Yeah, this was a weird ruling. Photo via Flickr User Can Mustafa Ozdemir.

The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that a person must actually penetrate an animal or vice versa in order for the act to be considered bestiality.

In a judgement released Thursday, Canada's top court ruled in agreement with a lower court that overturned a bestiality conviction.

The graphic ruling explains the case like this: A man, known in the judgment as D.L.W., tried to make his teenage stepdaughter have sex with the family dog, but that proved impossible, so he spread peanut butter on her vagina and made the dog lick it off while he photographed it. Later, he asked her to do it again so he could make a video.

The judge presiding over the man's first trial ruled bestiality "means touching between a person and an animal for a person's sexual purpose," and penetration isn't required. He was convicted of numerous sexual offences, including bestiality. He was sentenced to 14 years in prison.

But when the man appealed that conviction to the Court of Appeal, he won his case and the bestiality conviction was dropped. The Crown then appealed that decision to the Supreme Court of Canada.

In today's decision, a majority on the Supreme Court upheld the acquittal.

The ruling goes into the history of the crime of bestiality which was once categorized as "buggery" and/or "sodomy" but bottom line, in all cases, someone had to be penetrating the animal or vice versa.

"The term 'bestiality' has a well-established legal meaning and refers to sexual intercourse between a human and an animal. Penetration has always been understood to be an essential element of bestiality." The courts, they ruled, are not in a place to "broaden" the scope of liability for the offence—that's Parliament's job.

"Parliament may wish to consider whether the present provisions adequately protect children and animals. But it is for Parliament, not the courts to expand the scope of criminal liability for this offence."

It points out that although sexual offences against humans have seen many revisions over the years, the definition of bestiality has remained the same.

The dissenting judge, Justice Rosalie Abella, who thought nightmare stepdad's appeal should be dismissed, argued it's common sense to assume that Parliament intended to protect children and animals from abuse, including that which doesn't involve penetration.

"Parliament must have intended protection for children from witnessing or being forced to participate in any sexual activity with animals," she wrote.

"Since penetration is physically impossible with most animals and for half the population, requiring it as an element of the offence eliminates from censure most sexually exploitative conduct with animals."

Camille Labchuk, executive director of Animal Justice, which acted as an intervener in the appeal, told VICE the ruling shows the criminal laws for protecting animals are out of date.

"Sexually abusing animals is completely unacceptable, it is contrary to our values. Canadians care deeply about protecting animals from this type of cruelty and sexual abuse," she said, adding "people who abuse animals often sexually abuse children as well, as the accused did in this case."

In February, Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith introduced a private member's bill to close loopholes and expand Canada's animal protection laws.

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Although the mainstream Mormon Church abandoned polygamy more than 100 years ago, many fundamentalist splinter groups still practice plural marriage across Utah, where it's illegal but not criminalized. One such group is the Kingston Clan, known to members as the "Order," which also runs a set of businesses in Salt Lake City.

On this episode of Profiles by VICE, we meet Joe Robinson, a young man struggling with his recent excommunication from the Kingston Clan. We follow him as he tries to navigate life outside the Order with the help of fellow former polygamist group members and starts to follow his passion as a magician.

President Barack Obama appeared on Hillary Clinton's YouTube channel Thursday to endorse her bid for the presidency.

"I don't think there's ever been someone so qualified to hold this office," the president said into the camera in the three-minute video. He also used her campaign slogan when he added, "I want those of you who've been with me from the beginning of this incredible journey to be the first to know that I'm with her."

Despite the race for the Democratic nomination being "hard-fought," Obama described himself as, "fired up," and ready to "get out there and campaign" for the woman who was his rival for the same nomination eight years ago.

Speaking on Thursday just after a meeting with the president, Clinton's rival, Senator Bernie Sanders, thanked Obama for remaining impartial so far during primary season. Sanders has steadfastly refused to quit the race despite Clinton breaking the nominee threshold on Tuesday that elevates her to the status of presumptive Democratic nominee.

Obama praised Sanders in the video for running "an incredible campaign," and said he was glad Sanders had brought attention to "issues like income inequality and the outsized influence of money in our politics."

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Photos via VICE Du Jour

We meet the bikers in a parking lot behind a strip mall, a predictable landscape of Harleys, leather, and tattoos set against a backdrop of graffiti and train tracks. It initially seems a bit dodgy, until the crew of bikers bring out their stuffed animal mascot.

"Never underestimate the power of a bear," group leader CC Rider told me, clutching the teddy in his skull ring-clad hands. Beside him, a large bald man puffing on a cigar nods his approval.

Rider is the president of the Montreal branch of Bikers Against Child Abuse, an international group of do-gooder bikers whose mandate is to help children. Inside the strip mall, the bikers are about to kick off their monthly group meeting, which VICE was invited to attend.

Founded in Utah in the 90s, the atypical biker gang now has chapters in a dozen countries across the world. The organization was created by John Paul "Chief" Lilly, an American social worker who felt there was a lack of available resources for abused children.

"B.A.C.A. exists with the intent to create a safer environment for children who have been abused. We exist to empower children not to live in fear," Rider said.

But getting people to buy into this message has been a challenge in a province still reeling from the bloody and nearly decade-long 90s biker war. The Montreal chapter is the province's first, but Rider says the interest is building.

The scary reputation, he points out, can be an advantage. "This works because we're bikers, if we were golfers it wouldn't work."

Follow Brigitte Noël on Twitter.

Screencap via YouTube

Read: President Obama Just Endorsed Hillary Clinton

Watch Dogs 2 already "leaked" ahead of its official big-deal reveal at E3 2016 next week, and now comes Injustice 2, the sequel to 2013's DC-superheroes-and-villains beat 'em up Injustice: Gods Among Us, made by Mortal Kombat studio NetherRealm.

Here's its debut, cinematic ("not actual gameplay"!) trailer. It features a lot of characters you know punching and kicking other characters you sort of probably know but care less about. There's Batman. Superman. Supergirl. The Flash. Do people like The Flash? I'm never sure. Is that Aquaman? I'm too used to seeing him in LEGO Dimensions. Anyway, Injustice 2 is promising the biggest roster of DC fighters yet seen in, um, a DC fighting game. Have a look. Lasers!

Now, I get why Batman needs some protection—he's just a man in a suit, famously. Well, a psychopath in leather and rubber. But Superman? The Man of Steel? What does he need to clad himself in metal for? Something, something, Kryptonite, I suppose. I'm not vibing the armor, is what I'm saying. It's too Transformers-y.

NetherRealm's creative director Ed Boon's been bigging up the game, naturally, saying (via Videogamer.com): "In Injustice 2, we are introducing new features that will change the way fans play fighting games. We're always interested in pushing the genre forward and allowing players to customize and level-up their favorite DC Super Heroes and Super-Villains is a significant leap."

It will "change the way fans play fighting games." So, like, how? Are we going to be controlling Gorilla Grodd with our feet? Is the game set to best of five contests by default, rather than the standard three? This kind of vagueness isn't helpful at all, Ed. Now go away and think about what you've done.

Oh, hold on. There's something here about being able to personalize your fighter with different gear "load outs." Does no other fighting game already do that? I mean, surely, one must.

Injustice 2 will come out sometime in 2017 for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, with no official word yet on a PC version.

Read more VICE gaming articles and follow VICE Gaming on Twitter.

The orange seagull before his bath. Photo via Vale Wildlife Hospital& Rehabilitation Centre

A seagull took a nosedive into a giant vat of chicken tikka masala at a food factory in Wales on Monday and came out looking like Meryl Streep doing Trump cosplay, the Guardian reports.

After factory workers fished the cannibalistic gull out from his the pool of chicken curry, they handed him off to the Vale Wildlife Hospital, where he was given a much-needed bath.

"He really surprised everyone here—we had never seen anything like it before." Lucy Kells, a veterinary nurse at Vale, told the Guardian. "The thing that shocked us the most was the smell. He smelled amazing."

Vale workers were able to get the gull back to its natural color, but that delicious curry smell wouldn't wash away. The would-be Moltres has since been handed off to an outdoor aviary, where he can get some R&R before he's released back into the wild.

Apparently seagulls are pretty good at manipulating people into giving them free food and housing, at least when they don't just feel like stealing stuff outright.

Portugal's beaches are mostly known for their white sand, azure seas, and being featured in "Ten Best Beaches of Europe" lists, but when you look closer, not all that glitters is clear Atlantic water bathing in the late-afternoon Mediterranean sun. Portuguese photographer Diogo Andrade traveled the Portuguese coastline from north to south between April and May 2015 to document the other sort of Portuguese beach. The kind that will never be an idyllic summer dream destination, no matter what Instagram filter you unleash upon it.

The result is his series "The Garden," which shows the visual impact of 50 years of human interference on the Portuguese coastline. "It's the story of a country where you build first and think later," explains Diogo. "Where it's more important to make money from building permits, than to spend some on protecting natural areas that are vulnerable to floods and erosion. In Portugal, there's a history of a lack of architectural planning—especially on a municipal level. Economical interests get in the way."

See more of "The Garden" below. You can follow Diogo Andrade on Instagram and check out his other work at his website.

Palm weevil larvae makes a delicious snack. Photo by Andreas Johnsen

When I was in the fourth grade, I had a classmate named Alex. He'd been raised in an African country—I don't remember which one—and being a nine-year-old boy, he took great pleasure in telling us how everyone in Africa ate bugs. On the last day of school that year, Alex brought in what I remember as a cooked worm wrapped in dried leaves, which he said was a traditional snack in Africa.

Whatever it was, Alex didn't have to twist our arms to get us to watch him eat it. Grossing other people out is something of a sport when you're that age, and this topped any of the other stunts from fourth-grade boys. Plus, watching Alex eat the worm seemed like a win/win proposition: If it tasted terrible, we'd get to watch him suffer. If it tasted good, we'd live vicariously through him.

On the surface, BUGS, a new documentary about eating insects, has a similar appeal. The film follows three chefs who travel the world sampling entomological delicacies, from ant larvae to cooked termites. It's not just gross curiosity—chefs Josh Evans, Ben Reade, and Roberto Flore, along with director Andreas Johnsen, are trying to understand the potential of bug cuisine to save the world.

