It was a few weeks back in Varanasi when I came across Mr. S Kumar and a group of his friends taking their daily bath in the Ganges River. When I suggested that the river might be horribly polluted, he didn't look impressed and told me that daily bathing would give him a long life. "There's no problem eating or drinking it," he said as he gulped down a few handfuls then added "it's very clean water."

A drain flows into the Ganges. All photos by the author

That's not actually accurate, at all. In 2016 the section of the Ganges flowing past Varanasi is one of the most polluted bodies of water on the planet. There are 33 drains along the entire length of the city's 87 ghats, pouring an estimated 250 million liters of untreated sewage into the river daily. A 2006 study counted around 10(8) cells of faecal coliform (a bacteria originating in human intestines) per 100 ml of water. In short, the river at this point is just diluted sewage. Yet it's believed that the thousands of bathing Hindu devotees are immune from getting sick.

Professor Vishwambhar Mishra

I wanted to find out what was being done to clean the river up—if anything—and whether the rumor about immunity had a basis, so I met with Professor Vishwambhar Mishra, president of the Sankat Mochan Foundation (SMF). The foundation has been running their Clean Ganges Campaign since 1982, when Mishra's father brought the mounting environmental disaster to national attention.

In the mid-80s, the government began constructing a series of sewage treatment plants along the length of the city. But test results compiled at the foundation's own research laboratory show that these plants don't adequately remove fecal coliform bacteria. Over the 25 years they've been monitoring the water only to observe it becoming worse. At some points, such as the junction with the Assi River, the water is completely septic and no aquatic life can survive.

The sewage outlet meeting the Ganges

However, over recent years, there's been renewed hope. Mishra met with now Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2013, at the time of the last election campaign. He suggested that Modi, whose electorate is Varanasi, make the issue part of his main campaign speech. "Then to my utter surprise he started with the Ganga issue," Mishra told VICE, using the local term for the river. "And after he became prime minister, he formed the Ganga Ministry, a dedicated ministry for this cause."

Sadly, since these initial steps Professor Mishra says "nothing new has been done." This is despite having met with ministers and informing them that the latest test results from May show the problem is spreading the breadth of the river. In the past the fecal coliform was only contaminating the city side, but it's now present at the opposite bank.

The professor explained that SMF propose the construction of a cost-effective interceptor sewer along the river controlled by gravity. It would divert the sewage to "an appropriate place for treatment," which would allow for water and nutrients to be reused.

To me this all sounded like some level of progress, except that I broached the question of whether those bathing in the river become ill, Mishra's face lit up. "We are also regular bathers in the river," he said, referring to himself and the other SMF staff present. "And we bath and sip Ganga water, knowing what is happening with the Ganga. And I'm healthy."

This was similar to what several of the staff members had told me prior to the meeting. They believe locals have built up an immunity to the river's bacteria, even if their mission is to clean it up.

But according to Sue Lennox, chief executive of OzGreen, the idea that people who bathe in the river don't get ill is a myth. "People get sick, absolutely they get sick," she exclaimed. "Look, people do develop some immunity, but only after they're really sick." Lennox, who's been intimately involved in the Clean Ganges Campaign since 1992, described a situation where people may not be dying but waterborne disease is rampant.

The earlier mentioned 2006 report carried out by American and Indian microbiologists found the incidence of waterborne disease among residents who had access to city-treated water was around 38 percent, but for poorer residents who rely specifically on the river for everyday water supplies it's around 80 to 90 percent.

So actually, the river is making just about everyone sick, and yet, as the SMF have discovered, trying to convince people to keep out of it is just about impossible. That is because, for local people, the Ganges is much more than a body of water, it's an actual living goddess.

Here's Bharat Pandey

Take Bharat Pandey, a Brahmin priest. I came across Bharat at Dashashwamedh Ghat, in the heart of the Varanasi. The 46-year-old told me he's been sitting in the same spot as his ancestors did for thousands of years, performing religious rituals for a living. When I asked him whether the Ganges was polluted, he didn't comprehend where such a question was coming from. He simply replied, "No, Ganga is good life."

Follow Paul Gregoire on Twitter.

Photo via teakwood

I have come to the conclusion that summer is bullshit. It is unfortunate, but it is a truth we all have to address. Deep in the white cold frost of winter, through long autumn nights, through the fresh brisk shoots of spring: all we long for is summer. And then it hits like a bomb and we are all like: well, good goddamn and fuck. This summer nonsense is absolute bullshit. I need to buy a fan. My body has a crucial need for ice cream. I need ice cream more than I need to have blood. I hate this with my life. I loathe the horror of this heat.

Anyway, a lot of 'summer truthers'—people who actually enjoy eating their lunch outside and away from their desk, for instance, people who glow with the healthy lacquer of a tan instead of freckling up like a storm, people who enjoy drinking cool juice-based cocktails by open air pools—a lot of these summer truthers have been swinging for me, saying my opinions re: summer are bad, that they are wrong, that I am incorrect in a very deep and fundamental part of me, that everything I thought I knew is wrong. So here's a list to shut those fuckers up:

SLEEPING IS IMPOSSIBLE

Either you are cooking slowly in a bain marie of your own sweat or you are woken at 3 AM by some inexplicable sunrise or else every single animal in the world has decided to go loudly insane in the heat and as such are growling and chirping outside your bedroom where you, sticky with your own grotesque perspiration, toss and turn on top of a comforter and underneath a sheet because down means up and up means down here in summer, the worst month of the year by far.

This photo via, and I can't believe I am typing this, 'Hotlanta Voyeur'

THE SHORTS CONUNDRUM

Hard to know truly whether I should ever wear shorts because i. I am an English man and as such should never do such a thing ii. my legs are absurdly white, ridiculously white, my legs are Taylor Swift's 4th of July party iii. is it ever, really, acceptable to expose your legs and/or feet to the people you work with, the people you need to always demand from your respect? iv. The only shorts I own are actually swimming shorts so I'm sat at my desk right know looking for all the world like I might turn and do a dive bomb into a swimming pool any minute now, and v. shorts are surely the slippery slope towards walking down the street topless, this is where it starts, this is exactly where it begins to go wrong, this is what leads to my inevitable topless arrest next year outside the Brixton McDonald's, me white and flabby and undulating and going "BUT ME CIVIL RIGHTS, I JUST WANTED SOME DIPPERS, THERE'S NO SIGN SAYING 'NO SHIRT NO SERVICE,' THIS IS A NANNY STATE!." That said if I wear jeans right now my balls will get so hot they will explode and I will die, so.

MAGNUM RUNS

At 4 PM every day from the months of June through early September I and every other person on earth has a crucial craving for a Magnum, and seeing as I now have a BMI doctors describe as being 'extremely medically inadvisable' I am, sadly, powerless to resist such urges. This leads to two problems, maybe three, at a push five:

i. If you are going to the shop for a Magnum the same rules re: tea rounds apply, i.e. you have to ask everyone around the desk in turn if they, too, would like a Magnum, and this is how you end up with a hand full of people's dirty change, someone who doesn't have anything less from a $20 bill so will "owe you a Magnum" which you both know is an agreement that will never be served, and you are going to the shops with a Post-It note with '1 X CLASSIC 2 X WHITE 1 X MINT (OR CLASSIC)' written on it, and that's what finds you in a line of six people holding every Magnum on earth as they slowly melt and drip down your forearms;

ii. When you get back to the office and start to eat aforementioned Magnum you will have this conversation, verbatim:

"Ooh, what you got there?"
"White chocolate"
"Ooh. Should've got that new one, the caramel one."

