its LA analogue of Los Santos.

A screenshot from 'BioShock'

"When Joseph Delgado added VR support to Grand Theft Auto V, he was shocked at how the sensation of presence created a sense of guilt unparalleled in any other form of first person perspective narratives," Gabrielle tells me, continuing:

"Many games broaden our ability to co-operate with other players in-game with the ability to heal, rally, and steal from others, while external channels allow a variety of communication such as team speak and webcams to enable wildly unscripted events remembered only by those watching in real time not to mention enabling abusive behavior from anonymous trolls. Of equal interest, though, is when game developers remove or restrict these modalities, as Journey does, leaving us to fill in the blanks with our muted companions. Journey's composer, Austin Wintory, once recounted a story about a player who went through the whole game convinced that their silent companion was the ghost of their recently deceased father."

All the architectural elements necessary for video games to constantly provide fascinating stories are in place, it seems. And through touch-screen hardware and simplified control pad schemes, we are gently nudging down the barrier for initial entry. (Not that the properly challenging titles pairing amazingly intense combat with compelling narratives are going to water themselves down any time soon; we're never likely to see an official "easy" mode in a Dark Souls game.) Writing, though, remains so important, however advanced gaming's methods of delivery become. And the way I see it, there's just not enough great writing in games right now. That's why something like the Indiana-Jones-goes-Goonies-via-Romancing-the-Stone clichés of Uncharted have so long been held up as stellar examples of video game storytelling: too many alternatives are just so weak in comparison. The answer, though, is not simply to employ writing talent from other mediums, individuals with no prior experience of writing specifically for video games.

"I've seen terrible stories churned out by design directors turned writers, who think their experience in games and an interest in writing makes them more qualified than a professional writer," Gabrielle says. "But also, many games with great writers on board have been hampered by these types changing the work of the contracted writer, breaking story arcs and generally adding bizarre scenarios which don't fit with the overall themes, all for the sake of ego and a writing credit.

A screenshot from 'Journey,' a game that tells a small but impressive story (well, I think it does) without saying a single word

"I think games need professional writers who play and understand games, but as long as they are brought in right at the very beginning of a project I don't see that they would need to be bred within the industry itself. The main problem with games writing is that studios tend to bring in writers once a few levels have been built and then say, 'Okay, we've made an underwater level, a prison, and a Mayan temple, write us something to tie them all together.' By bringing writers in right at the beginning of a project they can sit down with the designers and create something with depth and structure and discuss what is going to be told through dialogue and what elements of the narrative are going to be embedded elsewhere.

"That said, gamers are already a vastly broad demographic. We will continue to get all of the flashy make-up as developers push the capabilities of the hardware; but beneath that we are seeing more emotionally engaging stories, deeper character motivations, and more rounded characters in general. There will always be games for those who favor mechanics and don't care about story either way, but there are now many more professional writers working in the industry and it is starting to develop a roster of games writing stars, in much the way the film industry has its go-to people for particular types of stories. I've noticed a lot more writers and readers starting to engage with games, because they now see the stories as becoming as engaging as novels."

Gabrielle's seen vast improvements made over her time in and around gaming, then. But for the future, the roadmap to breaking video games as a perfectly valid—indeed, incredibly innovative and important—storytelling medium into the mainstream conscious is reliant on two key points. Firstly, writers are installed on a project from day one, working beside directors and designers to collaborate on the game's play and plot, and how these pillars relate to one another. And secondly, that we understand as consumers, audience, players, that gaming's rule set for plot-driving discourse, persuasive prose, and affecting interactions is a very different beast to that written down in books or enunciated from a stage. The trick is to make the mechanics, how everything plays, work for you, and not against the story you want to tell. A little dissonance need not be destructive, if you can harness its potential productively, and that in turn will help affirm the language of storytelling in video games: both for those who know it fluently, and others who've previously been alienated by its surface-level indecipherability.

Thanks to Gabrielle Kent for her time. Find her on Twitter, more information on Alfie Bloom at Facebook—the next book is due in early June—and the Animex Festival here.

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Screenshot via YouTube

Imagine a train.

That debate was bookended by the Liberal Democratic Reform Minister, Maryam Monsef, who contended that the government is going to do a fantastic job reforming the democracy and you're going to love it, while offering no specifics, pretending like she consulted anyone about it thus far (she hasn't) and refusing to hold any kind of democratic vote on the matter.

It wasn't a great day anyway.

So when the NDP tried some tricks—basically, standing around and trying to make a point by delaying the vote by a few minutes—on bill C-14, the physician-assisted suicide legislation, shit got weird. Like, historically weird.

Now, the euthanasia bill is under a deadline. A court ruling takes effect on June 6, and will wipe out all the existing laws governing suicide for ill and suffering Canadians.

But there is also total chaos on the bill. The version drafted by the Liberals appears to have divided the House of Commons into a half-dozen different segments. Nobody, including many in Trudeau's own party, is quite sure how they feel about it. Does it go too far? Not far enough? Should we have a law, or not? Should we kill all old people? None? Some?

Welp, that seems like a pretty good thing for the House of Commons to figure out.

Instead, the government was moving to shut down debate outright. So the NDP—it's always the goddamn NDP—thought they'd make a point.

When the whips for the government and opposition walked into the House of Commons to take their seats in advance of the vote, the NDP caucus huddled around their side of the floor, blocking the path for Conservative whip Gord Brown.

Putting aside that their stalling tactics were never really going to be effective—even if they had put a bag over his head and whisked him down to Parliamentary jail, which is totally a real thing—the NDP were obviously being wangs.

But rather than just roll their eyes and let the third party do their little protest, the prime minister — the goddamn prime minister of a country of 35 million — blew over, grabbed Brown, and began dragging him down the aisle.

In the process, he elbowed NDP MP Ruth-Ellen Brosseau in the chest and knocked her into a desk. Now, everyone can play detective and analyze the Zapruder film until they identify the woman on the grassy knoll. But, basically, the prime minister got pissed off, bolted across the aisle of the House, grabbed another dude, accidentally knocked a woman out of the way in the process, then dragged the guy through a crowd of people.

Let's all agree that's not a great look.

What proceeded was through-the-looking-glass parliamentary procedure that saw the prime minister apologize—twice—the NDP lose their shit, the Conservatives accuse Trudeau of being a bully, Green Party leader Elizabeth May plead for reason only to be shouted down, a Liberal MP compare Brosseau's jostling to a soccer dive, and a lot of moral outrage.

But what we're left with is utter fucking dysfunction.

Rather than clean up the damn House of Commons, like he promised, Trudeau seems to be offering his own version of forced euthanasia to the place, fast-tracking its steady demise and turning Canada's Parliament into a smoldering dumpsterfire because it's 2016.

On Thursday morning, the opposition kept asking Trudeau directly: Are you going to cut this shit, drop the procedural sledgehammer, and grow up?

Trudeau responded by apologizing a half-dozen times, but making it pretty clear: no.

If anything, Trudeau turned around and blamed the NDP for this mess.

"It's important that we draw a clear line between my unacceptable behaviour and the general tone of the House," Trudeau said, ignoring that the tone of the House (shitty, with a whiff of puppyfire) is entirely his fault.

When I sat down with Trudeau last summer to talk about how fucked up Parliament is, he told me, point-blank, he wanted to make things better. He wanted kumbaya circles and friendship bracelets.

Instead, we've got... this.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

Mervit Mounir, left, and Answar Moissen, talk with journalists in front of the Egypt Air In flight services building where family and friends of the Egypt Air flight are gathering on May 19, 2016 in Cairo. (Photo by David Degner/Getty Images)

Early Thursday morning, EgyptAir Flight 804 disappeared from radar over the Mediterranean Sea. There were 66 people on board the Airbus A320 flying from Paris to Cairo, and Egyptian officials said initial surveys of the wreckage discovered southeast of Crete pointed to terrorism as being more likely than technical failure, as the New York Times reports.

As one might expect in a situation where facts are scant and speculation alluring, presumptive US Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump was quick to blame the tragedy on terrorists via Twitter. Still, Egypt's Civil Aviation Minister Sharif Fathi did say at a Thursday press conference, "If you analyze this situation properly, the possibility of having...a terror attack, is higher than having a technical problem." Piling on, CNN aviation analyst Miles O'Brien offered, "Planes just don't fall out of the sky."

And presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton told that same network the crash "shines a very bright light on the threats we face from organized terror groups."

Either way, the flight pattern and communication between pilots and on-the-ground crew suggest something catastrophic happened before the crash. The plane took off from Paris at 11:09 PM local time Wednesday night, and was last in radio contact with Greek air traffic controllers at 2:26 AM. According to Greek Defense Minister Panos Kammenos, everything seemed to be going smoothly when, just a few miles into Egyptian airspace, the plane made a left turn at 90-degrees and then a full circle right, plummeting from 37,000 feet to 15,000 feet, and then down to 9,000 feet, before vanishing from radar.

Most passengers onboard were French and Egyptian nationals, according to NBC News. No Americans were believed to be aboard the flight, though US Secretary of State John Kerry said from a NATO summit in Brussels, "I want to express my condolences to Egypt and to all other countries impacted by the disappearance earlier this morning of the EgyptAir flight over the Mediterranean. The US is providing assistance in the search effort and relevant authorities are doing everything they can to try to find out what the facts are of what happened today."

A statement from the White House early Thursday said that President Obama had been briefed on the situation by his adviser for homeland security and counterterrorism, Lisa O. Monaco, and that he would be updated throughout the day as more information became available.

According to the Times, intelligence analysts were monitoring jihadist websites and social media, but no terrorist group had claimed responsibility at the time of publication. American officials are reportedly sharing information from a terrorist watch list with Egyptian investigators.

In October of last year, Metrojet Flight 9268 exploded in the sky over Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. In that case, ISIS began taking credit for the downed flight's demise and the 224 lives lost on it almost immediately, though it took some months for Egyptian officials to concede that point.

Flight 9268 may have been brought down by a bomb placed in the main cabin, according to subsequent reports. But due to 804's origin in Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport, and the increased security in that city since the bloody, coordinated attacks last November, the likelihood of an explosive being snuck onboard seemed smaller, Stratfor analyst Fred Burton told New York. Given where the flight went down, though, Burton said a surface-to-air missile attack could not be ruled out.

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All illustrations by Joe Frontel

"I need you to keep this a secret," she said.

It was April 25, 2012. I was having lunch with my sister on a sunny day at an outdoor cafe. She tells me our father has been molesting my four younger sisters right under my nose for the last 20 years. She wasn't planning to tell me, she said, until our father died, to avoid bringing shame upon our family. But as he'd recently inherited a large sum of money and immediately asked my mother for a divorce, he was demanding to take our youngest sister, then 16, into his custody. My sister said she wanted me to work behind the scenes to keep the youngest in our mother's custody—and above all, to tell no one in the outside world what was happening.

I could not believe what I'd heard. It had never crossed my mind that my godly, devoted father was capable of molesting his own children. And yet, in that moment, I knew exactly what I had to do. If my father was raping his daughters, my father would have to go. I wasn't going to let this secret stay kept.

I called Child Protective Services that night to find out what I needed to do. They asked me to talk to my mother before I called the police. I called her that night and asked her to come over. While I waited for her to arrive, I felt like I was being taken over by a wrathful, ancient demon. As soon as she came over, I asked her if she knew what was happening. She looked at the floor. "Yes," she said quietly. "But I'll go down with my husband. God set him over me."

I lost my mind. I screamed at her so hard spittle flew out of my mouth. My face distorted with rage and despair. She just looked at the ground, saying nothing, mouth set firmly. I towered over her, swearing and accusing and interrogating. How could she let this happen to her own daughters? I demanded.