Evans, Reade, and Flore all work with the Nordic Food Lab, a Danish nonprofit that "investigates food diversity and deliciousness." It was started by the head chef at Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant that's been voted best in the world four times, and is known for its experimental dishes.

The Nordic Food Lab started to research insect recipes after the release of a widely-circulated report from the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization in 2013, on edible insects and the "future prospects for food and feed security."

According to the UN, there are several reasons we should look to insects for food: First, they're highly nutritious. Mealworms have roughly the same amount of iron and protein as beef. Greenhouse gases could be significantly reduced by switching to insect farming, too—mealworms generate ten to 100 times fewer greenhouse gases per kilo than pigs. The report also cites population growth and strain on the environment as a reason to look for radical ways to increase the food supply of humans and animals.

The UN estimates that about 1,900 insect species are part of human diets for people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. So the chefs at the Nordic Food Lab posed a radical question: Could eating insects not only be environmentally responsible, but also delicious?

A termite queen served with mango. Photo by Andreas Johnsen

The documentary follows them as they travel around the world—to Uganda, Kenya, Mexico, Japan, Australia, and Italy—tasting local delicacies and experimenting with insect cuisine. The only place someone gets sick is Sydney, where Meade gets food poisoning from a (non-insect) hamburger.

In Uganda, Reade pan-sears a termite queen. Uncooked, the queen is almost entirely liquid, so this hardens it. "It's like God's handmade sausage," he says in the film. The finished dish—served in several delicate bites over a slice of mango—is "luxurious," if you believe Reade.

In Mexico City, Reade and Evans visit Pujol, a restaurant that serves cooked escamoles—ant larvae—inside tortillas. "We don't see these as insects. We see this as food," the restaurant owner explains in the film.

While the chefs make bugs look incredibly appetizing, there's another layer to the documentary—will eating insects help the environment? Just because insects are more efficient than mammals at turning feed into protein, does that make mass producing them a good idea?

The film acknowledges some compelling projects—like a small-scale cricket farm in Kenya, where a few kilos of the bugs can be cultivated and eaten fresh on site. Other projects raise questions about mass-produced insects. In Uganda, the team visits a grasshopper farm that keeps the floodlights turned on all night to attract the insects. The workers don't have eye protection, and after spending a night exposed to the lights, both Evans and Reade wind up in the hospital with severe headaches.

So can eating insects save the earth? Probably not. By the end of the film, Evans points out that mass-producing bugs probably can't solve the world's food shortage. Today's hunger challenges are about access, not quantity. According to the UN World Food Program, the reason people go hungry isn't food shortage—it's poverty, climate change, war, unstable markets, and food waste (the fact that one-third of all the food in the world gets thrown away or wasted).

While entomophagy is not a panacea, BUGS offers another more promising message: Insect cuisine can be delicious, if only we're brave enough to try it.

To find an upcoming screening of BUGS, visit the documentary's website here.

Follow Simon Davis on Twitter.

Kevin Horne knew something was wrong the moment he arrived at Orgreave. It was the 18th of June, 1984 and the miners strike had been underway for several weeks. Horne, a 35-year-old pit worker from South Yorkshire, was a regular on the picket line and had become used to clambering over fences and crossing streams to avoid the police road blocks set up to hamper the striking miners. This morning, however, was different. "The police never stopped us," he says. "They normally stopped us wherever we went picketing. It were very odd."

Parking their car at a nearby estate, Horne and a few friends from the Barnburgh pit made their way towards the picket line. As they approached Orgreave coking plant, looking across the fields, the men caught their first glimpse of the mass of police uniforms, marching up and down in formation with dogs and horses alongside. Horne likens it to an assembled army. "It took our breath away," he says. "At this point we thought, 'Well, we've come this far, we'd better go through with it now.'"

The men made their way to join their colleagues on the picket line. Once there, Horne made his way to the front, where he found himself face to face with a line of policemen. Shortly afterwards, he received a shove in the back and was pushed up against the police line. He was swiftly arrested. "That's when I was put in a bus, along with another couple of lads, and slapped around a bit," he says. By the end of the day, after what came to be known as the Battle of Orgreave, 94 other miners would be arrested on charges of rioting and unlawful assembly.

In hindsight, Horne was one of the lucky ones. Those left on the picket line would find themselves subject to cavalry charges and beaten with truncheons. At Snig Hill police station in Sheffield, Horne watched as others were brought in with blood pouring down their faces, medical attention withheld until it was demanded by solicitors. Exactly what happened that day has always been disputed. Thirty-two years on, the police maintain that the protest quickly boiled over into violence, and they were forced to respond in kind. The miners remember it differently.

It took 27 years for the truth to emerge about Hillsborough. Survivors and the families of the 96 people who died in Britain's worst ever sporting disaster were forced to fight for nearly three decades to make public what they had always known. Finally, after hearing 296 days of evidence from more than 500 witnesses, the longest inquests in British legal history ended in April this year when a jury in Warrington ruled that the victims were unlawfully killed. The fans were exonerated from blame by a verdict that declared supporters had played no part in causing the tragic events of that day.

For South Yorkshire Police, the verdict was damning. The ruling that former chief superintendent David Duckenfield, the man in charge of the police operation that day, was responsible for manslaughter by gross negligence could lead to criminal charges. The jury completely overturned the force's version of events, which had painted supporters as a drunken mob intent on forcing their way into the stadium. In doing so, it revealed a major cover-up operation in the years that followed the disaster, which, along with the actions of compliant media, prolonged the suffering of survivors and the families of those who died.

Growing up in Britain, we are taught from a young age to place our trust in the police. In return, we are told that its officers will serve and protect us. It is an unwritten contract that fundamentally underpins the police's role in a democratic society, and one that many people live their whole lives without any cause to question. Indeed, it is only when the majority put faith in this agreement that the police can properly function. In South Yorkshire, the verdict in the Hillsborough inquests, combined with other allegations of wrongdoing by the same police force, mean that agreement is being tested to breaking point.

The lies over Hillsborough began while the disaster was still unfolding, when Duckenfield told the Football Association that supporters had stormed an exit gate to gain access to the overcrowded terraces. In fact, Duckenfield later admitted he had given the order for it to be opened. Further lies about the fans' behaviour followed and were ruthlessly maintained in the years after the tragedy. The inquests revealed that South Yorkshire Police repeatedly refused to admit its failings at Hillsborough and instead sought to place the blame on those who it was their duty to protect.

For those present at Orgreave five years earlier, none of this came as any surprise. They had already seen South Yorkshire Police's capacity to shape the narrative of events to its own advantage and apportion blame in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. In light of the Hillsborough verdict, fresh concerns are now being raised about a force which has unanswered questions about brutality at Orgreave, has faced criticism over its handling of child sexual abuse cases in Rotherham, and has found itself embroiled in a series of other serious scandals. With each incident, faith in the force is diminished. The question is: At what point does it fall below a level from which it can never recover?

Some suggest that point is perilously close. In a speech on the 27th of April, Andy Burnham, the Labour MP for Leigh, told the House of Commons: "I promised the families the whole truth about Hillsborough. I don't believe they will have it until we know the truth about Orgreave. This force used the same underhand tactics against its own people in the aftermath of the miners' strike that it would later use, to more deadly effect, against the people of Liverpool.

"This force hasn't learned and hasn't changed. Mr Speaker, let me be clear – I don't blame the ordinary police officers, the men and women who did their best on the day and who today are out keeping our streets safe. But I do blame their leadership and culture, which seems rotten to the core. Orgreave, Hillsborough, Rotherham – how much more evidence do we need before we act? So will the home secretary now order the fundamental reform of this force and consider all potential options?"

Others believe the point of no return has been passed. On the day the Hillsborough verdict was announced, John Mann, Labour MP for Bassetlaw, issued a statement: "Nobody should pre-judge ongoing inquiries into the police, but whatever conclusions they reach, the credibility of the institution of South Yorkshire Police has been irreparably damaged. It needs a new identity and more importantly a new ethos and ethics. South Yorkshire police should be disbanded."

The first court case of miners arrested at Orgreave began at Sheffield Crown Court in May of 1985. For the 15 men on trial, the 12 months since their arrest had been a stressful time. All had been charged with riot, an offence which carried a maximum life sentence.

Nevertheless, the miners were occasionally able to see the funny side of proceedings when they descended into farce. Kevin Horne was not one of the men on trial, but would take a day off work every week to travel to court. It soon became evident that many police officers' statements were clearly false. "We had some laughs," he says. "There was a lad from Fyfe in Scotland – nobody could tell a word he was saying – and in the police statement it said, 'What are you arresting me for, I ain't done nowt,' in broad Yorkshire. Another lad, Russell, had a stutter. Apparently he was telling lads to charge. It was all made up."

Sixteen weeks after the trial began, the prosecution's case collapsed. Charges against the 80 other miners arrested at Orgreave were also dropped. Michael Mansfield QC, who acted for the defence and would go on to represent the families of Hillsborough victims, described the case as "the biggest frame-up ever". Six years later, 39 miners would secure a settlement of £425,000 from South Yorkshire Police after suing for assault, false imprisonment and malicious prosecution.

Despite this, neither South Yorkshire Police nor the government have ever acknowledged any wrongdoing at Orgreave. After the event, Margaret Thatcher said the police had been "wonderful" and went on to describe the miners as "the enemy within". South Yorkshire Police would later refer itself to the Independent Police Complaints Commission after a BBC documentary revealed that officers' statements after Orgreave contained identical descriptions of rioting by miners. In June last year, the commission announced it would not be conducting an investigation due to the amount of time that had passed since the alleged events.

For those involved in the strike, the political motivation for a brutal showdown at Orgreave was obvious. Long-term industrial action is now unknown in the UK. Barbara Jackson is secretary at the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign, which is calling for a public inquiry into the incident. She says: "It was to teach people a lesson: if the miners can be beaten, with all their history and solidarity, don't even begin to think you can go out on strike."