IF I WANTED YOUR OPINION ON WHAT MAGNUM TO GET, LYNN, I WOULD'VE ASKED FOR IT—

And so point iii:

iii. Point iii is that no, you should not try the new flavor Magnum, they keep fucking about with the Magnum flavors but the ranking still goes like this 1. White Chocolate Magnum 2. Almond Magnum 3. Classic Magnum 4.–100. Fucking Every Other Magnum, there is no argument here, no disambiguation, I am telling you this to save you the disappointment of the double-dipped dark chocolate/caramel nonsense I had to endure a few weeks ago, why would they manufacture a Magnum that bad—

iv. Magnums, though delicious, leave you with very sticky hands, you mucky puppy, you, you mucky pup, oh, you sticky baby;

v. The only thing to do after you've eaten a Magnum at your desk at work is to just fuck off home, because you're not getting anything done for the rest of the day now, are you? The Magnum has subtly altered the very cogs and pieces of your brain to put it now in 'vacation mode,' there is no getting out of this, just get a Corona and put a wedge of lime in it and drink it at your desk, mate, you're not going to do that spreadsheet now, are you, you know it and I know it, just fuck it all off.

This is me, just nipping to the shops. Photo via Audrey

YOU'RE CONSTANTLY DRUNK

"Pint? Pints?" This is everyone you know, now, this is all they can say. "Prosecco? Cheeky prosecco?" It's so hot it is acceptable to drink rum. You're sat on a small slither of grass near work eating your Meal Deal and you're like: "Would it actually, really, be so bad if I went and bought a single can of Heineken to have with this?" It is, but you do it anyway. And now every weekend people want you to come to the park with them to lay on a blanket and watch one of your mutual friends lazily do kick-ups alone while you all drink wine. Last night I walked home and had two cans on the walk home. I cannot remember sobriety, I cannot remember what it is like to think straight, I do not know the joy of living a well-hydrated life, I can only think through a slow hazy stupor of drunkenness, this will continue until at least September and at worst my death, help me, please lord, I could crush a gin and tonic right now like it was nothing.

THE SUN SENDS YOU ABSOLUTELY INSANE

There is no way you've had a cogent and non-insane thought since, like, May. Don't lie. There's no way you've not done something absolutely nuts just because it's five degrees warmer than it usually is.

SUNBURN, THE CONSTANT THREAT THEREOF

This doesn't go for everyone but as president-elect of the Clapton chapter of the Pale Boys' Social Club (not to be confused with the KKK, I cannot stress this enough) I can tell you that sunburn is a problem and the fine balance between 'a hearty and healthy tan' and 'your nose going so pink HR take you to a side room and ask you if you have a drinking problem' is about 45 to 50 seconds in direct sunlight, and that's it, boom, you're sun damaged for life, thanks a lot, 'the sun.'

This is your Instagram feed, 30 straight photos in a row, after one hot Saturday. Photo via Bruno Caimi

YOU GOTTA DRINK WATER ALL THE GODDAMN TIME OR YOU WILL DIE

Ugh, the act of being alive is such unending bullshit. I have had like a thousand pisses today. A million pisses. I have consumed an ocean of Evian. I am water and I am piss. That is all I am now. I'm still thirsty. Hydration never ceases, never ends. Drink loads of water or you will fall asleep and die. That's why summer sucks a big one: if you do not drink two liters of the most boring drink then your heart will stop beating in its chest.

THE CONSTANT UNRELENTING PRESSURE FOR A BOOM AND BUST SOUND OF THE SUMMER

We need a sound of the summer, we need it so bad, we cannot have summer without it, each summer has a unique feel and fingerprint, no two summers are the same, so much of the DNA of a strong summer is tied up in a banging sound of the summer, and just as soon as summer ends we will tire of our 'sound of the summer' elect, but right now there isn't one, I mean maybe One Dance, at a push, or the other Drake song, the one he did with DJ Khaled, but none of them feel exactly right, and what I am saying is there is a void there that someone—anyone—could and should fill, and it's possible we'll go an entire summer without a sound, and then what? Who even are we without a sound of the summer?

THE CONSTANT WONDERING ABOUT WHETHER OR NOT YOU SHOULD JUST FUCK IT ALL OFF AND SHAVE YOUR HEAD, I MEAN IT'S HOT AND HAIR IS HOT, THIS IS SIMPLE, YOU'VE GOT THE SKULL SHAPE, RIGHT, YOU CAN DO THIS, YOU CAN TRIM IT YOURSELF AT HOME TONIGHT, IT'LL BE COOL, POWERFUL, RECLAIM THE TEMPERATURE OF YOUR HEAD, DO A DE NIRO IN 'TAXI DRIVER,' FUCK IT OFF, GET A GOOD SCALP TAN, YEAH

The only thing I can think about when I am not thinking about how hot my balls are is whether I should shave my head or not, and I know I shouldn't—I absolutely haven't got the head or the charisma for it, my hair is all I have, I'll just look like one of those kids at school who isn't allowed to have hair longer than an inch in case they set fire to it, those harrowed looking kids, the kids that somehow dropped out sophomore year and nobody ever noticed, those kids, the ones who never obeyed the dress code and somehow once bought an extremely hard dog into school with them and took it to lessons and the teachers never said anything, they said nothing—and yes but anyway no I still can't stop thinking that maybe, maybe, with my fringe slicked to my forehead with sweat, maybe, possibly, I could rock a shaved head. Could I? And the answer as always is: no I can't, and neither can you.

JULY 19TH, OR: NATIONAL EMERGENCY LYNX PURCHASE DAY

Most people on public transport in the morning have the good grace to smell like a fresh shower and some talc, but there's always one dude—always one, crammed on the top deck sat between four other people, a sweaty beacon in the crowd—who smelled himself before leaving today and went, 'I mean I smell like a used shellsuit, but I reckon I'll be alright,' gone, 'oh, I'll only just get sweaty again: there is no point having a full shower, I'll just rinse my dick 'n' pits,' and that person is essentially a terrorist, as far as I am concerned, an odor terrorist.

But still: is he as bad as the wave of men who left the house today entirely ill-prepared, perspiration-wise, and had to buy an emergency can of Lynx Africa from the drugstore near work, and now the entire city has that sweet, sticky smell of it, every bus heaving with the fragrance of new deodorant sprays, they only cover the smell they do not conquer it, summer smells so bad, it smells like a PE class where somehow one million boys just frantically played dodgeball, it smells like a special kind of hell? No. No he is not.