This went on for hours, with my mother refusing to budge or cooperate. Finally, I was too exhausted to go on. I sent her away with my pledge to stop at nothing to see my father go to prison for what he had done. She left quickly without speaking a word. The door slammed behind her.

Fifteen minutes later, I heard a knock on my door. It was my mother.

"Your father confessed to everything. I need you to go with me to the police station to file a report. I don't want to do it over the phone," she finally said.

I still recall my mom sitting with her legs out on the parking lot of the courthouse, back against her car. A police officer calmly taking a report. By the time we arrived back at my parents' apartment, it was already swarming with a dozen cops wearing tactical badges.

They didn't arrest him that night, but they did make him leave his home. A few weeks later, he fled the US to the Republic of Georgia with $20,000 from my parents' joint savings account. His brother is in the government there and he felt so confident in Georgia's non-extradition laws, he wrote letters to my sisters on Father's Day, blaming my mother's lack of interest in sex as the reason he molested them.

He appeared to be starting a new life, with a new LinkedIn profile and lots of Facebook posts about his adventures in his new country. We watched helplessly as our gleeful father flaunted his escape from justice.

This continued until a Russian-backed coup toppled the ruling party and with it the protection it afforded my father. Within weeks of the coup, the FBI, Interpol, and the Tbilisi Police arrested him at his apartment. He spent nearly six months in an old Soviet-era gulag before the US government found a military plane to bring him home. They didn't want to waste the money on a commercial ticket.

My parents were deeply religious. They defined their lives through piety and strict adherence to the Bible. My sisters and I were home-schooled and raised in poverty on a farm in rural Kentucky. No church was conservative enough for my parents, so they worshipped at home with us and a few others they knew who were dissatisfied with the excesses of the modern church. We spent almost all our time at home. Outside hobbies and socializing did not exist.

My father was emotionally distant and physically abusive, but I loved him. I grew up isolated and starved of physical affection, envious of my sisters who enjoyed a lot of time on my dad's lap, seeming to get lots of hugs and affection. I would learn that every time I saw my dad cuddling with my sisters, usually at the kitchen table or late at night while they played video games, he had his hands down their pants. At night, after my mother and I went to sleep, he would do worse things. I would realize later that I had witnessed my sisters being sexually assaulted in front of me every day for 20 years.

READ MORE: Canada's Vigilante Pedophile Hunters Say They're Now Working with the FBI

While my father sat in county jail awaiting his trial, he seemed intent on beating the charges leveled at him. He entered a plea of not guilty and spent the last of his resources on an expensive defense lawyer. I was afraid that he might actually beat the charges. If he did, I believed his first act of freedom would be to obtain a weapon and kill me in my sleep.

My mental health fell apart. I had a recurring nightmare every night: I was chasing my father through a huge labyrinth (sometimes a massive house full of endless rooms and hallways, sometimes an industrial complex, and sometimes the crooked, cobbled streets of an Eastern European city). He ran ahead of me, always just out of my grasp. Sometimes he would fall to his belly and slither under a vent or a crack, then leap out at me with hands outstretched to strangle me. I often woke up from these dreams choking back a scream.

I regularly had panic attacks and flashbacks so intense that I would black out, barely remembering what preceded them. The triggers were unpredictable. Sometimes a scene of deer hunters or rural life in a movie would send me into a catatonic flashback. I would be unable to move, unable to talk, almost unable to breathe. The world around me faded away, replaced with hallucinations of life on the farm with my father. Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night gasping for air. I experienced dissociation, anxiety attacks, and suicidal thoughts on a daily basis.

My relationship with my wife and my family rapidly deteriorated. My mother flailed, attempting to give my youngest sister into the custody of the state while trying to find a job to replace the income my father provided. Relations with my sisters were tense. The only love they'd ever known, broken as it was, had come from the man I had taken away from them. They tried to hold things together, but refused to seek therapy or any kind of help, choosing instead to stoically muscle through their pain. They took it out on me, I suppose because I was an easy target. They accused me of being emotionally toxic and mentally unstable.

After a year of trying to hold my family together, I couldn't take it any more. I had to get away. I got a new job and moved to Seattle. A couple months after, my wife of seven years began a series of affairs and then told me she was done. We filed for divorce. She was living with her parents in Tampa, Florida within four months, leaving me alone in a new city. By now, my family had mostly stopped talking to me entirely.

I lost my faith during this time, descending into a cold atheism. I studied science obsessively for over a year, reading books by Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan. I watched every episode of NOVA and Cosmos I could find. In truth, I was on the way out of religion for a while, but I fell over the edge into nihilism. If nothing else, focusing on atoms and molecules and the endless amount of dirt and gas in the universe—real stuff—helped to ground me when it felt like everything I'd ever known was a lie. Lacking anything or anyone to pray to, I became more despondent.

I turned to sex, drugs, and heavy metal to numb the pain and make the nightmares go away. I played Nine Inch Nails at full blast in my car as I drove up and down western Washington's back roads. Marijuana, alcohol, MDMA, and magic mushrooms helped me at least keep the worst of the nightmares at bay, and gave me a fleeting feeling of happiness and tranquility. I even turned to workaholism—anything to distract me. I was a sweaty, overworked, nervous mess. I rapidly gained weight and lost sleep and I put anything into my body and mind to fill the ragged hole inside.

Two years passed. My mental health was only getting worse as the trial approached. I got a call from the Spokane County Prosecutor on the morning of September 4, 2014. It was brief. She told me that my father pled guilty to all charges and received a sentence of 160 months. I sobbed for the entire morning, feeling every emotion it is possible to feel. I was the only member of my family to testify against my father at his sentencing hearing later that month. I held nothing back in my testimony against him. I hoped the judge would give him the longest possible sentence the law allowed. She did.

READ MORE: Realizing You're a Pedophile Can Make You Want to Kill Yourself

My father now resides in Coyote Ridge Correctional Facility in eastern Washington. I haven't spoken to him since the night I called the police.

Relationships between fathers and sons are complicated under the most ideal circumstances. Millions of years of evolution drive an instinct that compels sons to learn from their fathers, to become like them, but also to rebel against them, to be different, to be a force of change in the tribe. I took a chainsaw to the fabric of social order, and I paid the price. As bad a man as my father is, I still struggle with the guilt of placing the man I loved and admired for so long into a cramped, violent cage where, as a pedophile, his life is constantly at risk. I know he is where he deserves to be, and I know society is safer with him behind bars, yet the pain of knowing I put him there still lingers.

With time, however, I have finally started to experience some healing. I have more good days than bad ones now. I am comfortable being single for the first time since my divorce, without jumping into co-dependent relationships just to feel safe.

Can I forgive my father? Does he deserve forgiveness? What could he possibly say to me or anyone else that would make restitution for what he did? Sometimes I want to make the long drive through eastern Washington's dusty highways to visit him, just to look him in the eye, to see him in his prison jumpers, a guard lording over him. But what could I hope to get from seeing my father, a broken old man only two years into his sentence?

I think about all those nights back on the farm in Kentucky when my father would stay up late, tearfully memorizing Bible verses about being washed in the blood of Jesus for the forgiveness of sin. If it was a sign of a guilty conscience, it was the only one my father ever showed.

Pentonville prison. Photo by Anthony Devlin / PA Wire

Names and identifying details have been changed to protect privacy.

Wednesday's Queen's Speech in England saw David Cameron's much-publicized prison reforms take an interesting and, at least on the face of it, surprisingly liberal turn. It was revealed that in the future, selected prisoners would be released on new satellite tags during the week, so that they could continue to work in their current jobs, before returning to jail on the weekends for the duration of their sentence. The satellite tags are able to pinpoint where a prisoner is at all times. They are an improvement on the rudimentary tags that are currently in use and are only able to confirm whether or not the tagged individual is at their home address during their curfew. The ideas behind this seem to be lowering reoffending rates and creating a more positive vibe in prisons. David Cameron stated that he wanted to stop prisons being "warehouses for criminals," and that "they will now be places where lives are changed."

As a teacher in a prison, I often hear of prisoners complaining about losing their jobs, their homes (rented and owned), and even pets due to being given often fairly short custodial sentences. I'm covering a motivational class this week and it's a decent group; despite none of the prisoners having actually signed up for the course, they're mostly pretty affable. Once we finish the group work, I ask them about Cameron's prison plans.

SMUGGLING WORRIES

Jamie, 29, is due to be released next week after serving the full six months of his sentence. Due to his past record of violent crimes, and a previous record of breaking license conditions, he was denied the opportunity of being released on tag. He used to play soccer semi-professionally, and although he now works as a builder he has not given up on returning to the game at this level—which would mean he'd not be able to play in the majority of fixtures under the new satellite tagging rules.

I ask Jamie whether he would have any objection to seeing prisoners potentially returning to the wing on weekends having spent the rest of the week outside. "Wouldn't bother me really. I'll do my days, they can do theirs. I see it being more a problem for the governors and the screws." I ask Jamie to expand. "For one, imagine the amount of shit people will be smuggling in on a Friday evening or whenever. More than now, guaranteed, all those comings and goings. If they can't stop it as it is, how they fuck are they going to cope with it then?"

This seems like a valid point; even though more steps are being taken to reduce the amount of drugs being illegally smuggled into prison, recent headlines focusing on the increased use of synthetic cannabis in jails suggest that it's an uphill battle. But what of the prison officers' objections to weekend prisoners? "Creases me—it would mean they'd be doing more time in here than most of the inmates. The cunts would be absolutely fuming!"

THE RELUCTANT OFFENDER

Wes, 35, has previously served a three-year sentence for a commercial robbery and is currently waiting to go on trial for another crime of a similar nature. He assures me that he will be found not guilty, stating that "none of these new laws are relevant to me now, but..."

Wes explains that he's committed offenses in the past out of desperation, having served custodial sentences and been released he's found himself homeless and with no access to money for food. "What I mean is, if a prisoner is allowed to keep his job then it'll go a long way to keeping him from reoffending once he's done his bird. If you're worried about where your next meal is coming from then yeah, you probably will do something fucking stupid—and get caught doing it. I literally lost everything. The council kicked me out, fucking robbed my TV as well. If I'd been allowed to keep on working then none of this would have happened. I don't like that Cameron, but it's an alright idea if he sticks to it."

LIVING FOR THE WEEKEND

Danny, 20, tells me that he has broken his license conditions on every single one of his six sentences. Having been returned to jail for being five hours late for his nightly curfew, Danny is currently serving the remainder of a three-month sentence for assaulting his partner behind prison walls.

I ask Danny what he thinks of the prison reforms. "It's fucking the wrong way round, bro. Do the time in the week and let us out for the weekend, innit." But the whole point is to let prisoners keep their jobs, I say. "Yeah, I don't have a fucking job though. Get fed, watch a bit of TV in the week in my cell, and then party on road every weekend. Banging."

Related: Watch 'Young Reoffenders'

It's quite typical for younger prisoners to have a blasé attitude towards their license and tag conditions; Danny has spent the last three Christmases in jail, and missed the vast majority of each summer since his late teens. It's hard to imagine that being released on tag would help unless he gets the relevant professional help. I ask Danny whether he's bothered about being in jail, about missing more Christmases and summers. "Couldn't give a fuck, mate," he says.

THE MANUAL WORKER

Andy, 33, has been in prison a few times. Like a lot of the prisoners I meet, he works in a manual trade and is often able to walk back into work after sentences. He's got a couple of months left of this sentence and has already lined up three months' work on a new development of luxury apartments.