READ ON NOISEY: Why Shaun Ryder's "We Are England" is More English than Your Dad With His Shirt Off

As rigorously reported by David Conn in the Guardian, there are striking similarities between South Yorkshire Police's handling of Hillsborough and its alleged behaviour after Orgreave. Just as the Hillsborough inquests revealed that the police sought to divert blame, it is alleged that the same force attacked striking miners at Orgreave, then claimed that the cavalry and baton charges were carried out in self defence. In both cases, the Sun newspaper unquestioningly published the official version of events. And, in both cases, South Yorkshire Police received the unequivocal backing of prime minister Margaret Thatcher.

Once the inquests were concluded, it was revealed that the same chief constable, Peter Wright, and many of the same senior officers presided over the force at the time of both Orgreave and Hillsborough. After Hillsborough, officers were told to file statements on plain white paper rather than using their official notebooks – a significant departure from protocol. It later became clear that many of these statements had been amended to reflect the official version of events. The solicitor who advised South Yorkshire Police on Hillsborough, Peter Metcalf, also defended the force against unlawful arrest claims after Orgreave.

Many see an even stronger link between the two events. Chris Kitchen is general secretary for the National Union of Mineworkers. As a 17-year-old miner he was also on the picket line at Orgreave. "My belief would be that South Yorkshire Police was given permission by somebody higher up in government to do whatever it took to achieve the political aim of defeating the miners," he says. "The problem was, whoever gave that permission that they were above the law forgot to rescind it after the strike. When Hillsborough came along, they thought, 'We were allowed to do it in the past, we need to protect our reputation and make sure there's no fallout.'"

Critics of South Yorkshire Police point to its ongoing efforts to maintain lies over Hillsborough as evidence that, while the senior officers in question may have moved on, little about the force has changed today. Millions of pounds were spent on legal fees during the latest inquests in an attempt to uphold its version of events.

Meanwhile, the force has continued to attract controversy. In 2014, South Yorkshire Police was heavily criticised for failing to adequately investigate cases of child sexual exploitation, most notably in Rotherham. An independent inquiry found that the police "gave no priority to child sexual abuse, regarding many child victims with contempt and failing to act on their abuse as a crime". In February this year, the force was criticised over its handling of a case involving Cliff Richard, after tipping off the BBC and allowing the broadcaster to film a search of the singer's house as part of an investigation into claims of sexual abuse. In May, five men, including both serving and retired officers from the South Yorkshire force, appeared in court accused of misusing a police helicopter to film people naked or having sex.

The day after the verdict in the Hillsborough inquests, South Yorkshire Police chief constable David Crompton was suspended. Police and crime commissioner Dr Alan Billings said there had been an "erosion of trust" in the force and he had been "left with no choice" but to act. South Yorkshire Police now faces further scrutiny over its actions at Hillsborough. A decision by the Crown Prosecution Service on whether to pursue criminal charges, both in relation to the disaster itself and the subsequent cover-up, is expected by the end of the year.

Even Crompton's suspension highlighted the scale of the challenge facing those seeking to restore confidence in the force. Deputy chief constable Dawn Copley was appointed to take over on an interim basis, only to step down 24 hours later after it emerged she was under investigation over her conduct while working for Greater Manchester Police. North Yorkshire chief constable Dave Jones has since been appointed to run the South Yorkshire force until a permanent replacement can be found.

Pressure is now mounting for a full investigation into the police's conduct at Orgreave. In May, a cross-party group of MPs, including Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, wrote to Theresa May, calling for an inquiry into alleged police brutality at Orgreave and urging the home secretary to "seize the opportunity to build bridges between the police and those still troubled by how and whether police forces – ostensibly there to serve their community – were used against one".

Elkan Abrahamson, a lawyer for 20 of the Hillsborough families at the recent inquests, believes a wider inquiry into the ethics of South Yorkshire Police will also be necessary. In addition, he is calling for a new law which would require a "duty of candour" from police officers, making it a criminal offence not to disclose wrongdoing or liability, in an attempt to prevent a cover-up like Hillsborough occurring again.

Responding to calls for South Yorkshire Police to be disbanded, Dr Billings said he believes it would be "too big a step". Chris Kitchen, from the National Union of Mineworkers, believes a full inquiry into the force's conduct is more pressing than symbolic change. "I've heard some MPs saying we need to rebrand it," he says. "It's not rebranding that it needs. It needs a root and branch investigation to find out where things went wrong. What they need to do is look, through a full public inquiry, back to where it started, to go on and correct it from then, and do it in the public eye. So the public can have some confidence that it has changed."

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Dr Billings declined to be interviewed for this article. However, interim chief constable Dave Jones provided a statement in which he said: "Part of the reason why I have taken on this interim role is that I believe that the a duty to help the service in South Yorkshire to move forward. It is vitally important and it is the bedrock of British policing that we have the trust and confidence of the public." Jones acknowledged a common thread linking the force's failings over the years: "There are clear thematic similarities around leadership, culture and institutional defensiveness when challenged. Recognition of this needs to influence how leaders in particular are chosen, trained and held to account going forward."

In May this year, South Yorkshire Police posted a job advert for a new chief constable, a role it hopes to be filled by November. Referring euphemistically to the force's "unique legacy issues", Dr Billings wrote: "You will not need me to tell you that this is a challenging post," adding that the role will require "an exceptional individual to lead the service in building public trust and confidence". Barbara Jackson, from the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign, is sceptical that a candidate of sufficient calibre will be found. "Which talented, young, thoughtful, progressive, high-rising police officer is going to put their name forward?" she says. "It's a big ask."

In the meantime, Jones has backed an "appropriate independent assessment" of events at Orgreave. He said: "My priorities are to engage with staff and communities within South Yorkshire and beyond. I want to understand how confidence in policing has been affected so we can work to build it back up and restore pride in the police service." Looking ahead, he added: "There is no question that this is a very difficult period, both for South Yorkshire Police as an organisation, and for the communities it serves locally and further afield. Nevertheless, I believe there is a strong desire – both inside and outside the police service – for the force to move forward in a positive direction."

It is now 32 years since Kevin Horne was arrested at Orgreave, charged with violent disorder, then forced to wait a year to hear the charges had been dropped. Horne was brought up to trust and respect the police, but like so many others in the mining community, that trust has long been lost. Officers who weren't even born when the battle of Orgreave took place must now work in communities which are unable to forgive the police for its actions in the past.

"They are taking the flack for 30-odd years ago," says Horne. "We need to get to the bottom of Orgreave and the policing of the miners' strike so we can wipe the slate clean." For some, however, the slate can never be wiped clean. Horne knows men who were in their forties and fifties at Orgreave who have since passed away. Some of the younger men, too. "One lad committed suicide," he says. "Another lad lived on the streets, he'd never got over it. Drank himself to death."

Those who are still here continue to wait for answers and, in their absence, mistrust of the police is passed down the generations. Horne has three sons and four grandchildren, the oldest of whom is now 18 and has learned of past injustices from books and her grandfather's stories. It's not a situation Horne takes any pleasure in. "I don't want it to go on to my grandchildren or anybody else's," he says. "Because, at the end of the day, the police are all we've got between us and the bad men. The copper on the beat, he's the only person you've got."

@mark_wilding

Illustration by Ella Strickland de Sousa, via

According to recent Cambridge University research, women are nearly twice as likely to experience anxiety as men. The study, published in the journal Brain and Behaviour, combined evidence of 48 previous studies into disordered anxiety. The results suggest that we might be better able to identify those more at risk of developing an anxiety disorder, and therefore ensure the right treatment options are available. The World Health Organisation says that gender is a "critical determinant of mental health and mental illness", and that common mental health problems like anxiety and depression, "in which women predominate," affect approximately 1 in 3 people.

Does this mean that women are inherently more anxious than men? Not necessarily. It's a bit more complex than that.

In 2016, we can look to science for clues as to why some people experience mental health problems and others don't – such as genetic inheritance or trauma – but we are, at the core of all this research and discussion, talking about the brain: the organ that makes us who we are as individuals, and is still shrouded in mystery. We don't know exactly how it works, even now.

There are sophisticated medical scanning machines and quickly evolving technology that can tell us more about our cognition than ever before, but as any psychiatrist or neuroscientist will tell you, the human brain is enigmatic. So, when discussing mental health conditions, clinicians tend to use the word 'multicausal'. This means that a number of factors are at play when a person develops a problem with anxiety, say; both genetic and environmental. Our brains are sponges, porous to the world. What differs between each and every one of us is our capacity for resilience – how robust the sponge is. Therefore, it's important that we don't just declare women to be categorically more anxious than men. This is misleading and there are other things to consider.

The WHO state that gender-based violence, socioeconomic disadvantage, income inequality and low social status worldwide are gender-specific risk factors for women. The disproportionately high rates of sexual violence that women are exposed to and, therefore, the correspondingly high rates of PTSD following this kind of violence, means that women are the largest single group of people affected by this type of anxiety disorder.

These risk factors don't tell us unequivocally that women are more anxious than men – it explains why women are more represented in statistics, and what our risk factors are.

Take female hormones and the bloody havoc they can wreak on our mental health. Considering around half the world's population has periods at some point, it seems bizarre that premenstrual conditions are so poorly understood and, in many cases, poorly managed. There are over 150 symptoms of PMS, but the exact cause of it is unknown, which can make a woman feel like she's lost in her own Red Sea when she's losing the plot every month.

Research in the overlap between reproductive and mental health is ongoing, but still largely inconclusive. Common theory suggests that the brain areas responsible for regulating emotion and behaviour are studded with receptors for those chemical weapons of mass frustration, sex hormones – oestrogen, progesterone and others – which affect the functioning of neurotransmitter systems. These systems can change women's moods and ways of thinking. If they function differently, we feel differently. It's not clear why some women are more sensitive than others, but they are.

Being predisposed to anxiety and depression appears to have an impact on how our hormones affect us each month. A general rule of thumb is often that if you already have a mental health problem, it may get worse between ovulation and your period. There is also a link between genes and sensitivity to bodily changes, which would include changes brought about by hormones.

According to the National Association for Premenstrual Syndrome, the symptoms of PMDD – a more severe form of PMS that can cause women extreme mental distress – affect 5 to 8 percent of women. That's quite a lot of women. When we consider the power female hormones can have on our minds, being born a woman does seem an obvious risk factor for mental distress. Risk is the key word, though. Being female is not a guarantee of anxiety or depression. Statistics tell us that.