BEING AT WORK GENERATING CONTENT IN THE FOUNDRIES AND THE MINES IS ESSENTIALLY TORTURE

I want to be outside in a paddling pool doing something frankly disgusting to a ice pop but instead I must generate content for you squawking content birds, you hungry little chicks, you need content, always, your hunger never ends and it is ruining every second of my life.

Follow Joel Golby on Twitter.

Illustration by Kitron Neuschatz

I had a confession to make. To my husband, Alex, and our boyfriend, Jon. I was pretty sure I was having an affair, and I was pretty sure it was outside the rules of our open relationship.

His name is Conor. At first, he was just supposed to be some guy I fucked after one Sunday afternoon beer bust at the Faultline, the gay bar in Los Angeles where I work as a bouncer. I didn't even know at the time that I was attracted to him—I was just impressed by his game.

Out of nowhere, Conor slid in next to me and started speaking, too softly for me to hear at first. I kept moving in closer, saying, "What? I can't hear you." Finally, when I was right up next to him, he said, "Nothing. I just wanted to get you close."

We talked for a few minutes, then I took him into the dressing room. The following Sunday we were fucking in the bathroom.

It was only meant to be a fuck. That's all.

I didn't need another guy in my life. I already had a husband and a boyfriend. I already had guys I could fuck whenever I wanted. I had enough guys.

Falling in love with Jon taught me that my ability to love other people was endless, and that the more love I experienced, the larger my love for Alex became. Alex is my soul mate, my husband, and my best friend. He is still the sexiest man I've ever seen.

When I first started dating Alex, I wanted to be the only one he loved, the only one he wanted, the center of his world. The problem with that scenario was that I was never able to return the favor. I've cheated in every relationship I had.

Growing up meant being honest about who I am, which in turn meant I had to learn to accept my partners for who they were, even if that was uncomfortable to do. It meant accepting that I was not going to be faithful to just one person, and learning to be honest about that with the people I loved.

Telling Jon about Conor was easy. Jon was in LA, living with me full time, while Alex was in Spokane, Washington for six months working on a TV show, subject to a grueling production schedule and often unavailable for necessary conversations. Jon is different than Alex and I: he is easier, has less need to be in control. Alex and I are alpha: Territorial.

Jon encouraged me. He enjoyed watching my new relationship develop. And that meant I had someone to share my fears and anxieties with.

I planned on spending a week in Spokane to celebrate Alex's birthday with him. I had rented a large house so we could be alone. I knew if I let this go any longer without being honest then I was back to being a cheater.

We would probably fight, and our fights can be epic. But we would have endless conversations, too, and I loved our endless conversations. I loved nothing more than staying up all night with Alex, simply talking.

Nothing mattered if I couldn't share my feelings about Conor with Alex, but I was afraid.

Recently, things had been tough between us. I had always thought Alex and I were good at allowing each other to be who we are, to go out and experience the world as individuals and not as people trapped within the confines of a marriage. But we were afraid of being abandoned, of not being loved, of not being good enough. We kept trying to force each other into boxes that didn't fit the reality of our personalities. We kept trying to change each other based on our own needs and insecurities.

I believed that if we could break this pattern then maybe we could love each other for who we were, and not who we wanted each other to be. To encourage each other to be our fullest selves, even if that might scare us.

That is why I wasn't willing to give Conor up. When I finally decided to allow myself to be who I am, it opened a door to allow Alex to be who he is. Marriage no longer meant I had ownership over my husband. It no longer meant I dictated who he was or who he would become. I didn't get to tell him how to live his life. And he didn't get to tell me how to live mine.

On the way to Spokane, my flight got delayed in Salt Lake City. I imagined every possible outcome to the conversation we were about to have. I imagined huge, operatic screaming matches in my head. I would storm out. Alex would throw my luggage through windows. We would end up fucking on the lawn, all of Spokane cheering us on.

When I finally saw Alex at the arrivals curb, I thought I would cry. I always feel this way when I haven't seen him in a long time. All the emptiness of him being gone suddenly filling up with his presence. I suddenly felt home and safe.

We sat at the Satellite Diner in downtown Spokane, surrounded by drunk straight guys and their drunker girlfriends.

"I need to say something," I said. "But I don't want to." The words I finally spoke lacked the poetry I had imagined they would summon. Where were all the things I had practiced saying? All the beautiful one liners that would sum up my love for him? I suddenly began to doubt my conviction.

"Uh oh," Alex said.

I told him everything. I talked for 30 minutes straight.

When I was done, when everything was out there between us, he simply said "hmmmm. Okay." And took a bite of his biscuits and gravy.

"Baby, are you mad at me?" I asked.

"Maybe. Sure, I'm mad. But not at you. It's just not what I want to hear."

It was then he told me about Greg, who lives in LA. He and Greg had been talking. He had been thinking that he'd like to fly Greg to Spokane for a weekend.

It took Alex four minutes to say everything he had to say. Four minutes to my thirty. The man is succinct.

I imagined Greg and Alex spending a weekend alone together. I allowed myself to feel hurt and then mad, but those emotions only lasted a few seconds. What replaced them was happiness for my husband. And empathy: He was lonely in Spokane. It was hard being away from me and Jon, from his life. I felt happy there was someone else out there to care for him. I want Alex to have all the love in the world. The more people there are to hold him, the safer he will be.

I want that for all of them. For Alex and Jon, and Conor too. I want them to be loved and happy. I no longer needed to be the only one they wanted, the only one they loved. The more people we have, the more love, the more sex, the more friendship and hugs and kisses, the safer we would all be.

"That would be amazing," I said.

Alex was quiet. Our conversation was far from over. It would never really be over. We would have to talk about this again. And again. And again. We would fight and throw things around the house and fuck and fight and fuck again. But whatever we did, we would do it together. This life is our life, and we're in it together.

He reached across the table to hold my hand.

"I'm glad you're here, baby," he said. "I've missed you. I've missed you a lot."

Follow Jeff Leavell on Twitter and Instagram.

In the US, Friends is categorized under the "sitcom" genre—but to Matteo Pini, it's more of a "White People in a Drink Shop" show. "My friend once called the genre that," the 17-year-old Londoner notes when attempting to classify the iconic 90s US TV show, which he considers "The yardstick by which all PG-13 sitcoms are measured."

Pini first saw Friends at a cousin's house when he was seven years old; after regular rerun-binging sessions with his brother after school, he eventually caved and bought the series box set. "Most of my friends hold it as a touchstone—comfort food," he tells me over email. "Whenever we're sad or bored, Friends is our go-to show."

Friends ended its decade-long initial run in 2004—when Pini was around three or four years old—but its cultural presence has been persistent ever since. Regularly airing reruns and Netflix's recent streaming acquisition of the entire series guaranteed that Ross, Rachel, Chandler, Monica, Phoebe, Joey, and even Gunther would always be there for new fans and old heads alike. The show has proved especially and peculiarly popular in the UK, where average viewership ratings for reruns rose by a whopping 11% between 2014 and 2015; as of last year, Friends reruns aired up to 12 times a day on Comedy Central UK, which holds the show's British re-broadcast rights until 2019.