Andy says that if he's ever inside again, he would happily accept coming back to prison every weekend if it meant that he could carry on working and providing for his wife and two young daughters. "The way I see it, the weekend is the optional extra, a luxury. Life to me is Monday to Friday, grafting, and putting food on the table. There'll always be idiots who fuck up their tag, but most of us just want a simple life with the Mrs. and kids. I'd polish the tag every fucking night if they let me stay at home during the week."

§

It's difficult to not be cynical when assessing any reforms that this Conservative government rolls out. It may be the case that this particular reform is less about prisoner welfare and more about easing the burden on already overpopulated prisons; equally, it could be about keeping employment levels up and ensuring that convicted prisoners keep putting money into an economy desperate for any cash it can get. That said, if it's a policy that helps prisoners see their families, keep their jobs, and feel like worthwhile human beings, then it's probably a good thing.

Photo via Flickr user Michael Couglan

Read: This Guy Tried to Run Across the Ocean in a Plastic Bubble and It Was a Disaster

In what was apparently an extremely elaborate game of hide and seek, a 29-year-old Iowa man had to be rescued Thursday after he stripped naked and got himself stuck inside the chimney of a local business, the Carroll Daily Times Herald reports.

When found and subsequently rescued by local authorities from the Carroll Redemption Center's chimney, the man, Jordan Kajewski, pulled out an excuse kids caught somewhere weird have been using for ages—he said he was just playing a game of hide and seek.

Apparently, nine hours prior to Kajewski's rescue, Brad Sapp was working late at the Carroll Redemption Center when he thought he heard a bone-chilling whisper say "Get out of here." Sapp returned home to tell his wife, Carrie, of the bizarre encounter when she reportedly began to tease him for being afraid of ghosts.

The next morning, Carrie Sapp was walking past the chimney when she heard Kajewski's cries for help herself. "I'm in your chimney," he shouted. "I was playing hide and seek with my cousin! Don't call the cops, I just need help getting out."

Most of the time, when people say "don't call the cops" it means you should absolutely call the cops, and that is exactly what Sapp did.

Close to a dozen fire fighters arrived on the scene to liberate Kajewski from his ashy purgatory, but at least we can assume he won the hide and seek game.

Earlier this week, the Michigan State Senate took up a new bill, the Public Threat Alert System Act, that would allow state police to tap into emergency alert systems and send radio, television, and text messages to the public about "clear, persistent, ongoing, and random threats."

Think mass shootings, shooting sprees, and terrorist attacks.

Private companies have long employed internal alert systems for such tragedies, and since 2008, national law has required federally-funded colleges to send email and text warnings when attacks occur on campus. But the Michigan bill appears to be the first concrete effort to implement a dedicated, statewide alert system for shootings that would be as pervasive as, say, emergency weather alerts. Amid what is essentially a mass shooting epidemic, this raises the question of whether such systems could—or should—one day become an inescapable part of American life.

Already passed by the State House in a 106-2 vote on May 10, the bill has received widespread and bipartisan support from lawmakers and the public as a cheap and easy step to help protect citizen bystanders. The bill's path through the legislature seems smooth enough that one of its supporters expects it should clear the Senate before the end of the summer. Assuming embattled Governor Rick Snyder signs on, the system could go online as soon as this fall. But despite near-universal local acclaim, some outside observers like James Alan Fox, an expert on the dynamics of active and mass shootings at Northeastern University, see the Public Threat Alert System Act as no more than feel-good measure that will accomplish little. In fact, Fox suspects it could do more harm than good.

"It's a knee-jerk over-response to a low-likelihood event," Fox tells VICE. "The response will create unnecessary havoc."

The Public Threat Alert System Act is most directly a response to a mass shooting spree in the state this February, when cops say Uber driver Jason Brian Dalton's drove around the greater Kalamazoo area for nearly seven hours firing randomly at people with a 9mm semiautomatic handgun, ultimately killing six and injuring two. In the days immediately following the attack, stories about locals out on the streets who didn't find out about the shootings for hours and about the failure of Western Michigan University (two miles away from the shooter's route at various times) to notify students with its own system helped trigger calls by local media outlets and interest groups for a new alert.

On March 8, Brandt Iden, a Republican state representative from Oshtemo, one of the townships Dalton terrorized, introduced House Bill 5442, the embryo of the current legislation.

"I was on Stadium Drive getting gas at about the same time that the shooter would have been traveling down ," local media outlet WEMU recently quoted the state lawmaker as saying, in a reflection of what he believes was a common experience of dangerous ignorance. "I would have started to pay a lot more attention had I gotten this notification on my cell phone that said, 'Brandt, be alert.'"

Iden subsequently collaborated with Jon Hoadley, a Democratic state representative who had his own (nearly identical) bill already in the works—their unwittingly parallel efforts a testament to the local appetite for change. The duo enjoyed the support of the Kalamazoo County Sheriff, local residents, and family members of victims in Dalton's rampage. As it stands now, their bill requires local cops who hear about an active-shooter to contact the State Police, who would then verify that the incident meets criteria of their own determination before notifying broadcasters and utilizing telecom channels to send out media alerts and distribute text notifications to all wireless phones in a certain geographic area. (VICE reached out to the Michigan State Police to see if they have devised any of the specific criteria for what would trigger a notification, but had yet to receive a response as of publication.) Local broadcasters have pointed out they technically won't be required to distribute the message, but given the optics of throwing a fit over warning people about a mass shooting, we can expect them to participate.

Representative Iden has compared the system to America's Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response (AMBER) Alerts—which if nothing else offers some conceptual and infrastructural precedent for this new system.

The Michigan bill more directly piggybacks on the local infrastructure put in place late last year after the state created a Blue Alert program. Launched in 2008 in Florida and now active in 25 states (including Michigan), Blue Alerts send out information, usually by voluntary radio and television broadcasts, about suspects who've killed or injured law enforcement officers but remain at large. In Michigan, the Alert was adopted after outcry that if it'd been enacted earlier, authorities may have more quickly brought the killer of State Trooper Paul Butterflied, gunned down in Mason County in 2013, to justice. The state legislature determined that the program would cost about $20,000 upfront and $300 a month to maintain, which seemed OK despite budget woes and austerity measures.

When it comes to the new active shooter system, lawmakers have determined it could be incorporated into the of the Blue Alert system's infrastructure with "nominal fiscal impact."

For his part, Fox suspects that the Michigan law, when it passes, won't immediately trigger other states to follow suit. But if it seems to be working in Michigan, or if there are more random mass shootings with hours of lag time between outset and neutralization of the shooter(s) nationwide, it could be the start of a trend.

Still, this mass shooter alert system doesn't excite Fox, who notes that most active shooter situations are geographically contained and brief—enough so that the sound of gunfire is usually the fastest and best alert for anyone in actual danger to seek shelter. By the time there's enough good information to issue a solid alert, Fox says, the incident is often over. And he maintains that there are plenty of ways—mostly by creating undue fear with premature or overly broad warnings—a successfully-triggered alert can go wrong.

Even if the implicit costs of the alert are low, it's hard to argue with Fox that these systems will only provide protection in cases similar to the Kalamazoo mass shooting—a rare subset of an all-too-common form of gun violence. And Americans as a society may well be too eager to grab on to easy, low-cost, high-profile, program to address mass shootings and the threats they pose as a whole—if only to feel like they're doing something to improve security. Gun control advocates, for instance, may see warning systems as a distraction from efforts to stop machines of death from proliferating in their communities in the first place. But given the sheer volume of mass gun violence plaguing the country, that one state is using its own localized nightmare to experiment with a better response mechanism is not only understandable, but seemingly inevitable.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Gage Skidmore

Read: Trump Accused Bill Clinton of Being a Rapist on TV Last Night

Back before Trump was turning the presidential election into a reality show, he turned his business empire into one. The Apprentice was a big success, and Trump really squeezed everything he could from that annoying-ass "yer fired" catchphrase.

When the original formula got stale, Trump morphed the show into Celebrity Apprentice. But, as Buzzfeed points out, before Trump decided to spice up his show with some C-listers, he had a different idea for The Apprentice: dividing the show's two teams by skin color.

Apparently Trump first floated the idea back in 2005, during an interview with Howard Stern, and brought it up again on his own failed syndicated radio show.

On his show, Trump acknowledged the idea was "fairly controversial," and explained that he was toying with the concept of "creating a team of successful African-Americans versus a team of successful whites. Whether people like that idea or not, it is somewhat reflective of our very vicious world."

The idea wasn't particularly well-received, for pretty obvious reasons, and his next season of The Apprentice didn't involve segregation. You can say a lot about Trump, but you can't say the guy has a shortage of ideas—unfortunately most of them are xenophobic and stupid.

Jamie Turner, left, takes part in a therapy session in Pervert Park. Image courtesy of The Film Sales Company. Photo by Lasse Barkfors

Jamie Turner ruined his life when he was 22 years old. He was looking for attention by responding to an older woman seeking sex on Craigslist, but the poster, who was supposedly 30, said she wanted to bring her teenage daughter in the mix. The woman was persistent, Turner later claimed in counseling—she kept pushing.

When Turner eventually showed up at what he thought was the woman's house, he was cuffed by undercover cops To Catch a Predator style.

Once he was released from prison, life didn't get much better for Turner. In Florida, as in many states, sex offenders typically aren't allowed to live near places where children congregate. In fact, it's so hard to find a place that isn't close to a school, a park, a playground, or a daycare center that parole officers in Miami have been known to drop people off under a bridge for lack of better options. (And even then, they were in apparent violation of the law.) Once Turner was close to being released, a prison employee helped him check various addresses to see where he could go.

"She checked my father's address and it was a perfect bubble of awesomeness," Turner, who's now 27, told VICE. "But a real asshole of a probation officer rejected it and said there was a community pool there. And I couldn't go to my mom's because she lives within 700 feet of a playground."

Instead, he ended up booking a room at a "real shit-hole" of a hotel where he said the owners charged sex criminals weekly rates to live three-to-a-room. But the day before his release, that spot was given to someone else. Turner panicked, because he heard that if you're a sex offender and don't have a permanent address when your sentence is up, you get sent directly to county jail.

Luckily for Turner, he snagged one of the coveted 120 spots at Palace Mobile Home Park in St. Petersburg, where he became a subject of a new documentary called Pervert Park. The Sundance award-winning film, which opens in New York on Friday, is a study of one of the few places in America intended to exclusively house sex offenders. It offers a series of unflinching portraits of people who do terrible things and somehow have to live with their pasts.

Read: Why Sex Criminals Get Locked Up Forever

Scandinavian filmmakers Frida and Lasse Barkfors first read about Palace in a Danish newspaper, and got the sense it was a self-contained, almost communal place where residents provided services for one another and rarely interacted with the outside world. When they first visited in 2010, they realized that, in reality, Palace is the home of Florida Justice Transitions, a program designed to help offenders reintegrate into a society that wants them to disappear forever.

Even though it wasn't what they expected, the couple started filming anyway, though at first, they were too terrified to leave each other's sides while doing so. As one might imagine, some of what they heard was downright terrifying. For instance, the film opens with a shaking, apparently drugged-up man describing the time he was sexually rejected and then reacted by driving to Mexico, abducting a child, and raping her in the desert.

"I made sure that we were sitting between him and the door and not the opposite." Frida told me.

But it was important for her to start off the film with the most disturbing interview possible, so that the audience wouldn't feel like they were trying the abuse was being minimized. This was also strategic from a basic storytelling perspective.

"We wanted the film to feel how we felt when we first came into the park," Lasse told me. "We were scared when we first came here and we learned slowly about this and we wanted to make the same journey for the viewer."