Not every woman suffers mentally each month, so it can't just be about hormones. Another crucial thing to remember is that men and women deal with their problems differently. According to research by Mind, just 23 percent of men said they would visit their GP if they felt low for more than a fortnight, compared with 33 percent of women. Men are statistically more likely to turn to symptom-masking substances like alcohol and drugs. In developed countries, approximately 1 in 5 men develop alcohol dependence during their lives, compared to 1 in 12 women. Women are better at recognising emotional distress and asking for help quicker. Therefore women are more represented in statistics, because more women are seeking help.

Overly simplistic reporting of studies such as the Cambridge University one can lead us to simplistic conclusions. While this Brain and Behaviour study is encouraging in terms of determining who is at risk of developing problems like anxiety, it's crucial that more nuanced conversation is encouraged between the easy headlines. Gendered differences in mental health is a particularly complex issue, and to say that women are more anxious than men is doing such research a disservice.

@eleanormorgan

Eleanor Morgan's book Anxiety for Beginners is out now.

More from VICE:

The Language of Catastrophe: Why We Need to Stop Saying We're Mental

What It Actually Feels Like to Live With Severe Anxiety

Why Mental Health Problems Emerge in Your Early 20s

Barack Obama. Photo via Wikimedia.

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

US News

Obama Renews US War in Afghanistan
The Obama administration has approved plans for airstrikes against the Taliban in Afghanistan and has also granted US forces a wider range of powers to assist Afghan troops. American soldiers have been authorized to accompany local forces on the battlefield again, despite a formal end to US operations in 2014.—The Washington Post

Hundreds Claim Trump Doesn't Pay His Bills
Hundreds of people have alleged Donald Trump or one of Trump's companies refused to pay them. New analysis of court filings and judgments has revealed Trump to have been involved in more than 3,500 lawsuits over the past 30 years, including lawsuits by carpenters, dishwashers and painters, who claim they did not get paid for their work.—USA Today

Stanford Rapist to Get Out of Jail Three Months Early
Brock Turner, the Stanford University student serving a six-month sentence for rape, will serve only half his prison time. According to the Santa Clara County Department of Corrections website, he is to be let out three months before his planned release because "it was assessed that he was unlikely to misbehave behind bars."—VICE News

High Lead Levels Found in Water at 14 Chicago Schools
Chicago school district officials have said that 14 schools had tested positive for dangerously high levels of lead in the water fountains. Some schools have shut down their fountains and brought in bottled water. Parents of the children in the 14 schools will be notified before the list is released.—ABC News

International News

Food Aid Reaches Besieged Syrian Suburb
The first deliveries of food aid since 2012 have reached the besieged Damascus suburb of Darayya. Syrian Red Crescent and UN trucks carrying medicine, food and flour reached the area on Thursday. The UN says the Syrian government had given permission for aid to be delivered to 19 besieged areas, which are home to 600,000 people.—BBC News

Monastery Worker Hacked to Death in Bangladesh
A 62-year-old Hindu monastery worker has been hacked to death in Bangladesh, the latest in a series of attacks on religious minorities in the mainly Muslim country. The killing of Nityaranjan Pande follows the murder of a Hindu priest on Tuesday. Pande's killers have not been caught, and no group has claimed responsibility.—Al Jazeera

Militant Group TAK Claims Istanbul Bombing
The Kurdistan Freedom Hawks (TAK), an offshoot of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militant group, has said it carried out the June 7 suicide bombing in Istanbul which killed 11 people. The group said it was retaliation for Turkish army operations and warned tourists to stay away from the country.—The New York Times

Five Terror Suspects Killed in Kazakhstan Raid
Security forces in Kazakhstan say they have killed five suspects linked to terror attacks on Sunday in the city of Aktobe. The special forces unit stormed an apartment and killed four suspects after they opened fire, and shot another man dead in the street after he opened fire. Islamist militants are believed to have killed three civilians and three soldiers on Sunday.—Reuters

Thousands are expected to come out to mourn Muhammad Ali today at a procession in his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. Photo via Wikimedia.

Everything Else

Louisville Pays Farewell to Muhammad Ali
Thousands are expected to line the streets of Louisville today to wave goodbye to a favorite son, Muhammad Ali. His body will ride in a long procession through his hometown in Kentucky, before being laid to rest at Cave Hill Cemetery, where family and friends will gather for a private burial.—CBS News

Larry Page Funds Flying Car Start-Ups
Two Silicon Valley start-ups are working on a prototype flying car, one that can take off and land vertically, like in Back to the Future. Both Zee.Aero and Kitty Hawk are being personally funded by Google co-founder Larry Page.—Bloomberg

Black Sabbath Announce Last-Ever Shows
The legendary band will play its last-ever US show on November 12 in San Antonio, and the group's final show is set for Sao Paulo, Brazil on December 4. Ozzy Osbourne said touring had taken its toll: "I don't know how the fucking Stones do it."—Rolling Stone

South African Firefighters Leave Fort McMurray Over Low Pay
Around 300 firefighters arrived in Alberta last month to help battle a blaze that continues to rage. But they are now set to return home, angry about only receiving a $15 a day stipend from their South African employer.—VICE News

Done with reading today? Watch our new video 'How One Man Is Dealing with Life After Leaving His Family's Polygamist Cult'

Sonic illustration by Stephen Maurice Graham

This article originally appeared in VICE UK magazine, Volume 23, Issue 4 (June 2016). Find more information here.

Twenty-five years ago this June (the 23rd), Sega's Mario-rivaling mascot Sonic the Hedgehog spin-dashed onto the Mega Drive and immediately became the edgier alternative to Nintendo's popular plumber and pals. From the perspective of today, it might seem hard to understand how a blue hedgehog that looked more like a design you'd find on the side of some cheap sneakers than an actual animal ever qualified as "cool." But the video games landscape of the 1990s was a strange and terrifying place, stocked with side-scrolling platformers starring an array of questionably designed protagonists, predominantly based on some exotic creature or other from a dog-eared Spotter's Guide to the Natural World.

Which makes you wonder how a hedgehog, above any other, more exotic creatures, became the standout character amid a zoological cornucopia of contenders. Playing the original Sonic today, though, makes it abundantly clear how this game stole a march on so many other platform titles of the time, and why it formed the foundations of a franchise that, while not flourishing in the 21st century, remains a presence in gaming's middle-mainstream firmament. From the very beginning of Sonic's development, its makers at Sega's AM8 department—later renamed Sonic Team—placed their gameplay emphasis on speedy traversal, while the character design aimed to mix approachability and aggression. Ideas for vampire-like fangs and Sonic being the frontman of a rock band were ditched, thankfully, but he still bears the mark of pop culture: His red shoes were supposedly inspired by Michael Jackson.

Play Sonic today, the Mega Drive's biggest-selling title, and it's a remarkably streamlined experience, stripped almost bare of the superfluous extras that pepper even today's simplest games. There are collectibles, Chaos Emeralds, to pick up in special stages, and power-ups to temporarily enhance Sonic's defenses and speed. But it's predominantly a pure-and-simple case of racing from left to right, bouncing off enemies and beating a boss—the same Eggman/Dr Robotnik, in a different power-suit/vehicle—at the end of every zone. It's beautiful, Game Design 101 stuff: You press this button here, and fun happens there.

It's a shame, then, that the game's 1992 sequel, often cited as the outstanding game of the Sonic series, over-complicated its stages with confusing pathways and a rhythm-disrupting amount of backtracking. A clutch of its aesthetically vibrant middle zones are spoiled by speed-killing enemy positioning, blind leaps of faith, and cheap deaths by bone-crushing blocks. Sonic 2 is a great game, for the most part, but when I went back to it on a recent flight, via the excellent 3DS version that came out in October 2015, I was genuinely frustrated by obvious shortcomings I don't recall noticing when playing as a kid. Perhaps I had more patience for poor level layout back then, on account of each game bought using scraped-together pocket money and gift vouchers representing a more significant investment than they are today. I stuck it out through Sonic 2 in the 1990s, but I'd not finished it before we'd landed, and I've not gone back to polish that run off since.

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Related: Watch VICE's documentary on British rave culture, 'LOCKED OFF'

Sonic made it out of the anthropomorphized gaming mascot ghetto of the 1990s, and while his games aren't universally enjoyed today, it's worth remembering that hedgehogs only usually live for three years in the wild. At 25, he's well over 300 years old in equivalent human years, so we should forgive him for moving a little sluggishly in Shattered Crystal, and for letting so many game-breaking glitches slip into the retail code of Rise of Lyric. He's almost certainly in his twilight years, and he's earned a rest. Which conveniently affords me a moment to reflect on some of Sonic's peers who didn't make it to retirement age, and so very far beyond.

Sonic's success sparked a flood of comparably zoomorphic avatars featuring in their own releases, ostensibly much the same gameplay wise as Sega's breakthrough, featuring a whole lot of leaping, landing, and enemy lamping. On the Mega Drive itself, Aero the Acrobat (a bat) and Bubsy (a bobcat) in Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind both came out in 1993, made by Iguana and Accolade respectively, looking to cash in while platforming games featuring attitude-laden mascots were in their post-Sonic pomp. Both were decent and enjoyed some commercial success, but neither could step out from the spiky shadow of SEGA's market leader. And so, while sequels followed each debut, both Aero and Bubsy remain relics of the 1990s, with the latter last seen in action during the days of the original PlayStation.

The PlayStation was also home to Crystal Dynamics' Gex series, featuring a TV-addict gecko (obviously), and two Croc games from Argonaut Software, its playable character being, you guessed it, a crocodile. The terrifically titled Awesome Possum... Kicks Dr. Machino's Butt from Tengen saw an environmentally minded marsupial go up against a mad scientist set on world domination, but the late-1993 Mega Drive exclusive was poorly received by critics and didn't spawn any follow-ups. The same is true of Irem's Rocky Rodent, a SNES release of 1993 that only received an official release in Japan and the States. It was a speedy side-scroller featuring a wild-haired protagonist that was unashamed in its Sonic-aping presentation, but it missed a trick in my opinion for not taking its Japanese title worldwide. In Irem's homeland, the game was called Nitropunks: Mightheads. Which, frankly, can't have failed to grab teenage attentions in any branch of Tandy.