Last year, the network capitalized on Friends' British boom by staging FriendsFest, a five-day exhibition in East London's Brick Lane that included recreations of the show's famous set pieces for superfans and their, er, friends, to nerd out over. The first batch of tickets sold out in 13 minutes; during one of the FriendsFest evenings, a man proposed to his girlfriend. (One can only hope that he got her name right during the ceremony.)

"I went into it wanting to hate it, but I found it kind of endearing," VICE UK Staff Writer Joe Bish, 23, admitted in an email while relaying his experience of attending last year's FriendsFest. "It's easy to be cynical from a distance, but when you're surrounded by people getting psyched over a sofa."

This year's FriendsFest will be a whopping six weeks long and staged in as many different cities around the UK. If you're just finding about the festivities now and are looking to attend, you're about as out of luck as Joey trying to find his hand twin in Las Vegas—the first batch of tickets are already sold out. The website promises more tickets will be released to the public at a later date. (Representatives for Comedy Central UK were not able to respond to comment for this article by press time.)

It's understandable that American TV fans might be surprised at the across-the-pond adoration for Friends. Many British comedic TV exports—the soused vulgarity of Absolutely Fabulous, Monty Python's whip-smart absurdism, the witty, cerebral bonhomie of The IT Crowd, and cringe-inducing character studies like The Office and Saxondale—have been cultishly cherished by non-UK audiences looking for alternatives to the homogenous humor that American TV comedies had, until the last decade or so, come to define. Americans may occasionally look abroad for salvation from the cavalcade of milquetoast TV sitcoms that still thrive in Friends' wake—but the UK can't stop getting enough of the real thing.

All photos courtesy of the Friends official Facebook page

And neither can America—but there's an unmistakable continental divide when it comes to the reasons for Friends' enduring popularity. In its "home country," Friends initially presented a sanitized, glitzy, and strongly Caucasian reflection of New York City—a cuddlier alternative, perhaps, to fellow NBC juggernaut Seinfeld's acerbic (and similarly Caucasian) perspective on Manhattan's hustle-and-bustle.

For US millennials who've discovered the show over the last decade, Friends provides the impossible class-based fantasy of, say, holding down a spacious Manhattan apartment as a struggling actor (not to mention an alternate universe in which we actually talk to our neighbors). American Friends fans are, essentially, dreaming of better times in their country's recent past—whereas, for British viewers, there's the potential to revel in societal elements that have historically eluded their culture.

"The British—rightly or wrongly—have a strong fascination with America," claims 61-year-old Chris Rojek, Professor of Sociology at City University London; he's also published several books on pop cultural theory, including 2011's Pop Music, Pop Culture and the following year's Fame Attack: the Inflation of Celebrity and Its Consequences.

Rojek believes that the UK's fascination with Friends has sustained growth because of nostalgic potency—specifically, for a time when everything surrounding British society sucked a little less—but also because of the warmth that its characters emanate. "The show radiates emotional candor," he states. "Unlike British culture, it's not about having reserved opinions or getting to know someone...the perception is that Americans are much more outward-going and friendly."

"Here's a bunch of beautiful, young, witty people who cared about each other," adds 42-year-old British TV critic Ben Dowell, who regards Friends as "Witty, sophisticated, and likable." For all its relative tameness, too, Friends represented the quietly subversive notion that the institution of family didn't actually have to include your family members—that home, in other words, is what you make it, a way of life that Dowell describes as "very appealing to young people."

For the younger UK-based viewers who were largely discovering Friends' 236 episodes through reruns, the show often functions as a portal through which they can view parts of America under a refracted cultural lens—which can make engaging with the real thing a disorienting experience.

Robin Smith, a 23-year-old from Leeds, claims that his view of NYC was so magnificently warped by Friends that when he actually visited the Big Apple, the hustle and bustle "Scared the shit out of me.... You can get so absorbed into a sitcom that it doesn't feel like it's informing your view of a different place or country—but it totally is."

Indeed, Rojek is quick to point out that Friends was—like so much television—a largely sanitized and apolitical version of the day and age it was situated in, as well as a far cry from the realities of American life. "Are there any black people in Friends?," he genuinely asks me during our conversation. (The answer: barely, although Aisha Tyler portrayed Ross'—and later, Joey's—girlfriend Charlie Wheeler in the show's final two seasons.) "Friends shows us a very privileged view of American life—it's all about getting along, helping each other out, and essentially being in the same boat...Some British people still believe that is America, when it's a complete myth."

After the calamitous fallout post-Brexit, many have floated the possibility that the UK's current cultural state is not dissimilar to the considerable societal upheaval that American society has seen during the 2016 election. So if the UK's fate becomes more closely intertwined with America's, does entertainment like Friends lose its escapist appeal for Brits? Or do cross-cultural occurrences like the sure-to-be-successful second installment of FriendsFest signify a greater, collective desire to continue retreating to a time, place, and state of mind in which it was easier to ignore the regularly occurring injustices that continue to plague society.

While no one I spoke to believes that the UK's love of Friends stands to greatly decline or increase post-Brexit, the question of escapist entertainment from abroad certainly resonated. Pini believes that, if anything, there's been an increase in the presence of British cultural artifacts: "The referendum's brought out varying flavours of British pride, from depressing (and ironic) racism to a renewed demand for the gallows humour we're so good at."

Regardless, Friends' enduring popularity is undoubtedly tied to a desire to return to a time and place when British life (and the world at large) wasn't undergoing such total upheaval—pre-Brexit, yes, but pre-everything in the last 15 years that led to Brexit, too. "Britain wasn't exactly booming—but it was stable and economically viable," Rojek explains while addressing the Friends-era British social climate. "There was a feeling that everything was moving in the right direction...It it illustrates connections between how the British and Americans look at the world," Smith offers a sobering rebuttal: in the face of so much social and international uncertainty, sometimes the drug of nostalgia just doesn't work like it used to. "I actually watched some Friends this weekend," he writes in an email shortly after the UK voted to exit the European Union, "And even with mindless shit in front of me—from a different country, a couple decades ago, it's hard to get rid of the knot in my stomach...I can't think of escapism right now."

Follow Larry Fitzmaurice on Twitter.

One in ten Ontario teens have tried e-cigs. Photo via Flickr user VAPES

Over ten percent of Grade 9 students say they've used e-cigarettes, according to a recent study based in Niagara, Ontario.

The study said the kids were using e-cigs because they were "cool," "fun" and "new." (AKA the reasons everyone does anything.)

Michael Khoury, the head of the e-cigarette study, called the rate "alarming," and said it's a public health issue that needs to be addressed.

E-cigarettes are not illegal to sell in Canada, although Health Canada has never approved them either.

Health Canada said that it "continues to advise Canadians, especially youth, against the use of these products."

The federal government has yet to crack down on e-cigarettes, leaving it to the provinces to make their own legislation on the product. Eight of the 10 provinces have tabled or passed legislation to treat e-cigs similar to regular tobacco products.

A VICE Canada investigation last year found that the lack of federal regulation in e-cigs production is leaving consumers in the dark about what they could be vaping.

Studies have found that people who vape are more likely to also become smokers later on, despite the fact that many people, including tobacco smokers, are advocating for e-cigarettes as healthier options to regular cigarettes.