Image courtesy of The Film Sales Company. Photo by Lasse Barkfors

However, Pervert Park does serve to at least partially humanize people we might typically consider soulless monsters. Some are shown to be victims themselves, like William Fuery, the park's maintenance man. He says he grew up getting fondled by his babysitter and got a girl pregnant when he was a teen. After deciding to man up and join the Navy, Fuery ran into trouble again when his family car broke down on a trip to Chicago. While he was getting help, a drunk driver killed his wife and one-year-old son. Later, when he was with a new woman, her daughter had a sleepover. He was in bed smoking a joint and masturbating to pornography, he says, when a young girl walked in the room. She told her parents what happened and they insisted that he molested her, even though the girl said he did not, according to Fuery.

He got five years probation, but then ended up going to prison for dirty urine.

A more complicated example is that of Tracy Lynn Hutchinson, who says she was raped by her father and his friends growing up, and went on to have a sexual relationship with him as an adult. Later, she met a man online who said he would send her money if she had sex with her eight-year-old son. Initially, Hutchinson says, she resisted, before eventually committing the crime. Given her experience with incest, it's unclear if she understood how wrong that was at the time she did it, though. And while the park has an in-house counselor, Hutchinson tells the filmmakers this is the first time she's truly confessed her whole story.

Suffice it to say the subject matter is far from light, but there is something fascinating about watching people say things that are borderline unspeakable on camera—and through tears. Maybe it's just misery porn. But it's also uniquely confusing and even surreal to feel empathy for people who have been convicted of harming a child. And the larger point to the film is asking how much more America need to punish people who have already served prison time, particularly the ones who seem to display genuine remorse. As the number of sex offenders in Florida has more than doubled in the past decade, the question of what to do with them is even more important than when the film began production.

Still, Frida maintains that she and her partner did not set out to make an "activist" film. "If people see this and think that we should treat these people better, that's great," she said. "If not, then fine. We just wanted people to see the other side."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Over the past few years, I've been trying to spend more time with my parents. Recently, because of my job as the culture editor of this website, spending time with them has involved watching TV with them.

When my father visited New York earlier this year, I suggested we watch the "Parents" episode of Master of None, in which Aziz Ansari's character and his Taiwanese American friend take their immigrant parents out to dinner. Like the characters on the show, I thought this might be a possible bonding experience, one generation of Asian Americans learning from the plights of another. My father, who was born in Nanjing, China, in 1939 and grew up in Taiwan, wasn't so impressed, pointing out the inaccuracies of the regional accents.

"That's a Cantonese accent," he scoffed, about a scene supposedly set in rural Taiwan.

"So it's not realistic?" I asked.

"Pssh," he said.

After the show was over I asked what he thought about it.

"I don't think many people will watch it."

"Well, did you at least enjoy it?" I asked.

"Not really," he said. "I usually like more realistic shows. I like Blue Blood and Madam President."

Although a bit deflated, I still enjoyed our experience together, and was amused by his response. More than that, I felt I learned something I wouldn't have otherwise known about him.

The author with his family in Montreal in the mid-1990s

It was with this in mind that, on my most recent trip home to South Carolina, I decided to make my parents watch Game of Thrones with me. GOT is possibly my favorite show on TV, and certainly the one I've spent the most time with. After ignoring it for years, this past April I became hooked, binge-watching five seasons in the span of weeks. Now I reference it constantly in social situations. It's gotten to the point that VICE's art editor Nick Gazin drew a portrait of me with the tagline "James of Thrones." My approach to solving various life-conflicts has devolved to, essentially, asking myself what would Tyrion Lannister do? (Make a joke, then do something clever.)

Anyway, I wanted to share this interest with my parents—"For work," I added, playing the dutiful Asian card—and they graciously agreed to help. Though my mother seemed to do it entirely out of maternal kindness, my father appeared mildly curious. He said he'd heard about the show. When I told him it was one of America's most popular TV shows, he said, a bit huffily, "I know, I know."

"How Come So Many Evil People?"

Warning: Light spoilers through season six, episode four.

I decided to start them off at the beginning of season six, because I didn't want to drop them into the middle of the new season, and also because I didn't think anyone would want to read about season one, regardless of who they're watching it with.

I regretted starting so far into the series immediately. The first episode, "The Red Woman," changes perspectives and settings every few minutes, as if to remind viewers that each remaining character still exists. Watching with my parents was going to require a lot more explaining then I had bargained for. I explained to them who Jon Snow was, who Sansa Stark was, who Theon Greyjoy was, who the men attacking them were, who Ramsay Bolton was, who Brienne of Tarth was, and who Podrick was.

Onscreen, the Waif from the temple of the Many-Faced God tossed a bo staff at Arya Stark, then began hitting her before she could defend herself.

"What is that," my mother asked, of the scene. "Want her to fight?" With each blow my mother made a sound of disapproval and shook her head as my father watched silently.

"How come so many evil people?" my mother said, disturbed. "I don't really like that. Who write this movie is bad. Very cruel. Very few kindness."

"Stupid People Watch Stupid Movie"

Onscreen, the titular Red Woman Melisandre began to slowly disrobe, removing her amulet to reveal her true identity as an extremely old woman, and my father yawned.

"Ai yu, did you see that?" asked my mother, astonished. "The young beautiful lady become so old lady? In order to save that person life? She become a completely different person."

"No, this is not a good movie, Jems," my mother concluded, after the old-woman version of Melisandre climbed into bed, ending the episode. "Whoever write this, I don't like it. Bad. Everything is violence."

"Um-hmm," I said.

"It promote the violence, is bad. Did you see, all the children is hitting each other?" she said, referring to my sister's young kids, who were in the other room. "Even our little one. I saw hitting, kicking. I say, 'No, don't do that.' And your sister is going to let them take the lesson in karate, so promote the hitting and kicking."

"Can you understand why Americans like this TV show?" I asked.

"Many stupid," posited my father.

"They reflect the meanness in the people," said my mother. "Evil. See evil like nothing. No, it not my kind of movie."

At this my father yawned extremely loudly.

"Stupid people watch stupid movie," he mused. He turned the channel to the local news and yawned loudly again. After the local weather segment, he got up and went to bed. I asked my mother if she wanted to watch the second episode of season six.

"Well, I'll stay with you, whatever you do," she said, beaming though a little worried. "Mommy love you and your sister."

"That's His Father, and He Kill Him?"

"So who is this person?" my mother asked, as Ramsay Bolton stabbed his father in the gut.

"Remember the guy who I told you was the worst?" I said. "That's him."

"That's his father, and he kill him? What kind of people are they?"

After watching Ramsay feed his mother-in-law Walda and his newborn baby brother to the dogs, my mother turned to me, appalled.

"Jem, this is a bad movie," she said, shaking her head. "You shouldn't watch. When we see people don't have heart, our heart will harden too. We always get inferenced by the thing we see."

She sighed and continued: "I think that America has problem, enjoy this kind of movie, really have problem. No wonder they vote for Trump. They crazy. I cannot believe this."

Onscreen, in yellow- and orange-toned Dorne, Ellaria Sand stabbed Prince Doran in the stomach and one of the Sand Snakes stabbed his bodyguard in the back.

"So the guy who was stabbed?" I said, to give some context. "He was the prince of Dorne. And his son was killed by the same group of people. Does that make sense?"

My mother sighed wearily. "Just too many kingdom, too many princes."

"Oh, this is the dwarf," she said, upbeat, when earnest-faced Tyrion Lannister appeared in the dragons' lair. Tyrion seemed to be one of the few characters she actually liked, perhaps because I had introduced him in an earlier scene as "smart" and "decent."

"It interesting that monster can listen to him," observed my mother, smiling at Tyrion's ability with the dragons.

"Even Shakespeare Was Not This Violent, and They Have Lots of Good Conversations."

After Jon Snow is revived and the credits rolled, my mother said, "OK, we have two episode. Don't watch more. That's enough. Whoever wrote this story, too violent, not good idea. You know when people watch too much violence, they become violent. They don't see anything wrong with violence. Their heart become very hard. They have no sympathy. This is not for Mommy."

"Do you see any redeeming qualities?" I ventured.

"Well, I don't know," said my mother. "People feel differently, but the way I see, it just too much violence for me. It's not my kind of movie. Do you know what kind of movie I like better? Something like The Sound of Music. Something not violent. Or The Nun Story, Romeo and Juliet. Even Shakespeare was not this violent, and they have lots of good conversations. The sad thing is, I see lots of old classic movies when I'm growing up, and I think they're beautiful. And now lots of movie are violence, and it's really not good. People are different. I don't like this kind of movie. Actually, I prefer movie that promote love and kindness, not just violence and illegal stuff. Really too many evil, and too many scam."

"OK," I said. "We'll watch one or two more tomorrow."

My mother laughed, and repeated, "OK," without much enthusiasm.

When 9 PM rolled around the next night, my father had disappeared from the kitchen, but I was able to persuade my mother to watch the fourth and newest episode with me.

By Game of Thrones standards, "Book of the Stranger" is miraculously nonviolent, mostly showing scenes of happy-ish reunions and scheming, though it does end—spoiler—with a long segment in the Dothraki camp, where two of the Kalansar are killed in a dark alley and Dany burns the remaining patriarchs alive before victoriously emerging from the building's flaming shell, unharmed (and unclothed).

After the episode, I asked my mother what she thought. "Did you like it better now? Same? Was it still too violent?"

"Still too much violence," she said, shaking her head, then smiling: "And too nekkid."

I was still thinking about the experience a few days later, back in Brooklyn. I had laughed at many of my parents' responses, but there was something else that stuck with me, after the laughter. I occurred to me that, at some point, our roles had somehow reversed. Instead of their explaining things to me, the way it used to be, here I was explaining everything to them, elaborating the backstory, discerning what was important for them to know and what they could just pass over.

My new role extended beyond guiding them through Game of Thrones, this TV show neither of them had watched nor would ever likely watch again. It included things like having to teach my father how to send texts on their new iPhone (they share a single cell phone between them), having to set up my mother's email account. Helping my father to carry a bookcase and my mother to wash the dishes. Invisible though irrevocable moves toward finality and what I imagined as a kind of darkness.

I thought of the future, of wanting to raise kids of my own some day, and remembered something the writer Alejandro Zambra had once said, how "the purpose of adults is to answer difficult questions for children," and I knew I would need to improve, before it was too late.

Follow James Yeh on Twitter.