All of these Sonic wannabees are best left in the past, but there is one furry hero from gaming's 16bit era that I'd certainly welcome in a DOOM—or Shadow of the Beast-style modern remake. Konami's Rocket Knight Adventures was, come on now, a Sonic-beater in '93, and its sword-swinging star Sparkster, an opossum with a rocket pack, would look perfectly at home beside the revived Ratchet and Clank, in a shiny new PS4 form. I'd much rather that, than another awful Sonic project that jackhammers a fresh hole through his faded reputation.

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

Artwork by Nick Scott

When I was in elementary school, my two best friends were diagnosed with depression and given psychiatric drugs. They were both eight years old. At the time, I was weirdly jealous; I felt like they got more treats than me and the teachers gave them special attention. At one stage, I even made my mom take me to the doctor's, just to check I wasn't depressed too.

When psychiatric drugs first became widely available, it was incredibly rare for a child to be given anti-depressants. But in the last 30 years they have become more readily prescribed—alongside a wide range of other psychiatric drugs—to children and teenagers.

Major depressive disorders currently affect approximately three percent of children between the ages of six and 12, and six percent of teenagers from 13 to 18. Most of those cases aren't treated with pharmaceutical drugs, but according to researchers at China's Chongqing Medical University, the number of young people taking antidepressants for mental health problems is rising in both the UK and the US. In the UK alone, the percentage of people under the age of 19 taking antidepressants rose from 0.7 percent in 2005 to 1.1 percent in 2012.

New research, published in the Lancet, suggests that some of these drugs could be causing more harm than good. According to a new clinical trial on adolescents and antidepressants, most available drugs don't help with mental health problems such as depression, and may actually be unsafe. The trial found that of the 14 most popular antidepressants on the market, only Prozac worked better than a placebo in terms of relieving the symptoms of depression. Another of the 14, Venlafaxine, was associated with an increased risk of suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts.

Professor Penn Xie, a member of the team leading the research, told PA: "The balance of risks and benefits of antidepressants for the treatment of major depression does not seem to offer a clear advantage in children and teenagers, with probably only the exception of ."

With this in mind, we spoke to a few people—now grown adults—about their childhood experiences with psychiatric drugs.

Cady, 20, student

VICE: Why were you prescribed meds as a kid?
Cady: I was diagnosed with PTSD and dissociative identity disorder when I was 16, and went into a hospital a couple of times because of suicide attempts and stuff. I was basically an in-patient from 16 to 18. I was out in the world for like two months in that period of time.

How was that time for you?
It was good. A very safe environment, I guess, but you're obviously very restricted and you don't feel like you're really living, because everyone just continues around you, but you're stuck in a place and you lose track of time.

How did you feel on the drugs that were prescribed to you?
When I was still a child they prescribed me Prozac. It was actually alright, I guess. It took a long time to actually work, and I'm not even sure it did work, because a month later I was still in hospital. When you're on Prozac your emotions are very leveled-out; if you want to cry, you can't cry because it flattens you out a bit, so it suppresses emotions maybe a bit more than it should. I was also on anti-psychotics to level out psychotic experiences. They were supposed to decrease my thoughts, which didn't really work for me as a kid either, and they made me really, really drowsy. The antidepressants made me want to sleep, but with the anti-psychotics, I couldn't get out of bed. I felt like a zombie. Every spare moment I would get between the daily program at the hospital, I would be in bed.

That's quite a weird life for a child. Do you think that had a bad effect on you?
Yeah, because it made me enjoy things less. If I wanted to be excited about something, I couldn't be, because it wouldn't reach that level of excitement because I was brought crashing back down again.

How do you feel about the idea of giving kids the same sort of drugs you were on?
I'm still on anti-psychotics and now they're OK, but when I was younger I was really zombified, and that's not just me—that was everyone in the ward who was on them, so I wouldn't recommend it for younger people.

Bob, 33, advertising

What were you taking when you were at school?
I was on Prozac. I was put on it when I was 18 because I was a wacky guy. I was also on something they don't even make any more called Largactil. There's a song by the band called Amebix called the same thing that's pretty good. Basically, I took too many drugs and I went mental and they put me on Prozac to stop me being so miserable, and Largactil to stop me from having these crazy thoughts. So that's what I was on to begin with.

You were really young when that happened. How bad were things that you needed those drugs?
Well, I was really fucking crazy and I was doing crazy things, thinking crazy things. I had this irrational fear—it's quite hard to describe—but I took loads and loads of ecstasy and smoked loads of weed, and I think it was the beginning of schizophrenia. That's what they told me it was. That was drug-induced, basically.

What sort of stuff would you experience?
For example, I took loads and loads of drugs one weekend, and then on the way to college that morning I had this thought: 'Oh my god, what if I'll only be happy if I become like those cyber goths.' It's a bizarre thing to start a psychotic episode over, but I freaked over that and then I started questioning everything in my life and my entire identity.

I completely credit Prozac with saving my life.

Are you still taking anything for depression these days?
Yeah, I still take Sertraline but that's just because I'm miserable. I'm a year sober in four days, but when I got sober I realized I was still down in the dumps, so I went to my doctor and they put me back on those. It seems to work.

How would you compare taking Prozac when you were still in college to taking Sertraline now?
I think it really helped when I was 18. Like, I think I would probably have done something really bad if I hadn't taken it. I completely credit it with more or less saving my life, really. If I'd been left without medication at that point, I would have been sectioned. They say things like it stifles your creativity and things like that, but I don't believe that's true at all.

So you didn't experience the kind of negative side effects people sometimes talk about with Prozac?
I felt a little bit drowsy, but that was a small price to pay for my own sanity and not feeling like I wanted to throw myself in front of a train. I think it's almost irresponsible to recommend that people stay off these things when they're in a really bad way. Like, saying you should try some breathing exercises or whatever it is. It's going to be a chemical imbalance in your brain a lot of the time that needs to be redressed before you can do anything about the things that have caused your depression or your mental illness, and I really want to hammer that point home. It saved my life and it didn't stifle my creativity. The only things that have stifled my creativity have been illegal drugs and alcohol—they've fucked my life up.

Greta, 20, student

What was going wrong at the time you were prescribed these meds?
When I was little, like 6, I had all these phobias. It got to the stage where it was really bad and I couldn't fall asleep and stuff, so I was prescribed these tablets. I don't actually know the name of them, but I remember what they did.

How did the doctors come to the decision that you needed the drugs?
When I was eight we went to the doctor's and they ran some tests and I had to go to the psychiatrist and they asked me questions throughout that and realized I was exhausted and tired and couldn't sleep, they just prescribed the pills.

What did it feel like when you were on them?
It kind of used to take away all my emotions. Obviously, as a child, you don't understand what's going on. As an adult I feel like that would be really weird for me and that I wouldn't be able to function properly at all in society, knowing that there were things I wasn't experiencing to do with my own brain.

Did they work?
Yeah, they used to make me feel really calm and not feel any anxiety or anything. After three or four years I stopped taking them because everything had gone away.

If you are concerned about the mental health of you or someone you know, get help at the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

A good looking guy who writes about horrible things. Photo Via Wikimedia

The Orenda is an epic, gruesome, gut-wrenching book that opens with a bloody massacre that rivals any over-the-top battle scene in Game of Thrones. Replete with graphic scenes of ritualized torture—limbs are hacked, people get scalped often, bodies are slowly burned at the stake and many, many throats are slit—Joseph Boyden's award-winning historical novel set in 17th century Ontario and Quebec is at turns a violent story of struggle, assimilation, and suffering. The book, alongside Boyden's other works like Three Day Road, Born With a Tooth, and Through Black Spruce, has rightly elicited visceral responses from many Canadians. When The Orendawon the Canada Reads prize in 2014, there was a memorably heated battle between Stephen Lewis and Wab Kinew where the former accused Boyden of going too far in his depiction of historical brutality. The novel also faced criticism for what some called the reinforcement of First Nations stereotypes but there's no question The Orendastirred up a livelier conversation about the realities of our Indigenous communities than we're used to having in this country.

Boyden, who is part Metis, revisited some of those realities in a powerful essay for Maclean's about the recent suicide crisis in Attawapiskat and how the legacy of residential schools has shaped what's happening there. In the piece Boyden talks about how his own earlier struggles with depression and suicide were met with almost immediate assistance, the kind you can only get in this country by living in an affluent urban centre. This tiered class system is one of many ways Canada perpetuates inequality and Boyden tackles that issue with much needed passion.

I met up with him in a drab conference room in the bowels of Greater Toronto to talk about the role artists can play in reconciliation, what constitutes real progress in Indigenous communities and where exactly we go from here.

"You that nigga that can talk," a famous voice softly ribbed me in an airport terminal in 1993.

The whispering pipes belonged to Muhammad Ali, the towering, though visibly shaking, former heavyweight champion of the world. His mischievous eyes still glowed with the wonder of life.

Ali's compliment was far truer of his life than mine. In his golden days, he talked relentlessly, courageously, even dangerously, about black folk and racial injustice in America. And of course about how great and pretty he was.

Ali's boasting was a proxy for group assertion at a time when such a thing was wildly unpopular. His words echoed the desire for black folk to be confident in their self-worth. Black men were especially drawn to Ali and wanted to be just as unapologetic as the champ in voicing black pride. When he rhymed, we rhymed too, believing that we could spit homespun verse to proclaim our majesty. We too could "float like a butterfly and sting like a bee." We too could "rumble, young man, rumble." We too could say that we "shook up the world."

I met Muhammad Ali for the first time a year before our airport encounter. I'd been invited to participate in a 1992 symposium on his life at Miami University of Ohio that featured talks by eight thinkers and scribes, including renowned sportswriter and Ali biographer Robert Lipsyte. I was still a graduate student and just grateful to be in the room with the champ and a few other folks to parse Ali's complicated legacy in several no holds barred sessions. In my talk, "Athletes and Warriors," I reflected on Ali's verbal art as a way to fight racism and to define black manhood. I also imagined him as a poetic forerunner to hip-hop.