Khoury suggested that this growing popularity in vaping is "renormalizing" smoking behaviour.

The e-cigs study is not too out of line with other data on teen behaviour. A recent CAMH report showed that one in five Grade 7 to 12 students in Ontario reported smoking pot last year, over five percent of high school students used ecstasy, and more than a quarter of them were allowed to drink alcohol at home.

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I first met Milla Reika in Osaka, Japan, 2009. New to the country, she overheard me bragging to my friends about a Japanese rope bondage show that I had been invited to. Upon hearing the word shibari, this Australian skater girl almost begged me to take her with me. I did.

Seven years later, when we caught up for a drink, I found myself staring at the self-assured woman with a cigarette in one hand and a coffee in the other, marvelling at what she has become.

Reeling from the intense exhilaration of that first shibari show, Reika threw herself into learning the art with the sort enthusiasm that only comes with youth. She spent hours studying the knots, ties and history of shibari, and we even tried our hands at photographing the art, but things only really took off when she walked through the doors of renowned S&M Club Matrix. After talking with the Mama-San about her interests, she was offered a job right there. Too busy to teach Reika herself, the Mama-San recommended her to other rope masters in Osaka. Only a few months later, with coaxing from her mentors, she began performing locally around the city.

A year later, Club Matrix had closed it doors. The Mama-San would not reopen the club, no matter how much Reika argued for it—but instead, to her surprise, the Mama-San turned the keys over to the younger woman and told her to take over. Reika gladly accepted.

The male-dominated scene was jolted by the arrival of this young Australian girl not only topping, but running her own club. Her presence generated equal amounts of interest and reservation, and as well as navigating the shibari scene and learning Japanese business protocol, Reika had to earn the respect of the community.

Reika quickly begun to receive attention for her performances, even from respected Riggers. Her performance skills, however, didn't help the business of running a club. With limited industry experience, no networks and no history in the scene, Reika struggled to keep the Matrix afloat, and in 2015 the club closed its door for the second, and final, time.

Recently, Reika and I met at a cafe in Amemura, Osaka's American Village after she returned from a six-month trip to Australia to reset and regroup. She looked commanding and ready for a comeback.

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Photo via Flickr user Ted Johnson

A health centre in Surrey, British Columbia has issued an official public warning due to 30 people overdosing within a 48-hour span last weekend. Though BC has been a major epicentre of the opioid crisis both in recent and past years, many of the people who experienced these overdoses reported using a drug in a completely different category: crack cocaine.

The woman introducing Kate Koplenko said she wasn't even going to try and pronounce her last name. Instead, the deeply Southern-sounding MC turned the mic over to 16-year-old Koplenko and had her do it herself. She was onstage at Citizens for Trump's "America First" rally on the opening day of the Republican National Convention as an example of someone who came to the United States legally and had therefore made positive contributions to society.

Koplenko's contribution on this particular Monday afternoon was musical entertainment. "It's time to act / back on the track," she sang in what sounded like a t.A.T.u. song commissioned by the Kremlin. "The stakes are high / but still they deny / terrorist attacks." The name of her song was "Political Correctness," and the crowd of people wearing "Hillary For Prison" buttons, and the pro-Donald Trump bikers there to protect them, went fucking nuts for it.

Koplenko is a pale teenager with light-colored hair, barely visible acne, and a well-worn shirt advertising Roger Stone's book The Clinton's War on Women. She came to the US from Russia when she was ten on a student visa to improve her English, but is now a permanent resident living in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Her 40-year-old mother doesn't pay much attention to politics, but young Kate started watching the Republican primary debates in September, fell hard for Donald Trump's immigration policy, and then became the president of a pro-Donald group at Broward College. Her most recent step toward total devotion came when she begged her mom to take her to Cleveland to perform.

"I tried to stop her," the elder Koplenko told me. "But I couldn't, and now here I am."

Kate Koplenko flew to Cleveland to sing about Donald Trump. Photo by Olivia Becker

If Koplenko's mother doesn't really care for or understand her daughter's new passion, it was definitely popular among other adults at the "America First" rally. One man from Kentucky came up to the two Russian women to ask if they were good at chess, compliment their English, and see if Koplenko's mom shared his love of Putin. She looked simultaneously bored and nervous as other people approached to give praise.

Alan O'Brien was one of those fans. He works with high-end stereo equipment and thought the acoustics of the performance could have sounded better, but that Koplenko's message was spot-on. The 54-year-old, who's from somewhere in rural Ohio, told me he has family who worked in law enforcement and felt compelled to come to the rally because he had heard that 10,000 Black Panthers would be in attendance.

"I was just getting sick of it," O'Brien said. "I've never been prejudiced in my whole life, but I'll tell you what: I can understand both sides and police brutality. I've been roughed up by the cops, but when I think back on it, I think, Well I probably deserved that. But what they're doing now is out of hand. Their lives matter just as much as ours."

He couldn't really articulate what he felt he was accomplishing by being at the rally, or what it meant that he was planning to vote in 2016 for the first time since Ronald Reagan was on the ticket. But he did say that he "lives and breathes InfoWars," and that Koplenko's song resonated with him because political correctness has gotten out of hand. "The United States was founded on saying whatever you want," he said. "If people don't like it, they can walk away."

The rally, hosted by the grassroots pro-Trump group Citizens for Trump, was not an official convention event, and took place off-site, at a park a couple of miles away from where the actual delegates and Republican Establishment were gathering to nominate Trump. The lineup was a melange of libertarian-leaning pundits and conspiracy theorists, including former Trump advisor Roger Stone and Alex Jones of InfoWars.

Media Matters predicted it would be the "freak show to the RNC circus." In the end, though, it was a pretty peaceful event in which speakers harped on variations of the same theme: Basically, they all loved Trump because, in their eyes, he wasn't afraid to stigmatize Islam or say a variety of other things that might offend people. The only hint of unrest came when comedian Eric Andre tried to provoke an incident with a camera crew in tow and got shoved by a giant angry man; otherwise, everyone there seemed to be in agreement with the speakers. But the fact that the rally went unchallenged despite going on all afternoon was also perhaps what made it so unsettling.

O'Brien, for his part, came to Cleveland just to see Jones, who took the stage in a blue blazer and wayfarer-style glasses, yelling some of his catchphrases like, "The answer to 1984 is 1776." The "America First" rally was his event, and arguably its main draw. People rushed the stage to see him. But when O'Brien heard that the provocative Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos was slated to appear later in the day, he stuck around.

As he put it, "That guy's funny."

Yiannopoulos, a bleach-blond Brit whose work frequently appears on the conservative website Breitbart, rose to prominence writing about Gamergate and now writes opinion pieces about things like political correctness, feminism, Black Lives Matter, and Islam. In a speech that questioned the existence of transphobia and the eating habits of Lena Dunham, he called out the lack of anti-Trump protestors at the "America First" rally. "The midgets of social justice haven't shown up today because they're lazy and boring," he taunted.