(Photo by Phil Roeder, via)

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

US News

• DNC to Offer Sanders Policy Influence
  In an attempt to avoid conflict at the party convention, the Democratic National Committee plans to offer Senator Bernie Sanders a seat on a key platform committee. Sanders reportedly plans to push his party toward more left-wing policy positions, including a $15 national minimum wage and a more balanced position on Israel.—The Washington Post
• Oklahoma Passes Bill Banning Abortions
  The Oklahoma state legislature has passed a bill that would criminalize abortion. Any doctor found to have performed an abortion, except when saving the life of the mother, would be guilty of a felony and receive up to three years in prison. Republican Governor Mary Fallin now has five days to approve the bill.—The New York Times
• Trump Delegate Indicted on Child Porn Charges
  Donald Trump's campaign team said a Maryland delegate accused of producing child pornography will be "replaced immediately." Caleb Andrew Bailey, 30, has been indicted for the illegal transport of explosives, illegal possession of a machine gun, and child pornography offenses.—USA Today
• San Francisco Police Chief Reigns
  San Francisco's Police Chief Greg Suhr has stepped down hours after a police officer shot and killed an unarmed black woman, 27, suspected of driving a stolen car. Suhr's resignation was announced by Mayor Ed Lee, who had asked him to quit. It follows recent criticism of racist texts traded by the city's police officers.—CBS News

International News

• Debris Discovered from EgyptAir Plane
  Debris from EgyptAir flight MS804 has been found in the Mediterranean, according to the Egyptian military. Wreckage and passenger belongings were found 180 miles off the coast of Alexandria. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi confirmed the crash and offered his condolences to families of the 66 passengers and crew members on board the Paris to Cairo flight.—CNN
• Second Schoolgirl Rescued in Nigeria
  A second girl from the group of 219 schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram two years ago has been found, according to the Nigerian army. Serah Luka was among 97 women and children held hostage by Boko Haram who were freed after an operation by Nigerian soldiers in Borno state. The soldiers killed 35 Boko Haram fighters.—Al Jazeera
• Tsai Ing-wen Sworn in as President of Taiwan
  Tsai Ing-wen has become Taiwan's first female leader, having been sworn in as the country's new president. She urged China to "drop the baggage of history," but also called for "positive dialogue." Ms Tsai's Democratic Progressive Party DPP has traditionally favored independence from China.—BBC News
• Israeli Defense Minister Quits
  Moshe Yaalon, Israel's Defense Minister, announced his resignation on Friday, citing a "lack of faith" in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu reportedly offered far-right nationalist politician Avigdor Lieberman the job. Netanyahu is thought to want Lieberman's Yisrael Beitenu party to join his coalition government.—Reuters

A medical marijuana dispensary (Photo by Adam Jones, via)

Everything Else

• Original Member of Beastie Boys Dead at 52
  John Berry, a founding member of the Beastie Boys, credited with coming up with the group's name, has died at the age 52. Berry's father said he had been suffering from frontal lobe dementia.—Rolling Stone
• Doctors Cleared to Prescribe Medical Marijuana to Vets
  The House of Representatives has voted to allow Veterans Administration doctors to recommend medical marijuana to patients in states where the treatment is legal. It strikes down a Department of Veterans Affairs restriction on medical weed.—The Huffington Post
• Letter that Inspired Kerouac Up for Auction
  The 40,000-word letter Neal Cassady sent to Jack Kerouac in 1950, said to have inspired the spontaneous prose style of On the Road, will go up for auction in June. It is expected to sell as much as $600,000.—VICE
• British Columbia's Tent City to Get Toilets and Showers
  A tent city occupying the lawn of a British Columbia courthouse will get flushing toilets and portable showers next week, thanks to a non-profit from Vancouver. A court order has protected the camp from being dismantled, at least until September.—VICE News

Done with reading for today? That's fine—instead, watch our new documentary about terminally ill Serbians risking jail time to access medicinal cannabis oil.

Life Inside is an ongoing collaboration between the Marshall Project and VICE that offers first-person perspectives from those who live and work in the criminal justice system. Chris Dankovich is a 26-year-old inmate at Thumb Correctional Facility in Lapeer, Michigan, where he is serving a 25-to-37-year sentence for a second-degree murder he committed when he was 15. He stabbed his mother 111 times.

It was as if I had been bleached from the room.

My six-by-ten cell was white, the walls were white, the floor was white, and the lights were white but never dimmed. The only object in the room, apart from the mattress on the floor, was a stainless-steel toilet—which reflected the white light.

In the courtroom just hours earlier, on May 1, 2006, I'd received a sentence of 25 to 37 years in prison. The judge reminded me I could change my no-contest plea by claiming insanity.

I refused and was removed from the court.

Now I was in the "Pole," which someone had explained to me was the "Psychological Hole." It was a place for protecting me, physically, from myself. As I sat there—sometimes reflecting, sometimes just staring at the wall, sometimes napping—I began to wonder whether it got its name because it was where they put people who were crazy, or whether it's because this was the place they put people to make them crazy. Was there even a distinction?

Apart from when staff delivered meals, I never knew what time it was.

There, to the right, was a message written on a window: "100% Jamaican." It was scrawled in toothpaste and feces.

But even if the court had listened to the psychologists, I refused to. Try to imagine being 15 years old and being told that you, your brain, and your conception of reality (and everything you knew) was wrong. There I was, so crazy I wouldn't plead crazy.

When you are alone, truly alone, with no distractions, the only thing you can hear are the whispers of demons. Not real voices, but thoughts that infect your mind, your sense of self, your sense of what is real. What you hear is determined by whether you listen. There is only so much a mind can put up with, particularly when faced with unlimited nothingness.

Is it really possible to drive someone crazy? In such a short time, no, at least not permanently. I could feel it welling up, though. A hypersensitivity at first—I noticed the most subtle, alternating flickering of the white light (on a scale of one to ten, it was the difference between a 9.9 and 10). Patterns, faces, and images appeared in the texture of the walls next to small stains I hadn't noticed before, the origins of which I didn't want to consider.

As I lay there, blanket over my head, pinpricks of light shining through the threads, I imagined scenarios in my mind.

There was the girl I used to talk to back in school, who I imagined was coming to check in on me and see how I was doing. I imagined meeting my judge again, and this time I could say whatever I wanted to him—some combination of "fuck you" and "please help me."

I imagined myself in the hospital, where I went around my 11th birthday, after my mother (to whose murder I had just pleaded no contest) sucker-punched me and threw me head-first into our living room's glass-and-wood coffee table.

And I saw myself as I was a year earlier, when I had been incarcerated in the highest-security building of the juvenile detention facility. It was the best, and the freest, year of my life, having spent the previous 15-and-a-half years in a house with someone who kept my bedroom window nailed shut and barred me from going outside.

Soon I merely imagined a companion who anesthetized my loneliness: a beautiful girl with a face and a name I could whisper as if she were actually there. A person to talk to, to hold, to hold me.

In my solitude, alone and away from my mother and everyone else who could possibly listen or would possibly care, I muttered thoughts to this girl. And I would imagine her responses, sometimes subtly mouthing the words I pretended she'd say.

To turn on English subtitles, click "CC" and change the language to English.

Going off an accident report obtained by VICE, stating that a North Korean welder lost his life in the CRIST shipyard in the Polish seaport of Gdynia, VICE filmmakers Sebastian Weis and Manuel Freundt have uncovered which companies are using North Korean laborers in Poland.

Weis's and Freundt's investigation has revealed the conscious and unwitting beneficiaries of these exploitative working conditions. They spoke with North Korean laborers who have been isolated and kept under watch, and who were most likely too afraid of punishment to report their living and working conditions in Poland.

VICE has also gained exclusive access to documents that reveal the wages of North Korean laborers in Poland before the Kim regime's deductions, as well as confidential service contracts, payment records, registers of persons, passport copies, and excerpts from a population register smuggled out of North Korea, indicating that a Polish company is likely being run by a high-ranking member of the North Korean military.

The research unravels a complex web of organized exploitation, bureaucratic chaos, official indifference, and political ignorance that extends all the way to the European Commission. Most of all, the film shines a light on working conditions that can only be described as forced labor, as defined in the European Convention on Human Rights and by the International Labor Organization.

The documentary poses the question of whether the presence of North Korean forced laborers in Poland is a bureaucratic system error, or rather the result of economic policy that turns a blind eye to the consequences of its actions, as long as European companies profit, while the Kim regime bypasses international sanctions to fill state coffers with foreign currency.

Photo via Ottawa Police Service Facebook

Lost smartphones, wallets, dignity—the usual suspects of a night out. But if you're a cop, there's a little more to lose: say, a firearm, for example. After a night of (seemingly) going too hard, an Ottawa cop reported both his gun and his vehicle stolen and—after it was found that neither were—is now facing suspension (with pay) as of last week. According to the Ottawa Citizen, the incident supposedly happened after Constable Christian Nungisa went out for a night of drinking in Kingston, Ontario.

All photos by Alexandros Avramidis

This article originally appeared on VICE Greece

Military conscription was first introduced in Greece in 1909, following a coup that brought prime minister Eleftherios Venizelos to power. Since then, the length of the service has changed at times to reflect the country's political situation. In 2009, it was decided that mandatory military service in Greece would last for nine to 12 months for men between the ages of 19 and 45, and that's still the case today.

Besides the horrible food and the fact they waste a year of their lives sitting around doing absolutely nothing, Greek guys also have to face a number of hazing rituals designed to humiliate new recruits and entertain old ones. I asked some friends of mine to share some stories from their "good old army days."

The Nausea

"I chose to serve my time in the Special Forces, so I was prepared to get hazed. I'd heard countless stories about having to sprint while carrying your full armament, endless crawls in the mud and timed team showers, but nothing could prepare me for the initiation ceremony that old recruits have aptly named 'The Nausea.'

"It was my first week on duty and we'd just finished eating, when the whole unit was told we were to exercise until someone vomited. And so we did—we ran, we jumped, we climbed, we did push-ups and crunches in the blaring sun until this one guy kneeled down on the ground and begun to retch grains of rice and a horrible green liquid. I still don't know how I managed to keep myself from doing the same when I saw what was coming out of his mouth."

—Thodoris, 30

SPRING CLEAN

"My unit was on kitchen duty when it started raining. In fact, I was peeling potatoes when an officer walked in and handed us a bunch of newspapers and bottles of cleaning spray and told us to go wipe the windows of the building from outside while it was raining. Basically, the whole exercise was pointless because the windows kept getting wet again and again and again."

—Akis, 24

The Jukebox

"About ten of us newbies entered our room after training, when a group of older recruits called us to attention, leaving us to stand for about 15 minutes, I think just for fun. Then the oldest recruit, who was basically in charge, asked loudly: 'Who digs jukeboxes?' A tiny, scrawny guy dared to respond that he did, and so they picked him up and locked him in a clothes trunk.

For the next hour or so, they kept slipping coins through a crack in the trunk and he was obliged to sing a new song every time they did. This happened quite a few times over the next next year, but I dodged the bullet. I'm very tall, so they couldn't fit me in the trunk."

—Christos, 39

The Bayonets

"Older recruits would make us stand up, arms stretched, holding a shelf with stuff on it. Under our hand they'd fasten a bayonet, so that if anyone got tired and their hand slipped, they'd get stabbed."

—Anonymous

CODFISH

"I was part of the Evzones, or Presidential Guard, an elite unit that is supposed to guard the Greek Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the Presidential Mansion, and the gate of Evzones camp in Athens. The Evzones are supposed to stay completely motionless and at attention for long intervals, so ensuring a soldier has the necessarily stamina and self-control is a big part of the Evzones training and the hazing surrounding it.

I had to stand motionless and at attention for half an hour while three older recruits tried to provoke me. That included continuous slaps on the face and neck—which is referred to as "codfishing"—and covering my face and hair with shaving cream until I looked like a Smurf.

The hazing was intense, but when I was an older recruit I could do whatever I felt like—for instance, I could make anyone freeze just by shouting, 'Freeze!'"

—Dionysus, 23

The Toothbrush

"Every time a general or other 'top brass' inspected our chambers, they'd find stains and dirt in the toilets and showers. Every single time, we had to clean the toilets and the showers with our toothbrush. It's one of the most common and disgusting hazing rituals in the army."

—Nikos, 25

Army Nut

"We had just finished an evening report so the officer on duty—a well-known asshole —sent us all upstairs to our quarters. Just after we'd laid down he called us all downstairs again, because supposedly we were making noise. He did this a few times, and every time we had to get to his office in full gear—gun, helmet, boots, everything—as if we were about to go to war. Then he made us march for an hour. It was 1AM when he finally let us sleep.

The tragedy was that some of us had watchtower duty after, or service in the morning, so we basically didn't sleep at all. He was a brute, the definition of an army nut."