Ali twisted language to suit his pugilistic purposes and transformed the political grammar of black identity. The surface structure of Ali's brashness pointed to the deeper structure of his quest for black self-respect, and ours too.

Hip-hop great Jay Z captured this idea when he said that "Muhammad Ali is one of my heroes because when he was saying, 'I'm pretty,' he was saying that to all of us, he made all of us feel like we were pretty. 'I'm pretty, I'm a bad man, I'm pretty.' You gotta figure this was a time when we were considered ugly, so he wasn't saying that as a boast to walk inside the ring, he was saying that as a boast for all of us."

Jay Z is right. For most of our history, black folk were viewed as ugly creatures who lacked European charm and beauty. Black folk were considered biologically ugly, too—we were a race that drew from the genes and chromosomes of an impure species. Black folk were morally ugly, too—soulless savages seeking to satisfy appetites without higher purpose. And black folk were seen as mentally ugly, too—intellectually inferior beings incapable of divining life's deeper meanings. Ali, like the best rappers, was speaking against that as best he could.

The charm and magic of Ali's incantatory street doggerel is the way it permitted him to call down on Earth the gods of our self-making and our bold self-loving.

Ali blazed the path for hip-hop artists, placing vernacular speech in the service of truth, though such speech is always at first seen as a mockery of taste and pedigree. That's true whether the art in question is the sorrowful songs of the slave plantation, the blues of the urban enclave, or the rap of the concrete jungle. Such views didn't just come from black cultural outsiders; they sprang from native speakers as well. Because reading and writing for enslaved blacks was a matter of life and death, it has often compelled black elites and others to favor highbrow instead of gutbucket literacy. Ali, like the rappers who came behind him, fought racial denigration outside black culture and faced class disdain from within.

The truths he told were raw and blunt, for instance, that black folk hated our broad noses and big lips. But Ali knew those noses were made to whiff the sweet scent of self-love, and those lips, which contained a beauty large enough to swim in, were meant to proclaim our beauty and greatness. The charm and magic of Ali's incantatory street doggerel is the way it permitted him to call down on Earth the gods of our self-making and our bold self-loving.

Ali's speech could not be separated from his spirit, his tongue from his temple of worship. When Ali announced to the world that he would no longer answer to his slave name of Cassius Marcellus Clay, a name that rolled off the tongue in near alliterative euphony, but that he would instead adopt a name bestowed on him by the leader of a black religion, he certainly "shook up the world" as he had when he battered heavyweight champion Sonny Liston. Ali stood in for every black man who has had his sanity questioned for refusing to pray the way he was taught to pray by those whose gods and rituals that were meant to undo us by containing and deflating us.

Photo by Ira Rosenberg via Wikimedia Commons

Of course, Ali wasn't always perfect, especially when he sucker punched an opponent with the very ideas he meant to defeat. Like many black men who surrender to the temptation to become oppressor for a day, Ali occasionally did the white man's work for him, like when he viciously painted Joe Frazier as a racial sellout during the buildup to their third, most consequential battle in the Philippines in 1975.

Ali taunted Frazier with his most derisive rhymes ever, proclaiming on national television, as he playfully pummeled a toy primate, "It's going to be a thrilla in Manila when I kill that gorilla." Ali was a 6'3" light-skinned black man in a world that agreed with his self-proclaimed handsomeness. Frazier was a 5'11" dark-skinned black man who was widely viewed as anything but pretty. Ali's heartless attack on Frazier couldn't be merely seen as his usual attempt to get inside his opponent's head. The racial enemy that Ali had so brilliantly resisted, even truculently disputed, remained inside his mind; and in his psychic bloodstream flowed color specific stereotypes that temporarily suppressed his immunity to black self-hate. Ali projected onto Frazier's chocolate body the nation's sacramental disdain for darkness that is religiously transmitted in its catechism of colorism. That so many black men remain color-struck in who we love and dislike suggests that Ali's bitter ignorance 40 years ago still burns in our brains and bodies.

Although we didn't speak of his ugly offense to Frazier at the symposium, Ali did admit error in dealing with Malcolm X, about whom I would publish a book two years later. "I was wrong about him," Ali gently confessed to me about the man largely responsible for inspiring his conversion to Islam. After Malcolm fell out of favor with Nation of Islam head, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, a chorus of voices within the religious group dubbed Malcolm a traitor and left him vulnerable to some members' murderous rage. Ali turned his back on Malcolm too, a decision he later regretted. It is sad that black men can't sometimes disagree without fatal consequences, whether in the streets where we often meet our ends at one another's hands or in more polite circles where we thrash one another with unkind words that separate us from former friends, a bitterness I have unfortunately tasted. Malcolm died before Ali could seek his forgiveness, a reminder that our egos may out outlast our impulse to acknowledge wrong and embrace reconciliation.

If Ali didn't reconcile with Malcolm, white society managed to reconcile with the former champ. Ali had exulted in unpardonable blackness by embracing a black God and displaying unquenchable loyalty to black folk by loving his people unceasingly and without apology. He developed a grassroots calculus of white offense against blackness and produced a patchwork framework of demonology that drew from the Nation and the black power struggles that he both inspired and absorbed. Ali reveled in valiant blackness, a courageous moral and philosophical argument that black life be treated with dignity and respect. He presaged our contemporary Black Lives Matter practice of both naming and resisting black animus while linking such gestures to practical politics. It's not that Ali was versed in Sun-Tzu, or Von Clausewitz, or Frantz Fanon in warring against the strictures and structures of white supremacy. His was surely an intuitional rebellion, a matter of saying what he in his gut knew to be wrong, but his actions were also connected to broader freedom struggles in black America and throughout the black diaspora where he was madly loved.

When Ali made war on war, and held out as a conscientious objector against the bloodbath in Vietnam, he offered black folk and other allies a lesson on how to link local and global forms of oppression, saying that his conscience "won't let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America. And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn't put no dogs on me, they didn't rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father... Shoot them for what? Just take me to jail."

Ali was even more forceful about the link between domestic and international racial terror and colonialism and oppression, when he declared that "I'm not gonna help nobody get something my Negroes don't have. If I'm gonna die, I'll die now right here fighting you, if I'm gonna die. You my enemy. My enemies are white people, not Viet Congs or Chinese or Japanese. You my opposer when I want freedom. You my opposer when I want justice. You my opposer when I want equality. You won't even stand up for me in America for my religious beliefs, and you want me to go somewhere and fight, but you won't even stand up for me here at home."

Shedding tears over Ali's death while ignoring the tears of those who suffer today soils Ali's heroic legacy; extolling Ali's courage as a spokesman for truth while pillorying those who dare tell the truth now is a rejection of Ali, too.

It is not that Ali matured and gave up his ferocious social conscience as much as America caught up to his progressive ideas—at least on the question and costs of the Vietnam War, and to a lesser degree, on the racial crises at home. But the country has yet to acknowledge the link Ali drew between racial injustice at home and war abroad, in which people of color are, as Malcolm X put it, "the victims of democracy." Ali boldly built his views about what was happening in any number of "over there's" with a strict attention to what was happening "over here." "Here" and "there" mattered because their different geographies didn't exhaust the common ideologies that underlay their misfortunes. Ali challenged America to face up to its political hypocrisy and to acknowledge its moral shortcomings as the common point of reference in any serious discussion of war and race on both shores.

If Ali didn't come over to America's side as much as the nation warmed up to his view of things, Ali's image changed, too. He went from troublemaker to peacemaker, from rebel to saint. That change had as much to do with political and social amnesia—America often forgets what it seeks, or fails, to defeat—as it did with the admission that Ali's vision of America was more compelling, freer, truer, more capacious than the cramped vision of white racial nationalism. Like the great thinkers and leaders who preceded him, from Du Bois to Paul Robeson to King to Malcolm, Ali's embrace of the world's beleaguered and downtrodden masses forced the nation to come to grips with its foul treatment of its own citizens of color. Thus, like those figures, Ali's insistence that America do the right thing was far more loyal to the nation's ideals than those figures who savaged the once deposed champ in the name of American patriotism.

For many of his admirers, Ali's transition from pariah to prophet, from scourge to icon, stands as a sharp contrast to his previous radical political activism. For them, Ali's criticism of the nation seems to have given way to his embrace of America. That is far too simplistic a conclusion. The progress the nation made toward the ideals Ali fought for opened up space for him to fight injustice in a far less volatile environment. As America caught up to Ali's political vision, it pushed closer to a redemptive core: Humanitarianism is not the not a substitute for justice, but may be one measure of its fulfillment.

Photo by Trikosko, Marion S. via Wikimedia Commons

This should be kept in mind as contemporary expressions of black radicalism and social resistance are often unfavorably compared to Ali's post-60s humanitarian efforts. Such a vexing pivot depends on denying the value of Ali's earlier radicalism, and ignoring how his embrace of black love and black politics forged a path toward progressive humanitarianism. A humanitarian emphasis should be tied to black struggle, and when the two are opposed, it distorts, or even erases, the very politics that make humanitarianism possible. Those who profess to love Ali but despise current black protest—against police brutality, against voter suppression, against environmental racism—fundamentally misunderstand his political vision and moral sophistication.

A few prominent examples suggest how those distortions work. As long as LeBron James played basketball with a smile on his face, he was celebrated, and his charitable efforts in the community were lauded. Yet when he argued that racism played a role in the fevered responses to his leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers for the Miami Heat a few years back, he was sternly taken to task, just as he was criticized in some quarters for tweeting out a photo of his Miami Heat team donning hoodies in solidarity with the fallen black teen Trayvon Martin. When all pro cornerback Richard Sherman quietly played his position, he was hailed, but when he said that calling him "thug" because of his demonstrative on-field behavior was a euphemism for the N-word, he was lambasted. Beyoncé is embraced as a global icon of black genius when she performs, but when she spoke up about police brutality and defended the Black Lives Matter movement, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani pounced on her and some police departments swore not to protect her as she toured. Shedding tears over Ali's death while ignoring the tears of those who suffer today soils Ali's heroic legacy; extolling Ali's courage as a spokesman for truth while pillorying those who dare tell the truth now is a rejection of Ali, too.