Although Yiannopoulos seemed vindicated by the fact that protestors didn't show their faces, his schtick in some ways depends on their existence. When he appeared at DePaul University in Chicago this May, for instance, he didn't really have to do much––his event was shut down due to the demonstrations against him. His appearance and subsequent ejection is often the whole show. So on Monday, it actually seemed like he might bomb in the absence of some kind of drama, that the self-deprecating jokes about being a "dangerous faggot," as he calls himself, might go over the heads of the old people in wheelchairs and the leather-clad dudes from the American Legion Riders.

They all loved it.

After his speech, Yiannopoulos headed to the perimeter of the park to sign autographs. A 17-year-old named Chris Walker was visibly shaking as he stood in line to get one. The recent high school grad, who said he was about to matriculate to the University of Pennsylvania, looked like he was about to cry when describing Yiannopoulos as "a very great shit-poster."

Chris Walker poses with his signed headshot of alt-right hero Milo Yiannopoulos. Photo by Lindsey Byrnes

"I've been following him for a year or two maybe, and he's like a celebrity to me," Walker told me. "He talks a lot about political correctness, which destroys the ability to have an honest conversation. You don't have to advocate for something that Trump says or Milo says, but you should at least advocate for their ability to say it."

At around 4 PM, the crowd started to clear out. A man wearing Trump-branded sunglasses danced wildly to a country song, like he was at an alternate universe Bonnaroo. The police looked bored, and the streets smelled like boiling horse shit.

A throng of barrel-chested men eventually escorted Yiannopoulos out of the event. He did not look up from his phone once––not even as he was crossing the street. He didn't say a word the entire way back to his hotel, although people behind him were chattering.

"I can't believe that's Milo," a bro with a Georgia twang and Oakleys whispered to his friend. "He's the only guy I would go gay for."

The two paused, looked at each other, and high-fived.

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Brigitte Bidet performs at the STUD at Club Some Thing on June 24th. All photos by Matthew Terrell

Queer bars come and go. It's a reality of the nightlife industry: Running any bar or club demands enormous time and manpower; success or failure is often a matter of luck. For queer spaces in particular, cultural shifts—from the rise of Grindr to gay assimilation and the gentrification of historic gayborhoods—have beleaguered establishments that often take on extra political and social significance for marginalized LGBTQ communities.

That makes it all the more remarkable that the Stud, a gay bar in San Francisco's South of Market (SoMa) district, has stuck around for half a century, even as it becomes harder and harder for the city's queer spaces to survive. Since it opened in 1966, the Stud has outlasted the shuttering of at least 159 other San Francisco bars, according to the crowdsourced map "Lost Gay Bars of San Francisco." It is the rare bar that has generated a legacy and reputation far greater than the sum of its parts, which is one reason why its July 3rd announcement that it may soon close, facing a 300 percent spike in rent, was as tragic as it was portentous for the state of the city's nightlife.

It's become an all-too-common fate for queer bars in San Francisco, where the past decade of fast and loose Silicon Valley venture capital has created a real estate crisis of unseen scope in urban America. The last five years, in particular, have brought hell for the city's queer spaces: 2012 brought the shuttering of drag dive Deco Lounge and gay cocktail lounge Club Eight; 2013 saw the demise of "infamous SoMa leather den" Kok; Latino drag mecca Esta Noche closed in 2014; last year, bear bar Truck and lesbian bar the Lexington Club shut down, and this July, gay nightclub Beatbox also shut its doors.

What set the Stud apart from its peers was a decades-long commitment to nurturing cutting-edge music, dance, drag, and style. To preserve that heritage, the Stud's current crop of resident art-makers has created an advocacy group called Save Our Stud (SOS.) City Commercial Investments, LLC, who purchased the building, has not announced any plans for the property, but SOS dread the possibility of more tech condos in the SoMa tech corridor where the bar sits.

Glamamore performs at Club Some Thing at the Stud.

SOS and other figures in queer nightlife are floating the idea of establishing "cooperative bars" in the face of a savage real estate market—bars that are owned by several establishments, promoters, and proprietors, who would each program the space on different nights of any given week. Their cooperative vision extends to co-ownership, as well—all employees of the bar, from drag queens to barbacks, would own a stake. It's an unconventional idea, but the Stud has always fostered a radical queer community, from bikers and miscreants to working-class drag artists and performers like Janis Joplin and Etta James. That community, likewise, is no stranger to radical thinking.

Michael McElhaney, 49, has owned the Stud since 1996, and has worked to carry on the bar's legacy since. Its signature kitschy décor—Boston ferns in macrame hangers, faceless mannequins, and thrift store-chic pleather booths—has remained for years. The bar is still cash-only after all these years, and you may notice the $1 bill you receive in change from the coat check has been stamped to say "Drag Saves Lives."

"It's always an interesting mix of humans here," says McElhaney. "It was always 'come as you are.' But since the recession, it's been hard. I've had to pay for rent out of my pocket. My business partner died of AIDS in 2011. I've been trying to put the old girl back together ever since."

Drag queen Phatima Rude at the Stud

In the 1980s, the Stud was among the first gay bars in San Francisco to play punk and new wave music. Trannyshack, a drag show by legendary local drag queen Heklina, premiered in 1996, lasting 12 years as a weekly event. The show pushed boundaries of subversive drag, complete with fire, fake blood, and performances that were more political than pretty. In 2008, Lady Gaga used the night to introduce herself to gay San Francisco, performing songs from just-released The Fame.

Currently, one of the Stud's most popular events is a weekly high-concept drag show called Club Some Thing, which features local artists Fauxnique, Glamamore, and Rahni NothingMORE.

VivvyAnne ForeverMORE performs at the Stud.

Mica Sigourney, a drag personality who performs as VivvyAnne ForeverMORE, co-founded Club Some Thing and is a driving force behind SOS. "By creating a co-op, we're capitalizing on the notoriety of the individual nightlife personalities " he said, "and creating an environment where employees are owners, which hopefully means higher job investment and satisfaction."

Monique Jenkinson first began patronizing the Stud in the 90s, during the Trannyshack era. As a dancer, she became fascinated with the dedication drag queens brought to their performance; she eventually took the stage herself as Fauxnique. Her work at the Stud has given her a space and audience to develop her work; without it, she may have been unable to develop work like the F-Word, a traveling drag show that deconstructs feminism. "I credit Trannyshack with giving me an art practice," she says. "I found my audience at the Stud."

Jocelyn Kane, the executive director of
 San Francisco Entertainment Commission, says that the Stud's impending $9,000 rent is in line with market trends for local bars and restaurants. She notes that a bar like the Stud relies solely on nighttime events to survive; without daytime customers, Kane says that keeping these spaces alive will require active community investment.

"Nightlife customers go into spaces that used to be cheap, dirty, and dangerous and make them attractive," says Kane. "Then restaurants and housing move in, and they go out of business. It's a natural cycle, but it can be changed; people need to patronize these historic venues if they want to keep them alive."