—Tasos, 32

The Chambermaid

"Early in the morning, it's inspection time. The officers check if everything is clean and in place in the army chambers. They are particularly strict about the way you make your bed—the sheets and covers need to be folded in hospital corners. One morning I'd made mine perfectly, but they still completely stripped my bed, claiming that it wasn't good enough, and made me do it again. And again. And again. I had to make my bed five or six times before they were satisfied, just because they felt like hazing me."

—Akis, 24

Image by Lia Kantrowitz

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

These are uncertain times for the "special relationship" between Britain and the United States. In decades past, no one needed to worry that, when there were wars to be fought, profits to be made, and financial regulations to be slashed, trusty old sidekick Britain would be there to back up gallivanting leading man America.

You have to wonder whether that will change now that Donald Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee. British politicians from all parties have been lining up to cash in some free positive PR by having a pop at the biggest target in world politics. David Cameron called his proposal to ban all Muslims from the US "divisive, stupid, and wrong." The new Labour mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, called Trump "ignorant."

But the Trump is a violently sensitive man, and he's not happy about all this. When Piers Morgan put the quotes to him, he seemed to threaten Khan, saying, "Tell him I will remember those statements," and hinted that Cameron's comments mean the US and the UK "won't have such a good relationship anymore."

With this in mind, I met up with Simon Tate, author of, A Special Relationship? British Foreign Policy in the Era of American Hegemony, and a senior lecturer in the school of Geography, Politics, and Sociology at Newcastle University.

Illustration by Sam Taylor

VICE: How important is the special relationship right now, for both Britain and the United States?
Simon Tate: The first mention of there being an Anglo-American "special relationship" is in Winston Churchill's "Sinews of Peace" address, delivered in Fulton, Missouri, in 1946. He said, "Neither the sure prevention of war, nor the continuous rise of a world organization, will be gained without what I have called the fraternal association of the English-speaking peoples... a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and United States."

In the British public psyche, the relationship is still very important. For politicians, it's not quite as important as it once was. Both Obama and Cameron have made comments over the last seven years that have sought to move the focus of their foreign policy elsewhere. Cameron once said Britain should be less "needy" when it comes to the US.

A number of British politicians have attacked Donald Trump. In return, Trump has said, "It looks like we're not going to have a very good relationship." What do you think a Trump–Cameron special relationship would look like?
My best guess is that a Trump-Cameron relationship will be fairly frosty at a personal level, but the relationship will endure at least at the level of security and intelligence sharing, which is where the relationship really is special and functions best. In fairness to Trump, we also have to remember that the US doesn't instinctively think of the Anglo-American relationship as a special one—that's a British term.

Even if he doesn't become president, Donald Trump might come to Britain soon as part of a foreign trip. That could be a diplomatic nightmare, right?
If you're the British government, normally you want to meet potential incoming presidents early and get your priorities on the table. It's just the done thing. I've got a hunch the British government might not want to do that, because if it does, it'll give Trump credibility as a potential leader, and it forces the British to possibly rethink their foreign policy, which they certainly don't want to do until the Brexit campaign is finished.

What happens if Cameron refuses to meet with Trump?
I don't think there's a precedent for that. Potentially, it seals what happens to the special relationship in the next eight to ten years. It'd be hasty to say that it ends the special relationship, because it tends to bounce back, but it certainly goes through some very frosty periods.

And if Cameron does meet with Trump, it could play very badly in the UK. It could actually be good for Britain's Labour Party Leader, Jeremy Corbyn.
Yes, and I think Corbyn is very interesting here, because he has the potential to reshape British foreign policy. In the years to come, the special relationship won't be as important as it used to be, but I don't think the British public is ready for it to end. And I don't think the Conservative Party is ready for Europe to be our main foreign policy ally.

But I imagine Corbyn looking to speed up the movement of British foreign policy away from its alignment with the US—making us less "needy." This will probably happen anyway, as Britain seems to be looking toward a multi-polar world with lots of foreign-policy relationships, though that seems to have stalled recently under the current government. Under Corbyn, this move in foreign policy might evolve more quickly.

Theoretically, what would happen if Trump were president and Corbyn were prime minister?
Corbyn and Sanders would be a game-changer. If you think of those two working together over a significant period, you'd be looking at a very different kind of geopolitics. I think the special relationship would shrink to being a military, security, and intelligence relationship. Trump would have to be crazier than people think he is if he decided he didn't want to share military and security intelligence. And that relationship operates at a level that is almost independent of who the president is.

Some would say a much more dangerous kind of geopolitics. That Trump and Corbyn would not be "responsible," at least in issues of defense.
I think it depends on who you think should be defending the world. Let's not forget the UN, let's not forget NATO: Is that not their job? It depends on many things, including whether you think Russia is dangerous or a useful balance.

How bad would things have to get between, say Trump and Cameron, for there to be trade or foreign-policy implications?
I can't imagine it ever coming to that. Ultimately, both Cameron and, increasingly, Trump, are hard-nosed politicians, and it isn't in either of their interests to rewrite economic and foreign policy around a personal grudge. Also, much of the special relationship functions at a military and security level, almost independently of political leaders.

I don't think we should confuse the term special relationship with a preferential relationship—it is special in the sense of shared culture and history, but not in terms of the two countries doing each other favors, as evidenced by Obama's message that outside of the EU, Britain would have to go to the back of the line for a new trade deal with the US.

But what happens if a British PM and Trump just don't talk to each other?
For Britain, it's a much bigger problem, because we're used to the relationship being special, whereas America talks about "special relationships." For most British people, it's not about intelligence sharing; it's about state visits. It's about Obama going to visit the queen.

"Blair was a classic example of British overstretch. He couldn't say, 'Let's do less.'"

So the worst-case scenario is that we don't have Donald Trump meet the queen?
We don't have state visits, and in that sense, it looks like the special relationship has ended. But historically, when it has looked like it's ended, it hasn't, because of the importance of Europe and the role Britain played negotiating with Europe on America's behalf. That role doesn't exist anymore.

So if the special relationship dips, can it recover this time?
America doesn't need Britain the way it once did. In the past, when the relationship went frosty, it had to recover because both sides needed it to. Britain, with its diplomatic ties all over the world, was still a go-between for America. This time, America doesn't quite need Britain in the way that it did.

This is something we forget: Britain had phone numbers for the whole world.
Blair tried to exploit that in the run-up to the Iraq war. He was off touring the world, using these links and this influence.

Did it work?
No. It's that kind of delusion: We've still got the phone numbers, but having them doesn't mean you have influence.

So, really, the worst-case scenario could be a best-case scenario, one that actually allows a different kind of Britain to emerge, a Britain that is more happily realistic about its place in the world.
And about what it can and can't achieve. It's OK to say "let's do less" in the way that Blair, who was a classic example of British overstretch, couldn't.

I can't imagine former London Mayor Boris Johnson being happy about that, were he to be prime minister.
Oh God no.

How do you think him and Trump would get along?
Boris is a shrewd politician, so he'd make it work in some way. There is the shared neoliberal-economic outlook with Trump, which bonded Reagan and Thatcher so well. The Johnsons also have family ties with the US. So did Churchill, Boris's hero, and if Boris can use those ties to the same effect, it will certainly help to oil the diplomatic wheels.

The Boris and Donald show would be quite something.
It would be spectacular! Because they don't have the diplomatic language you expect from politicians. I wouldn't say stream-of-consciousness, but it's not far off.

Would it be terrifying for the rest of the world?
It would be terrifying because it would be unpredictable. I think what you are hoping is that, in Britain's case, the civil service sets the agenda and says, "This is what we need to do. There are certain limits on what you can and can't do." In America, it's different, but you are still hoping for checks and balances to come into play.

We've had this concern in the past—that the personalities of presidents and prime ministers will conflict and that the special relationship will be damaged. But with Blair and Bush, Obama and Brown, and Obama and Cameron, the status quo has prevailed. Will that not be what happens again, even if Donald Trump gets in?
More than likely, the special relationship will prevail. Anthony Eden spectacularly annoyed the Americans through the invasion of Suez, yet his successor MacMillan got on incredibly well with President Kennedy, and no lasting damage was done. It is also true that personalities are only one facet of the special relationship—many suggest that it is the military, security, and intelligence sharing that is more important. If anything makes the special relationship less important going forward, it will either be the strengthening of the EU as a foreign policy actor—and how Britain responds to that—or the refocusing of US foreign policy away from Europe and Russia and toward the Middle East.

All photos courtesy of Jason Fraga

In 2010, Jason Fraga drove to a supermarket near his home in Belchertown, Massachusetts, to pick up some groceries. A veteran BMX racer, he was accustomed to the claustrophobia of the pack, the thrown elbows, and the barely controlled choreography of speed on the dirt track. But when another shopper wheeled his cart into Fraga's path, something snapped. It was a completely unremarkable cut-off, the type of thing that happens a hundred times a day in a grocery store, and yet he found himself overcome with rage. He wanted to kill the man who'd pulled in front of him. What's worse, he didn't understand why.

Later, it would seem obvious: The day before, Fraga—founder of the Knockout Project, a forum dedicated to spreading awareness of concussions in sport—had suffered a concussion. It was his ninth. Or maybe his 19th. It's hard to say, because for years, stretching back to when he first started racing as a kid in the early 1980s, concussions were rarely talked about.

Today, the discussion around concussions and traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) revolves largely around professional football. In 2015, a federal judge approved a class-action lawsuit brought by some 5,000 former NFL players who accused the league of downplaying the dangers of the game.

Those dangers include chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a degenerative disease caused by an individual blow or series of smaller blows to the head. According to the Boston University CTE Center, symptoms include deteriorating cognitive function, memory loss, dizziness, headaches, erratic behavior, impaired speech, vertigo, and suicidal ideation. In 2012, Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher killed his girlfriend, and then himself, in front of his coach at the stadium where he played. The same year, former linebacker Junior Seau killed himself. Autopsies later revealed evidence of CTE in both of their brains. Since then, a number of high-profile football players, like San Francisco 49ers linebacker Chris Borland, have retired early, citing concerns about CTE.

It isn't limited to football: In February, Dave Mirra, the most-decorated BMX rider in X Games history, was found dead of an apparent suicide at his home in North Carolina. Toward the end of his life, friends reported Mirra was behaving strangely, and many have speculated that he was suffering from some form of CTE, although results of an autopsy that might prove this have not yet been released.

"The rub some dirt on it mentality you see in football is the same ... you start getting really depressed, like, How do I even deal with life?"

Fraga started the Knockout Project in 2012, after meeting a group of kids in the waiting room at his specialist's office, all of whom were suffering the same type of brain injury symptoms. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that almost 250,000 children were treated for concussions in 2009, the most recent year for which data is available, up 57 percent from a decade earlier.

"It was a really difficult thing to see, so I figured at that point I had to do something," Fraga said. He added, "If I'm going to be forced to live this shitty existence, at least I'm going to warn people."

The organization connects with athletes at every level of play, from high school sports to professional football. Many are simply looking for others who can commiserate.

"There is nothing more painful than having an injury that other people can't physically see," a former high school basketball player wrote in a personal essay on the Knockout Project website earlier this year. "There's no cast, there's no brace, and there are no crutches. Nobody can see that you're physically, mentally, and emotionally dying inside."

While some have advocated for banning sports that cause high numbers of head injuries, Fraga is not an abolitionist. The primary message he wants to impart, particularly to young athletes and their parents, is to get checked out after a hit; if it turns out to be a concussion, he said, cognitive rest is critical, and athletes should make sure they are free of symptoms and cleared by a doctor before returning to the field.