The price Ali paid for his moral courage was steep, including the sacrifice of riches and reputation, and the loss of time to be able to perfect his craft at the height of his transcendent and luminous powers. But the price to his body for his stubborn persistence in the fight game was incalculably grave. Ali's physical courage in the face of debilitating disease goes far beyond his athletic valor—as great as that was. His management of disease was a metaphor for black men trapped inside stifling bodies of belief as they seek to negotiate their existence with a measure of grace and dignity.

As much as he meant to the world, what he meant to black men can never be measured in merely physical acts alone, but in the imperishable realm where his style of fight and speech were gifts that linger far beyond his mortal disappearance.

In encounters I had with him, Ali performed magic tricks, nearly in defiance of the unmagical, thudding literalism of the decline he suffered in his physical and motor skills. Despite the withering diminishment of the physical gifts for which he was known, and the silencing of the tongue that once flamed with timeless truths, Ali soldiered on and held fast to his beliefs—that Islam brings peace, that blackness brings greater humanity, that protest and resistance bring greater justice.

But then America has always been in love with change in reverse, in the safely settled past, not the dangerously changeable present. We prefer our heroes dead or quiet. Ali's silenced tongue surely hurried him into an iconic space that may have been impossible for him to occupy should he have been able to continue to raise his voice against the injustices he spotted. Because the physical idioms of his expression were severely limited, because his fiery declamation was laid waste to by the siege of decline, Ali was forced, instead, to inhabit relative muteness and transform it into an eloquent expression of his humanity—one where suggestion and inference form a grammar of moral communication.

Ali's magic feats were a delightful distraction for us both, but his far greater magic was the relentless pursuit of good in the midst of unimaginable suffering. In that sense, he represented the greatest achievements that black men have conjured when facing odds that most might not survive. As much as he meant to the world, as much as he belonged to that world, what he meant to black people, and to black men most of all, can never be measured in merely physical acts alone, but in the imperishable realm where his style of fight and speech were gifts that linger far beyond his mortal disappearance. That may be Ali's greatest magic act of all.

Follow Michael Eric Dyson on Twitter.

Over the past seven days, America witnessed seven mass shootings that left six dead and 23 wounded. These attacks bring the US mass shooting body count so far in 2016 to 118 dead and 466 injured. That means that this year's American mass shooting death toll already exceeds that of the 1981 collapse at the Kansas City, Missouri, Hyatt Regency Hotel, a tragedy that left 114 dead and 216 injured in one of the worst structural failures in US history.

Meanwhile, Europe suffered one mass shooting over the past week: On Sunday, an argument between two groups of young men outside a restaurant in the Moscow, Russia, suburb of Mytischi escalated into gunfight that left four injured. The shooting brings the continent's body count in such attacks this year up to 20 dead and 70 injured.

This week's bloodiest American mass shooting struck on Sunday as well: Just before 10:30 PM, 28-year-old Daterryn McBride opened fire in a Motel 6 lobby just off the interstate in Phoenix, Arizona. He ultimately killed a guest and employee, wounded another hotel worker in the lobby, and injured two more individuals in a truck in the parking lot who were attempting to flee. McBride followed up this semi-public and at least partially random attack by carrying out two carjackings and a kidnapping and leading police on a highway chase before finally shooting himself in the head; he died of his wounds on Monday.

A less deadly shooting ultimately garnered more national and global media attention, though: At about 1:15 PM on Wednesday, an unknown shooter killed a 17-year-old student, injured two more teens, and grazed a 67-year-old woman near a high school in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston during a fire drill. The attack was carried out in a crowd of students in broad daylight.

Both incidents had elements that usually draw significant media attention: they occurred in fairly public locations and felt random. It's unclear whether any of the victims knew the shooters, but from an initial public vantage they seemed like incidents of stranger-on-stranger violence.

Certainly, they were both more "exceptional" than this week's other, more routine American mass shootings: At about 8:15 PM last Friday, a shooting at a home in Denver, Colorado, ultimately left three dead and one injured—the deadliest shooting in the past seven days, albeit a very opaque incident. At about 2:30 PM on Sunday, a street shooting in Brooklyn, New York, left four injured. Then, at 9:20 PM, another street shooting in Minneapolis, Minnesota, injured four more. On Monday at about 12:45 AM, a shooter fired into a SUV outside of a bar in Visalia, California, wounding four more. Finally, at about 4:20 PM on Wednesday, a man carried out a targeted shooting on a street corner with a history of violence in Washington, DC, injuring four.

These incidents—especially the last one—largely involved individuals, settings, and patterns to which the public has become accustomed and that do not seem particularly newsworthy to national outlets.

Boston seemed to get the bulk of the attention at least partly because it occurred near a school and involved young people. As Jaclyn Schildkraut, a specialist on media coverage of mass (and especially school) shootings at the State University of New York—Oswego, tells VICE, schools are usually totemic locations, seen as repositories of "worthy victims." This wasn't the first shooting on or near a school this year, but it does appear to be the first mass shooting directly associated with a school, which makes it noteworthy. And it likely doesn't matter that the shooting occurred outside of the school; although there's no dedicated research on the subject, Schildkraut suspects it doesn't matter where in relation to a school a shooting occurs—so long as it involves a crowd of students and is associated with that venue, it will draw attention. The level of attention thereafter is usually determined by the extremity of violence involved and the ultimate body count in the event.

Although the Phoenix attack was ultimately more extreme and deadlier than the Boston tragedy, Schildkraut points out that elements of that incident probably negated its media salience.

"The perpetrator an ex-convict," she tells me. "There may be a tendency to discredit the severity of the violence since the perpetrator has a record... When there is a pattern of crime, it seems to diminish the importance of a single event."

Between the multiplying effect that the word "school" has in drawing attention to shootings and the mitigating effect that the mention of a convict can have, it makes sense that the less deadly and murkier of this week's two most notable US mass shootings might draw the lion's share of attention. Such logic belies the hierarchy of care American media routinely manifests when it comes to mass gun violence. Fixating on schools is logical: It is particularly tragic when young lives are cut short or severely disrupted. Allowing that tragedy to hang so high and heavy that it eclipses other major incidents of violence is a shame, though, as it does a disservice to the broader spectrum of victims and makes America's grinding epidemic of large-scale gun violence seem narrower than it actually is.

In order to seriously address mass shootings, we have to keep a spotlight on all of them, confronting ourselves with the true magnitude of the tragedy, rather than indulging in a focus on exceptional cases that seem especially worth of our time.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

If one thing is clear after this week's primary races, it's that Americans are in for a brutal summer and a horrible fall. The 2016 general election is going to fill the country with a negativity that will suck the life out of us, and perhaps inflict lasting damage on the country's political system.

On one side, there is Donald Trump, the reality-television tyrant who became the Republican nominee on a wave of support from angry, white men, tapping into their racial anxiety and feeding their egos by giving them common enemies to attack. His campaign has an almost apocalyptic subtext—a message that the world is coming to an end, for white people at least, and that Trump, like some Fifth Avenue William Wallace, is the only one who can save it.

On the other side, Hillary Clinton is running an almost Seinfeldian campaign that hasn't seemed to be about anything, other than the campaign itself. Unlike Trump, the presumptive Democratic nominee has real policy ideas—but there's no broader mission behind her candidacy, no sense of purpose higher than Clinton's own advancement, which she justifies with her deep political knowledge and experience.

But nature abhors a vacuum, and so it has provided Clinton with a galvanizing issue that makes her campaign about something bigger: The idea that she alone can save America from the coming Trump apocalypse. In short, both sides want voters to feel as though we're teetering on the brink of the end of the world. It sure feels like we are.

For Clinton, this means she has to attack Trump—a lot. In a national security speech delivered in San Diego last Thursday, she came at him hard, attacking his temperament, his hypocrisy, and his basic understanding of the world. "This is not someone who should ever have the nuclear codes," she said, "because it's not hard to imagine Donald Trump leading us into a war just because somebody got under his very thin skin." In a biting, sarcastic tone that suggested she's decided not take Trump seriously as a leader or a thinker, Clinton dismissed his foreign policy ideas as "not even really ideas, just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds, and outright lies."

After effectively winning her party's nomination Tuesday, Clinton leveled a similar missive of personal attacks, denigrating Trump's character and highlighting his long history of racist and sexist remarks. As the race moves forward to the general election, we can only expect much more of this. "Donald Trump is temperamentally unfit to be president and commander in chief," she told a crowd at a victory rally in Brooklyn. "He has abused his primary opponents and their families, attacked the press for asking tough questions, denigrated Muslims and immigrants. He wants to win by stoking fear and rubbing salt in wounds. And reminding us daily just how great he is."

Americans always say they want elections to be about policy, but usually, we get a personality contest. This year, though, we're in for a barroom brawl. There's little value in attacking Trump on policy—his major proposals are like congressional fan fiction, so for Clinton to tangle with them would be pointless. His campaign promises—that he will build a wall between the US and Mexico, ban Muslim immigrants, and generally make America so beautiful again—exist only to frame him as tough and binary. Clinton is right to understand that she gains little from deconstructing these ideas, and more from character attacks that make Trump sound like a dangerous lunatic.

Of course, character attacks are among Trump's favorite things. He responded to Clinton's speech last week with gleeful trolling. "Bad performance by Crooked Hillary Clinton!" he tweeted. "Reading poorly from the teleprompter! She doesn't even look presidential."

You can already see how their pas de deux will go: She will point out his character shortcomings, and his racism, and he will respond by calling her names. Then he'll launch into an attack on Clinton's age, or the way she walks, or her husband's extramarital affairs. As NBC's Chuck Todd reported, the two candidates did not publicly congratulate each other on wrapping up their respective party nominations this week, a customary courtesy at this point in the race.

But how could they? Clinton claims Trump is fundamentally unfit to be president; Trump says Clinton belongs in jail. It's the beginning of a low-down, muddy campaign that will pump venom into our democratic system, and likely drive people to hate politics even more than they already do.

All this is further complicated by the way the candidates are exploiting the racial demographics of their supporters. On one side, Trump's coalition is overwhelmingly white, and it seems like his campaign strategy will be to drive up turnout among these voters. Clinton's coalition, meanwhile, is multiracial—she performed well in primaries where black voters accounted for more than 10 percent of ballots cast, and also enjoys strong support among Latinos.