Rahni Nothingmore at the Stud

Other San Francisco queer bar owners say they are unsure their businesses will continue to be viable without legislative protection from the city. In 2015, voters approved the establishment of a Legacy Business Registry to preserve historic venues from redevelopment. The program has had trouble launching; although voters approved the measure, the city didn't move quickly enough to dedicate funding or staff to it, and businesses have been slow to complete the intensive application process. As a result, it has only provided nominal support to local businesses thus far. The Stud, for its part, is currently in the process of applying for the Legacy Business Registry.

"Anyone with a commercial lease in San Francisco is in danger," says Lela Thierkfield, the former owner of the Lexington Club. "Bars. Restaurants. Art galleries. And queer spaces are in particular danger, because the businesses that suffer most are minority-driven." Thirkield currently owns Virgil's Sea Room, a mainstream bar with queer influences in the Mission.

Signature kitsch style: A mannequin at the Stud

"Your rent can go up incredible amounts overnight and blow up your entire business model," Thierkfield continued. "For commercial leasing, there's no law beyond your contract to protect tenancy. I'm worried about San Francisco. I'm hopeful because people are doing queer nights at other spaces, but we're still losing our queer spaces."

It's a cruel cycle: The avant-garde creative energy that thrives in spaces like the Stud is what entices real estate developers and techies looking to mine magic from the city. The tech boom exacerbating the San Francisco real estate crisis lauds "disruptive innovations" as an inextricable part of good business. The sad irony? If there were ever a time and place for a radical idea to save San Francisco's historic, politically necessary spaces, it is here and now, at the Stud.

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A recent potluck dinner for members of the Arab community, hosted by the University of Toledo Muslim Students Association. Photo courtesy of the UTMSA

Zein Torbey knew he needed to leave his home in Damascus when the Syrian civil war began to escalate in 2012. The violence made everyday life difficult—"explosions all over the place, people killing each other for stupid reasons, airplanes shooting on people on the ground," he told VICE.

So in July 2012, he fled with his wife and two-year-old son to Jordan, where they applied for tourist visas to the United States. He only knew one person in the US—a friend in Toledo, Ohio—so that's where they ended up.

While the Buckeye State might seem like a random place to land, Toledo has a long history of welcoming immigrants from the Middle East. The city's Arab roots extend back to the late 1800s, when newcomers arrived from Beirut and Tripoli. By the 1920s, an ethnic Arab enclave known as "Little Syria" had emerged in the Toledo's north end, forming a neighborhood where residents could be seen sitting on their front porches smoking hookah and sipping Arabic coffee flavored with cardamom.

By the time Torbey arrived in 2012, there was also a well-established network to help immigrants like him acclimate to the city: A local non-profit, Social Services for the Arab Community, helped his family find an apartment and provided them with free furniture; they showed them how to apply for health insurance and drove his wife, who was pregnant at the time, to doctor's appointments. The group also connected him with a pro-bono lawyer to handle the family's asylum claim. "Those people did everything for us," Torbey said.

Zein Torbey with his family near their home in Toledo, Ohio. Photo courtesy of Zein Torbey

Toledo is hardly the only city with this kind of support for immigrants, but it stands out as particularly welcoming during a time when the resettlement of Syrian refugees in the United States has become a contentious political issue. After 130 people were killed in Paris terror attacks this past November, more than half of governors across the country announced their opposition to receiving Syrian refugees, expressing concerns over security. John Kasich, the Republican governor of Ohio and then-presidential candidate, was among those who called for a moratorium, saying he did not believe the US could adequately screen Syrians.

The cautious mindset has carried over into the Republican National Convention in Cleveland this week, just two hours away from Toledo's Little Syria, where Donald Trump is expected to formally become the party's nominee for president. Trump won over Republican voters in the primary with tough talk on immigration—promising to build a wall on the border with Mexico, deport undocumented immigrants living in the US, and suggesting a ban on all Muslims entering the country. On Sunday, Trump softened his position to "extreme vetting" of immigrants from nations with a history of terror, but that kind of policy stance could still block Syrians from relocating to the US.

In Ohio, it's obvious that such a policy would not only harm would-be refugees, but also the local economies.

"It's amazing how well-behaved this community is," said Ammar Alo, a Toledo-based attorney who has handled dozens of Syrian asylum cases since 2013. Alo, whose parents came to the US from Syria in the late 1970s, emphasized the rigorous screening process required for successful refugee and asylum applicants. "I think Mr. Trump is playing to the crowd and he's just saying whatever will get him the most cheers."

Watch on VICE News: My Escape from Syria

In Toledo, the growing immigrant population is helping offset the city's declining population, which went from 315,701 in 2000 to 277,933 in 2014—a 12 percent drop, according to census data analyzed in a report co-produced by Welcome Toledo-Lucas County, part of a national initiative to embrace immigrants in their new communities. Over the same period, the city's foreign-born population grew by 14.6 percent.

Those newcomers contribute to the economy both by supporting local businesses and creating their own businesses, according to Corine Dehabey, a resettlement coordinator for US Together, a refugee resettlement agency with offices in Cleveland and Toledo. In the nearby Cleveland area, refugees had a positive economic impact of $48 million in 2012, according to a report by Chmura Economics and Analytics, a research firm specializing in regional economic growth.

"The government won't let them stay on benefits for more than three years. Most of them are working in three months," Dehabey told VICE.

When Zein Torbey came to Toledo in 2012, he could barely speak English. He washed dishes at a restaurant for a month before taking jobs at a tire shop, a convenience store, and a car mechanic shop. By June 2015, he had saved enough money to open up his own tire shop, a small business he started with the help of Syrian immigrants who had lived in the area for decades.

Photo courtesy of the UTMSA

While many residents of Little Syria have decamped to the suburbs, Toledo remains a magnet for Arab immigrants. Of the 310 Syrian refugees who have been resettled in Ohio since 2013, 90 of them went to Toledo, according to data from the US Department of State.

Part of the reason is the network of support: One Christian organization, Water for Ishmael, runs English language classes, early education for children, and a volunteer shuttle service for those without cars. Another group, the Epworth Furniture Ministry, provides couches, tables, and beds to those in need. And the University of Toledo Muslim Students Association has hosted gatherings, including potluck dinners for refugees and community members.

So far, residents and local politicians have been supportive of the resettlement effort, according to Brittany Ford, the co-lead for Welcome Toledo-Lucas County. Toledo's Democratic mayor, Paula Hicks-Hudson, has spoken out in support of Syrian refugees and if there's any backlash, Ford hasn't heard about it.

Peter Ujvagi, who sits on the Toledo City Council and served as a state representative from 2003 to 2010, told VICE he hasn't heard any complaints about welcoming Syrian refugees either, which stands in sharp contrast to the immigration rhetoric taking place at the Republican National Convention this week. Ujvagi, whose family spent months living in refugee camps after they fled Hungary in 1956, attributes the welcoming atmosphere to the city's long history of Arab immigrant communities and a recognition of how immigrants contribute to society.

"I'm very proud of this community," he said, "and how they've opened their arms."

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No crime story fulfills our need for justice without a corresponding punishment. That's how wrongs are righted in our moral imaginations. But if the crime and punishment aren't balanced, we're left waiting for an equilibrium that never comes. This is one of those stories.