It sounds obvious, he said, but it's something he'd never considered before. "We just went back out and blasted ourselves."

Follow Luke O'Neil on Twitter.

Photo by Nicolas Vigier via

This article originally appeared on VICE France

So far, every time I've attended a Nuit Debout protest, I've left feeling a little disappointed. The few times I've been, it seemed more like a big gathering of lost hippies than a genuine protest movement. But, at the same time, I'm well aware that the people who make up Nuit Debout do it for the right reasons.

Nuit Debout is a movement of daily anti-capitalist protests that started on March 31 this year on the Place de La République in Paris. The movement is a reaction to the breakdown of the social and economic situations in France over the past few years. But what lit the flame of the protests was the announcement of a new labour law by French Minister of Labour Myriam El Khomri, which protesters saw as the end of the protection of the French worker.

The Nuit Debout movement is reminiscent of Occupy and similar protests that have spread around the world in the past few years—like the Indignados movement of the Puerta del Sol in Madrid in 2011 and the 700 Euro Generation at Syntagma Square in Athens. Like a lot of these movements, Nuit Debout wants to organize itself organically, without a leader. At their general assemblies you mostly find militant supporters of the Leftist Front and the Green Party, unionists, community activists, and students. The protesters want to work within a direct and horizontal democracy and don't just oppose the new labour law, but also the current political institutions and economic system in general. Nuit Debout has spread to other towns in France and has even popped up in Belgium, Spain, Germany, and Portugal.

Photo by Nicolas Vigier via

In theory, the political and social nature of Nuit Debout—like its aspirations to horizontal democracy—is the essence of the movement. But in practice, that also makes it unclear what its direction is; you'd be forgiven for asking whether it really is a new revolutionary movement or just an idealistic flashmob. The hundreds of people who have gathered every night since late March are, for the time being, not making a concrete impact on anything. When Le Figaro—the most read right-wing media outlet in the country—asked its readers whether they thought the Nuit Debout movement was going to last, 67 percent of them gleefully said that it wouldn't. In the same paper, the author of the book Don't help yourself, the state will help you, wrote an op-ed titled "Nuit Debout: Dawn of the hipsters".

I went back to Place de la République to see what the atmosphere was like a couple of weeks after the demonstrations started. Basically, the Nuit Debout protesters are mainly white high school kids and university students, passive revolutionaries, progressives, humanists, and some actual misfits. Walking around, I couldn't shake the feeling that the young people who are suffering the most because of the current French system aren't participating in this movement. For now, it's all pretty calm—there isn't necessarily a sense of revolution in the air.

The protest area is split in two: there's a speaker's corner on one side, where people participate in a political open-mic session of sorts. The other side mostly reminds me of a circus. There are slackliners, am-dram actors putting on a politically charged show, a fire breather, jugglers, and circle drummers. The dividing line between these two spaces is made up of some kids picnicking on the concrete.

In the speaker's corner, people were trying to right all the wrongs in the world, but it became immediately clear that there are a lot of wrongs to right—too many, perhaps, to be dealt with by a relatively unorganized group of street protesters.

At the center of the square people wandered about like they were at a festival, stopping here and there to have a grilled sausage or watch bit of a play. In the speaker's corner, people were trying to right all the wrongs in the world, but it became immediately clear that there are a lot of wrongs to right—too many, perhaps, to be dealt with by a relatively unorganized group of street protesters. Some speakers were fighting for women's rights, others argued we should have a democracy without political parties, and some were demanding an end to people being dicks to each other on the subway. Which is fine, of course, because they're all noble causes.

But this broad range of demands is also what could limit the impact of the movement, given that such a splintered message won't keep people in power up at night. Nuit Debout reveals a political problem: it's a gathering of people who want to make a point about this political issue—but it's still mostly just a political awakening, not a revolutionary force.

That doesn't mean that Nuit Debout isn't an important social space, of course. From what I saw and heard, the El Khomri Law is a constant topic of discussion on the square. But what really binds people together is the general frustration at the right-wing policies of the supposedly left-wing government of President Hollande.

Photo by Maya-Anaïs Yataghène via

In a televised interview on September 9, 2012, François Hollande set a goal for himself: to reverse "the trend in unemployment within a year." But in 2014, unemployment had risen to over 5 million people in mainland France alone. This year, unemployment has gone up again. Young people are hurt most by this trend—one in four French people under 24 are out of work.

Hollande is not yet at the end of his first term, but a big chunk of his supporters on the left—workers, civil servants, and people under 30—feel that he's turned his back on them. Young people and working class voters in areas where support for the Communist Party used to be a given are now collectively voting for the far-right Front National.

French voters on the left feel Hollande has had a socio-liberal change of heart and abandoned his left-wing values—for example, when he canceled €30 billion ($33 billion) in social charges or when he planned a €50 billion ($56 billion) cut in public spending. Voters feel he has been prioritizing support of businesses over supporting the middle classes, further alienating himself from French socialism.

On top of that, Hollande took various controversial security measures after the terrorist attacks in Paris on November 13, 2015. His bill around taking away French nationality from potential terrorists was the most problematic for many within the French left; the same suggestion was made directly after the attacks by right-wing former president Nicolas Sarkozy and Front National leader Marine Le Pen.

Given the anger and disappointment concerning this government's policies, it's no surprise a movement like Nuit Debout has emerged. It's easy to scoff at the theater productions and the drum circles, but at least these people are actually taking to the streets to make their opinions heard. I know too many young people who identify as leftist but who, in reality, are apolitical bums, mostly concerned with their personal development, success, and finances. I'm one of those people, actually. A generation of apolitical bums never changed anything, so it's great news that a new generation is standing up for what they believe. And if that involves some juggling, so be it.

Donald Trump will be the Republican Party's 2016 presidential nominee, which means he could well become the most powerful man on Earth. Given his extreme stances on issues that impact black and brown people (young blacks need more "spirit"), immigration (he wants to build his famous wall to keep out "rapists"), and terrorism (he wants to ban Muslim immigration and possibly put Muslim citizens in a database), it's easy to understand why so many young people are baffled that the divisive real estate mogul and reality TV star's candidacy has made it this far.

Of course, Trump isn't the first modern Republican candidate to lead a mainstream campaign so xenophobic it snagged the support of white supremacists. Back in 1964, Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater was backed by segments of the Ku Klux Klan. The infiltration of white supremacists into the center of the national conversation was no surprise to black nationalist Malcolm X back then, who felt the rise of Goldwater was not some aberration, but instead a reflection of core American values. In fact, in an op-ed in the Saturday Evening Post just weeks before the general election, Malcolm cynically wrote that Goldwater was better than Lyndon B. Johnson, the Democratic incumbent who had just passed the most important civil rights law in US history, because "black people at least know what they are dealing with."

(Both Trump and Goldwater eventually disavowed the KKK, but that did not stop fringe white supremacists from continuing to champion their candidacies.)

According to Zaheer Ali, a scholar and expert on Malcolm X, the 20th-century black icon may well have viewed Trump's candidacy in a similar vein, and might have argued he's just laying bare bigotry essential to American culture. Although it's always a bit dangerous to extrapolate on what historical figures like Malcolm X might say or do in a modern context—something Ali warned me about repeatedly—I think Malcolm's insight can be useful in sizing up what's happening right now in US politics and what the potential presidency of man like Trump means for black and brown people.

If Malcolm X were still with us, he would be celebrating his 91st birthday this week. His life was cut short on February 21, 1965, when he was assassinated by three members of Nation of Islam (NOI), a religious and political movement for which he once served as national spokesperson. Before his death, Malcolm X managed to channel the rage he had over being terrorized by white supremacy, first into crime, then into black nationalism with the Nation of Islam, and finally into a sort of global-minded humanism. It was through those life transitions that he acquired the wisdom reflected in his scathing analysis on the black experience in America.

To properly apply the philosophy and ideas of Malcolm X to the Trump question, I forced Malcolm X expert Zaheer Ali to venture deeper into the realm of conjecture. Here's how Ali thinks Malcolm X might view the positions of prospective presidential candidate Donald Trump in 2016.

VICE: There seems to be extreme anxiety around Trump possibly taking office. In a general sense, what would a potential Donald Trump presidency mean to Malcolm X?
Zaheer Ali: Malcolm X did not view American politics in the same dire circumstances that many of us do today. Malcolm X had transcended his American national identity. He was not an American nationalist—to that extent, he did not feel that his fate rested in the hands of whoever sat in the White House. Malcolm X argued for a transnational identity and movement for black people in the United States. He wanted to shift the black civil rights struggle to a human rights struggle, which elevates it to an international concern. To that end, Malcolm X spent much of the last years of his life abroad. In general, he did not think it was wise for black people in America to hang all of our hopes on the outcome of a presidential election. So it is important to think of his work as transcending the election cycle and the histrionics of an election. To Malcolm X, it was a long game.

OK. So Malcolm X saw white right-wing politicians like Trump as being not all that different from the white politicians on the left, since America is fundamentally a white-supremacist nation. And he didn't think blacks should confine our identity to national politics, since we're in a much bigger struggle. Does that mean Malcolm X might think it'd be a big waste of time to even cast a ballot against Trump in the 2016 election?
Well, he says a ballot is like bullet, and you don't waste your bullets. In other words, he thought people should organize and be very purposeful in how they vote. He thought you should vote, but just remember that voting should not be the only political act that you do. Mobilizing all of our political capital, resources, and power in one election is not a wise political move.

"We need to expand the civil rights struggle to a higher level—to the level of human rights... " —Malcolm X

I guess I've sort of taken for granted the idea that Malcolm X would be in complete opposition to Trump. But there are some things that maybe they'd agree on, like reigning in gun control? Or would he be like many modern black leaders, who want to see more gun control, because of the high rate of gun violence in black communities?
In 1964, he advocated for African Americans to own guns in order to defend themselves when the government had failed protect their lives and property. This is the context for Malcolm X's gun advocacy. So, to the degree that modern advocates of gun ownership rest their argument in the context of self-defense, there might be some convergence.

He would probably be very concerned about how regulations on the Second Amendment are deployed, considering the disproportionate focus and targeting of black communities by the law enforcement. Remember, after Malcolm X was assassinated, we saw the disproportionate incarceration of African Americans. We saw how structural inequality shaped the discourse, prosecution, conviction, and sentencing of African Americans. And a lot of this took place around discourse about stopping gang violence and crime in the black community, an effort some black lawmakers supported. Of course, these black leaders weren't calling for the criminalization of black people. Unfortunately, that is what we got. Because of this criminalization of blackness, I think Malcolm X would be weary of how new gun control laws might be disproportionately enforced in black communities.

"n the areas where the government has proven itself either unwilling or unable to defend the lives and the property of Negroes, it's time for Negroes to defend themselves." —Malcolm X

Donald Trump doesn't offer the same kind of comprehensive plans for fighting structural racism as Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton. But he is a businessman, and his supporters say he knows how to create jobs, something black folks need since unemployment is over twice as high in the black community than in for whites. How do you think Malcolm X would view all of this?
Early on, Malcolm X embraced what he called an "economic philosophy of black nationalism," which he argued was black people controlling the economies of their communities. We know now that this model works most effectively when there's a segregated market that is sort of captive. At the end of the day, black-owned businesses on a hyper local scale are not going to solve unemployment, the high incarceration rate, or disparate wealth and income inequality. Not saying it shouldn't happen—it should happen. The more economic activity African Americans can engage with on any scale is beneficial. But what we need is a structural transformation. And Malcolm X was thinking about that towards the end of his life.