While recent presidential elections have had similar racial undertones, the divisions in seem to be more insidious, and potentially dangerous, this election. That has become increasingly clear in recent weeks, as Trump doubled down on his racist attacks against the federal judge in a suit involving Trump University. Despite pleas from other Republicans, the candidate continues to refer to the judge, Gonzalo Curiel as "Mexican," even though he is an American born in Indiana. Trump believes Curiel's Mexican heritage "proves" he is biased against Trump.

Trump is referencing a perception that people of color know well—that race is somehow proof that you are less capable than your white male peers, who are automatically assumed to be competent. He's also touching on the idea that the judge's background somehow makes him different from other Americans—and that Trump's white, European ancestry doesn't create its own bias.

From the start, his campaign has been full of comments that would have instantly disqualified virtually any other presidential candidate. But for a man who has cast himself as a champion of white men, the remarks are a feature of his campaign, not a bug—they are central to his appeal.

Clinton and her surrogates have predictably deployed this as a line of attack, seizing on Trump's racism and bigotry as a powerful tool to turn out black and Latino voters she needs to win a general election. This will, of course, make the race even nastier. But the effect will also go beyond that, making the election about whiteness, and the deployment of it. On one hand, Trump is using his whiteness as a weapon to mobilize people; on the other, Clinton is deploying hers as a tool to prove her competence, and to underscore her power to help others.

A racialized campaign like this is likely to unearth some deep pain and tensions about race in America. It will pit black and Hispanic people who still feel left out of the American dream against whites concerned that the country's rapidly shifting demographics will strip them of their economic power and social privilege.

As we head into the general election, voters will increasingly be at odds, drawn into public arguments ignited by the candidates they support. Even worse, given the country's growing political polarization—and the fact that voters face a choice between the two least-liked major party nominees in history—half of the country will simply reject the outcome, no matter who wins. The result, I fear, will be an election that leaves scars on the national soul—an election in which the only sure loser is America.

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What the face of TV justice. Photo via NBC.

In the Law & Order: Special Victims Unit-verse the Stanford rapist is quietly weeping in his cell right now; trying to imagine what the next nine years in federal state prison have in store for him. Oh sure, things looked dire for a few minutes when the star witness slipped up during an intense grilling by a particularly evil defence attorney ('sup Jeffery Tambor!). Great, another rapist about to get off... But wait, what's this? Could it be a deus ex machina in the form of an email landing in Det. Tutuola's inbox: video footage from the frat party showing Vance (or Todd? Bentley? Chad?) shoving a funnel down an already passed out woman's throat before proudly proclaiming to his frat bros "I'm gonna rape this chick so hard cos she is so drunk and I don't care about women!!!!!!" followed by joyous cheering and many high fives. Piece of shit never stood a chance.

Welcome to the world of SVU—an extremely satisfying procedural crime show that dramatizes all of your most paranoid thoughts. You know, the ones you have when you're walking home alone at night and someone pops out from behind a car and you have a minor heart attack because for all you know he could be the Raincoat Rapist or the sex stabber. SVU follows the the crack team of sex crimes detectives who work diligently to put those monsters away.

SVU is currently in its 17th season, which translates to approximately 272.3 hours of sexual assault-based television. Last season drew in, on average, 6.895 million viewers making it the fourth most popular show on NBC. And I wouldn't be surprised if three-quarters of the SVU viewership are women because what I've come to learn, as a new fan of the show, is that women love SVU. Do a quick Google search and you'll find Buzzfeed listicles like "24 signs you're totally obsessed with Olivia Benson" or "7 reason why women love binge watching SVU and why that's OK" It's our fucked up comfort food. It'd be like if men watched... oh right, there is no SVU equivalent for men. Unless there's a show about a superhero chasing a pair of sentient scissors that goes around cutting off innocent penises? But then again they probably wouldn't tune in.

So why the hell do we love watching SVU?

Here's one popular theory: SVU offers viewers an alternate reality where sexual assault survivors are taken seriously and justice is obtainable thanks to a crack team of well-trained detectives, each one fluent in the language of sexual assault. This is especially satisfying in their ripped-from-the-headline episodes. The Jian Ghomeshi SVU stand-in is currently locked up thanks to a particularly feisty courtroom sequence where Assistant District Attorney Rafael Barba had the bad man demonstrate his bondage technique on him.

It was completely unhinged and incredible. I'm pretty sure I yelled: "Fuck yes motherfucker!!!!" at my TV. Pure, visceral joy, or the exact of opposite of how I felt when the real life Ghomeshi verdict came in and left me, and countless others, feeling depressed and angry.

When I spoke to Andrea Braithwaite, a professor of communication and digital media studies at University of Ontario, about this, she suggested that perhaps women are drawn to true crime shows like Law & Order because they offer lessons and survival techniques. "It gives you an idea of things to keep your eyes open for. Possible options you can take. Possible resources that you have in potentially threatening or dangerous situations," she said. SVU lets us prepare for the worst-case scenario. It's like a how-to guide for dealing with the bridge dwelling ogres of the world. Which is fine, except for the fact that most sexual assaults are rarely so clear cut. Instead, as we well know, they're complicated affairs often occurring between two people with preexisting relationships.

I interviewed Toronto-based writer Jade Blair whose recently-published story in Hazlitt discussed the serious problem with preconceived notions surrounding sexual assault: "It's really cool that the show takes the position that this thing happened and everyone in the police believes it," she told me. "But to make it believable to the viewer you have to see it happen and that's just not how it is in real life. These are things that happen in the dark alone."

The fact is that SVU doesn't bother with nuance because it can't. It's a TV show on a major American network that has a mandate to be popular. With that in mind, it's hard to imagine viewers tuning in for a six-episode arc about a date rape occurring in the privacy of a bedroom between two people who had just been out on a date, and the subsequent he-said-she-said, and maybe there was booze, and did I mention she texted him after, and it took her six months to disclose what happened to the police. That's just not "good TV." To wit, the six-episode arc about the sadomasochist rapist murderer William Lewis were some of the most watched episodes in the history of the show. Because, as Braithwaite put it so nicely: "America really likes to watch women get beaten."

So yeah, it's not hard to find problems with SVU. Most episodes open with titillating depictions of brutal assaults that leave you wondering what the hell anyone in the writing room was thinking. In one particularly nightmarish opening sequence (Season 16, episode 11), over the course of two and a half minutes we see a young woman in a cab on her way to a date. Cut to the same woman being stuffed into a suitcase and wheeled through the hotel and dumped onto the street. The entire scene unravels as "Let Her Go" by Jasmine Thompson plays (worst music video ever?) How's that for objectifying women! She's literally luggage. But as any SVU viewer can attest to, it's par for the course. I'll never forget the time I said to my clearly disturbed boyfriend: "What's the matter? It's like you've never seen an online child pornography ring before?" To be fair, I was five episodes deep into a binge when I said it.

Read More: We Talked to a Director About the Cultural Obsession with Hot Murdered White Women

The thing is, SVU actually does have a positive affect on viewers. Stacey Hust, an associate professor at Washington State University, lead a study on the effect SVU has on its viewers, specifically in regards to consent and rape myth acceptance, and what she found was pretty incredible.

"We decided to look at whether or not Law & Order was different. Whether people who watched Law & Order responded differently to sexual consent questions than those who watched other crime dramas mainly CSI and NCIS. And what we found is that they do," she told me.

But it went further than that: "Individuals who watched Law & Order were also more likely to refuse unwanted sexual activity and they were also more likely to adhere to their partner's decision related to sexual consent. And so this was beyond just an attitudinal change. This was actually they felt more empowered to say no if they didn't actually want to have sex or to participate in sexual activity. And if their partner said no, they reported that they were more likely to intend to stop."

But people aren't crushing SVU episodes on Netflix because they want to brush up on rape myth acceptance and the rules of sexual consent. So maybe the simple reason women watch SVU is because of Detective/Sergeant/Lieutenant Olivia Benson played by Mariska Hargitay. And while TV has a lot of strong female protagonists (Jessica Jones, Kim Wexler, Selina Meyer, Claire Beauchamp Randall...) Olivia Benson is a cut above. She's the survivor who never gives up the fight, no matter how dire it might be. She's the person we all wish we had in our corner during our darkest moments. She's the expert witness who's able to drop knowledge on anyone who dares question the credibility of the victim. Hell, she's so incredible, a judge in the show let her adopt a baby just because she kept showing up to his custody hearings! I'm pretty sure that's Fairy Tale Law, but who cares? It's Olivia friggin' Benson. Unfortunately she's just a fictional character on a TV show. And it's hard not to wonder whether portraying an extremely idealized version of the criminal justice system will give women faith in the actual system that we already know has a tendency to fail those who need it most.

SVU exposes a large audience to a topic most people would rather pretend did not exist in their non-TV time. It's a show that does its best to demystify sexual assault which is extremely important at a time when rape culture is so pervasive. Does it fail in other respects, of course, but we take what we can get.

It's clear that network television has yet to figure out how to accurately portray kinds of sexual assaults that happen every single day but lack that certain TV pizzazz. It may even require hiring more women showrunners. But for now at least we've got a show like Law and Order: SVU that offers its female viewers (many of whom we can safely assume are survivors themselves) the opportunity to briefly inhabit a world that takes women on their word and casts aside all the bullshit that makes us want to punch the entire world in the dick.

Follow Alex Hughes on Twitter

Guilty or not, former Conservative staffer Michael Sona has lost his appeal. Photo via Canadian Press/Dave Chidley

It looks like Canadians will never find out what really happened in Guelph, Ont. on election day 2011 when thousands of voters got a fraudulent robocall sending them to the wrong polling station.

Performers Adon Vain and Bambi Venison. All photos via the author.

I'm sitting in a chair in a small attic room. When I look down, I see that I'm wearing a pink tank top and a black and white skirt. I also have breasts. I'm usually a cisgendered man, so this is new to me. When I look up, I see a man and a woman in front of me. The woman is kneeling and the man is taking a leak in her mouth.