Later in his life, Malcolm grew increasingly critical of capitalism. There is one interview, where he says capitalism and racism are intertwined. So if we really want to address the inequality that black people are experiencing in the US, we have to talk about the way capital is organized, accessed, and distributed. In that respect, Bernie Sanders's ability to highlight that nature of the problem is something that I think is consistent with the kinds of questions Malcolm was raising toward the end of his life.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons. Originally published in Ebony Magazine.

Malcolm X was a Muslim. It's probably very different to be a Muslim in the aftermath of 9/11 than it was in the 1950s and 60s. After all, a big part of Trump's appeal to voters is his so-called tough stance on Islam, since he frames all followers as a potential threat. How do you think Malcolm X would have viewed all that?
When Malcolm X was was well aware how much of a target the convergence of his black and muslim identity made him. He was under FBI surveillance. When he traveled, he believed he was under CIA surveillance. He was targeted because of the way he practiced and preached Islam—it was a way that increased, enhanced, and nurtured his black nationalist politics.

When he was in Mecca, he wrote that he thought Islam could help America in its race problem. Because while he was there, he saw white Muslims, and he saw how Islam could help deconstruct the racial identity that he felt was at the root of social and cultural racism. He thought that if white Americans could adopt Islam, it could break their socially constructed identities as white people, which were an impediment to equality. He saw Islam as an asset to his liberation problem as a black man in America and America's crises with race. So he would have seen the attempts to demonize Islam and Muslims as an attempt to demonize and marginalize and silence something that was beneficial to black Americans and America in general.

Of course, he could not have predicted the rise of extremists who use the religion to commit acts of violence against innocent people. What he would have said in this context, I don't know. But Malcolm X was always critical of the way America exercised its power in the world in ways that created inequalities and imbalances. So he'd probably be critical of America's role in helping foster the emergence of extremism within Muslim communities. I think he would have been very clear in his critique of the American empire. But there is no evidence that he would have embraced the violence perpetrated by someone like ISIS, who hurt other Muslims.

"The economic philosophy of black nationalism is pure and simple. It only mans theat we should control the economy in our community."—Malcolm X

Women aren't crazy about Donald Trump. And for good reason. A recent New York Times piece ran down some of his unwanted or aggressive advances toward women, highlighting his penchant for focusing on physical appearance. He's also perceived as having a sort of 1950s-style patriarchal perspective. And he's known for sometimes being disrespectful to women who challenge him, like Fox's Megan Kelly. Where did Malcolm X stand with women? Was he more woke than Donald Trump?
Malcolm X was not a feminist. But he was moving in a direction of seeing the valuable role women could play in the movement of liberation.

The Nation of Islam's framework for gender was pretty conservative. It was a patriarchy. And I think Malcolm X was, at times, a kind of benevolent patriarch. He felt that black women should be celebrated and black beauty should be celebrated. It was in an objectifying way, but it was done to counter the stereotypes that existed of black people. Black women had to carry the burdens of the community in many ways and had to do so without the support of the men in their lives. They had often been rejected by the men in their lives because of white-supremacist standards of beauty. Malcolm X supported black women by placing them in positions of authority after he left the NOI, and he argued to other international Muslim leaders to do the same. So, he was someone who was always rethinking views and evolving.

One of the things interesting about Donald Trump is that he's given more progressive lip service to LGTB issues than other Republican candidates. He recently said he opposed North Carolina's bathroom law, for example. Of course, he's also (at least this year) against gay marriage and has expressed support for the First Amendment Defense Act, which would allow business to discriminate based on sexual orientation. Where did Malcolm X stand on the gays?
He came out of a political religious tradition that was heteronormative. That said, Malcolm X knew James Baldwin and Bayard Rustin, and he respected them. He thought they had much value to contribute to black people. How much he knew of their sexual orientation is unclear. But I don't think they hid it. What we can say is that Malcolm seemed to be moving to the point where everyone had something to contribute to freedom, justice, and equality. How far he would have gone with that, I don't know. And how that would have come in conflict with his own personal religious ideas, I can't say. There are probably people who would say Malcolm X would be very much against the kind of public legalization and legitimacy granted to LGBT people. But whatever Malcolm X's personal views may have been about LGBT issues, it did not stop him from engaging in substantive and productive interaction with people like James Baldwin and Bayard Rustin.

"A ballot is like a bullet. You don't throw your ballots until you see a target, and if that target is not within your reach, keep your ballot in your pocket."—Malcolm X

As you said, Malcolm X looked at the black experience from a global perspective. And in terms of foreign policy, he was very critical of our interventions across the globe, including the Vietnam War. Donald Trump has this whole American First concept within his campaign. Some people label it as sort of isolationist, as it's supposed to be about about ceasing some of our interventions into the problems of other countries and turning our focus back onto the US. Do you think that's the kind of thing that would appeal to Malcolm X?
To the extent that anyone is talking about reducing America's footprint in the world—and let's be clear, that foot has typically landed on the throat of black and brown people—that is a conversation Malcolm X would have welcomed.

But this is complicated. Because if Donald Trump's view of non-interventionism is coming from a perspective of America First, Malcolm's is coming from a position of Black People First. To the degree that America First aligns with Back People First, cool. But if America First elevates black people within the US, but hurts black people abroad, I don't think that is something Malcolm X would support.

Malcolm X was not interested in Making America Great Again, he wanted to check the growth of the American empire. Trump's isolationism seems born out of a kind of nativism. Whereas the non-interventionism that Malcolm X might have embraced would have been born out of a transnational solidarity with people from other parts of the world.

How do you think Malcolm X would respond to this idea that America was ever great?
He would have appended "for white people" to that phrase. Look at the post-war economic boom in the 1950s. This is the time when America was feeling itself as a superpower. It had been the only nation to drop an atomic bomb, so it had demonstrated its military might. The level of economic activity that the war produced was astronomical. The 1950s are also a point of reference for "the good old days," because Malcolm X's 1960s represents a decade of rupture from that narrative.

The problem is that the 1950s bliss was not enjoyed by African Americans. So if you mentioned making America great again to Malcolm X, I think he would say of course America was great, but not for us.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

All pull quotes taken from Malcolm X's "The Ballot or the Bullet" speech delivered April 3, 1964, in Cleveland, Ohio.

Zaheer Ali served as project manager of the Malcolm X Project (MXP) at Columbia University and contributed as a lead researcher for Manning Marable's Pulitzer Prize-winning Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (2011).

For more information on Malcolm X, check out"The Autobiography of Malcolm X," "Malcolm X Speaks," "Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention,""The Portable Malcolm X Reader."

An earlier version of this article mischaracterized Malcolm X's stance on the private ownership of military grade weapons. Malcolm X was photographed in the 60s with a M1 carbine, which was a military weapon at the time.

Follow Wilbert L. Cooper on Twitter.

At the unveiling of her newest film, a five-years-in-the-making profile of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his key collaborators Sarah Harrison and Jacob Appelbaum, Oscar-winning documentarian, New York Times Magazine cover subject, and alleged enemy of the state Laura Poitras didn 't mince words when asked if there had been friction between her and Assange during and after the shooting of her documentary. "I'm curious as to what your sources are," Poitras shot back at a French journalist, amid rumors of a last-minute recut of the film at the behest of Assange, who is nearing his 2,000th day in the virtual prison of asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. "I'm very supportive of the work they do at the site."

At a sit-down the next day at the Croisette Beach Hotel, Poitras told me that it had taken some finesse to get access to Assange. "It was a long process," Poitras said of her courtship of Assange, whom she initially approached after the release of Collateral Murder in 2010. By that point she was already being tracked by the government, and Assange was taking council not to step foot in the United States. "I was five years into this, I knew I was on some sort of list," Poitras explained. "But once I started filming with them, I started getting stopped every time I was in Europe."

The film, which had its world premiere at the Cannes Directors' Fortnight on Thursday, is a savvy companion piece to her riveting 2014 Edward Snowden doc, Citizenfour. After the Snowden revelation, Poitras envisioned them as one film, but gradually it became clear she would have to bifurcate the projects. Risk follows the work of Assange's outfit from the release of various unredacted state department cables in 2011. Opening with a scene of Harrison calling the US State Department—asking to speak to Hillary Clinton herself about the matter—the film documents the ongoing exile of Harrison, a UK citizen of Australian descent who cannot return to ol' Blighty after helping Snowden find his way to Moscow in 2013, and Assange, who has been holed up the past four years at the Ecuadorian embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden for sexual-assault charges that some feel are a trumped-up way of landing him in US hands. "Julian Assange is a political prisoner who sought asylum," Appelbaum told me at the premiere, "His courage endures."

VICE Talks Film with 'The Look of Silence' director Joshua Oppenheimer

Unlike Andrew O'Hagan's lengthy, less-than-flattering portrayal of Assange last year in London Review of Books , Risk is a relatively kind portrait of the work WikiLeaks has done and the personalities at its center. Partitioned into ten nameless chapters, the movie breezes by a number of the websites' most significant leaks, including the video of US helicopters gunning down journalists that Chelsea Manning helped them acquire, costing the transgender woman her freedom for the rest of her natural life. One bravura sequence takes us to Egypt as Appelbaum, at a tech conference in Cairo the year after the Arab Spring, castigates a panel of Arab ISP executives, claiming that each of them in their own way tried to stifle the Egyptian revolution by limiting internet access and censoring social-media websites. The movie sacrifices a narrative arc for a sort of segmented vignette approach, one that adds up to a fragmented but weirdly satisfying glimpse at the most controversial journalists in the world.

Harrison comes across as a slick yet humane operator, Assange's right-hand woman and increasingly, due to the tentacles of Western justice attempting to bring Assange to heel, the public face of the organization. Shot with the same assured verité that powered Citizenfour, Poitras generates remarkable tension in the sequence where Assange is attempting to gain asylum from a nation with a UK embassy. After Iceland falls through, the Ecuadorians come to the rescue at the 11th hour, just as a police presence arrives outside WikiLeaks' London headquarters, with the intent to capture Assange.

The documentary has moments of levity, too—after the WikiLeaks founder finds his way to the Ecuadoran embassy, he is visited by Lady Gaga, who grills him in an impromptu interview. After haranguing him to switch from the jacket and oxford he'd planned to wear into a "dirty fucking T-shirt"—she candidly inquires, in a sequence dominated by jump cuts, "Do you ever feel like fucking crying?" Gaga, in a stylish black floppy hat, holds her camera mere feet from his face. Assange rebuffs the thought immediately. After years of this high-stakes work, he's ice-cold. Though he cops to still occasionally having such feelings, he lost the ability to cry during puberty.

Assange is trying to stay fit at picture's end, boxing and doing sit-ups, huffing fresh air out of a barely cracked window while his exiled collaborators, who both read prepared statements of solidarity after the screening, continue to be threatened. Poitras too: In the wake of her laudatory American theater-of-war documentaries My Country, My Country and The Oath , she has been on the US Department of Homeland Security watch list since 2006.

As she revealed in her recently closed Whitney Museum installation Astro Noise, Poitras has sued the government to find out details about her case. Risk includes audio of a counter-terrorism official at the FBI's New York Field Office, recorded in secret by a Poitras sympathizer, identifying her as an "anti-American" filmmaker. Which, of course, couldn't be further from the truth. One senses, throughout this remarkable picture, the personal risk that Poitras is taking right along her subjects.

"As far as I know, it's ongoing," Poitras said, referring to the government's secret investigation of her. Risk proves to be a meditation on the costs of bearing inconvenient witness, for both subject and author.

Follow Brandon Harris on Twitter. Read more of his coverage of Cannes 2016 here.