On October 9, 1979, Thomas Beitler was working the late shift when he used his break to buy cigarettes and a soda. Pittsburgh's Fort Wayne Cigar Store was open 24 hours a day, and the third-generation postal worker arrived there a little after 3:30 AM—almost exactly the same time as 14-year-old Ricky Olds and his friend Todd Allen. Minutes later, Beitler was dead from a gunshot wound. Barely a month after that, Olds and Allen were taken into custody, and neither has left prison since. Thirty-six years have passed, and Olds continues to pay the price for being a barely adolescent kid out too late for his own good.

The two teens had met up by chance that Columbus Day evening. "I was supposed to be staying over at my grandmother's," Olds recalls. "As soon as I walked out my mom's door, he was just there."

The way Olds now describes his relationship with Allen, it sounds like typical adolescent idolatry. "He could play basketball, he was good with the girls... He could dance real good, he knew how to do a lot of things I couldn't do," he says. But in many ways Allen had traveled a much tougher road. He had been shuttled back and forth between Pittsburgh and Detroit—his father was long gone, his abusive stepfather was back in Michigan, and his mother had died two years earlier. At 16, he was all alone.

"I know he had a hard time," Olds recalls. "I used to sneak him in, let him sleep on the floor or in the bed... I would, like, feed him."

The duo crossed the Allegheny River on the Sixth Street Bridge, took a bus to a neighborhood called Homewood, and ran into some older kids. One of them was Allen's brother Larry, whose 18-year-old pal Claude Bonner had a car. The four of them made their way to the Music Bar on Liberty Avenue, but Ricky was carded at the door.

Later, when asked at trial what he did while his buddies were in the bar, he testified, "I stood outside."

A few hours after that, Allen and Olds found themselves in front of Doggone Sam's, a hotdog joint on Penn Avenue, where they again bumped into Bonner. He was heading back to the city's North Side, and they hopped in his car for a ride. As they approached their neighborhood, Olds announced he was hungry, and the Cigar Store was the only place open at that time of night.

As the boys got out of the car, Allen said, "I should just rob the joint."

"Yeah, right," Olds replied.

What did he mean by that, his attorney would later ask at trial? "I was being sarcastic... I didn't really believe him," he said on the witness stand, explaining that he thought his friend was joking, because Allen always talked like that. Olds went to the back of the store and got a bag of potato chips; Allen stayed in the front. When Olds returned to the counter, he smiled at the clerk's joke about not spilling anything on the freshly swept floor, and paid for the bag of chips. He then watched Todd Allen follow Beitler, the postal worker, out of the store. "I'll see you later," Allen told Olds.

A few seconds later, Olds did see him—pointing what looked like a gun at the mailman. At Olds's murder trial, this was the key moment emphasized by his defense attorney:

Q: And what did you do or what was your reaction when you saw that?

A: I turned and started to run.

Q: Why did you turn and start to run?

A: Because if it was a gun I didn't even want to be a part of the robbery.

An eyewitness to the shooting, walking up to the Fort Wayne just as shots were fired, recalled seeing only a "colored male and a white male." Ricky Olds was already gone.

Bonner heard the shots too, started the car, and practically ran over Olds, who was flagging him down. Allen wasn't far behind him, and jumped in as well. Bonner related the conversation that followed at trial:

Q: When they got back in the car who said what first?

A: Todd said you made me shoot him, and Ricky said naw, naw. said when I pulled the gun out you was supposed to grab the wallet....Then Todd said again you was supposed to grab the wallet when I pulled out the gun.

Q: Then what did Ricky say?

A: He didn't say nothin'. He just kept sayin' naw.

Bonner drove home the long way—"to avoid the police," he later testified—and dropped both boys off less than a block from Olds's house. All they had with them was Ricky's bag of chips; Allen had run off without taking his victim's wallet.

When the two teens were arrested for Beitler's murder a month later, the newspapers referred to them as "North Side youths" accused of killing a man from Millvale. This was code—any Pittsburgh reader immediately understood that the kids were black and the victim white. At trial, when the prosecutor asked about the height and weight of the victim, the coroner testified he was a "well-developed, well-nourished white male."

Olds and his mother remember an all-white jury hearing the evidence and taking more than five hours to reach a decision. During deliberations, the foreperson asked whether a third-degree verdict was an option if they found Olds guilty of robbery and conspiracy; she was told that the jury could return any verdict it saw fit. But jurors ultimately did not distinguish between Allen and Olds—each teenager was convicted of second-degree murder.

"There is nothing I can do except to write a letter to the pardon board."
–Judge Samuel Strauss

The case of Ricky Olds is one of thousands getting fresh attention after recent rulings by the United States Supreme Court overhauled America's philosophy of juvenile sentencing. Studies of developing brains have confirmed what every parent already knew: Children are prone to behaving recklessly and with very little thought to the consequences of their actions. Such studies, authored by leading medical and psychological experts and appearing in hundreds of legal opinions, have supported a new, less draconian approach to the incarceration of children.

In 2005, the US Supreme Court banned the death penalty for minors; in 2010 it ruled against mandatory life sentences for juveniles who committed non-homicide offenses; in 2012 it ruled against mandatory life sentences for juveniles under all circumstances; and this past January it ruled that inmates already serving mandatory sentences should receive new sentencing hearings.

What this means, practically speaking, is that many young people who had previously been condemned to die in prison will now get a second look, and many will have a chance for freedom. The opportunity has prompted a retrospective examination of crimes that occurred decades ago, and of how these lost boys and girls have emerged from their years of incarceration. Ricky Olds is one of them.

He could not have imagined this chance when he was sentenced in 1981. Back then, life without the possibility of parole was mandatory for all felony murder convictions in Pennsylvania. That put Samuel Strauss, the judge who presided over the trial, in something of a bind. He had already imposed such a sentence on Todd Allen, but said he was "uneasy" about giving the same punishment to Olds, a defendant he classified as a "lesser participant" in the crime. Strauss knew he had no choice—the jury had already rendered its verdict. Nonetheless, he asked the district attorney's office to plea bargain for a milder sentence, even though the trial was over and the time for such bargaining had long passed.

District Attorney Robert Colville wasted no time going after the judge. "It's not only unorthodox. It's absurd," he told the Pittsburgh Press at the time. "The jury knew that mandatory life would be imposed if it opted for second-degree murder and I cannot withdraw a jury conviction... Besides, the standard of life imprisonment in this state is not prison for the rest of your natural life. With good behavior, he could be out in 17 years and maybe far less."

Colville, the elected prosecutor of Allegheny County from 1976 to 1997, should have known better: All life sentences in Pennsylvania since the mid 1970s had been imposed without the possibility of parole. In addition, the judge's instructions to the jury made no mention of the consequences of a second-degree murder verdict.

At the sentencing hearing, the trial prosecutor addressed the judge's concerns: "I know the problems your honor has had with the case and the disparity between the involvement of the perpetrator and the involvement of the accomplice." The prosecutor went on to suggest that the legislature pass a new homicide statute giving the judge more merciful sentencing options, but Strauss was in no mood to be mollified. "That is talking though our hats," the judge replied.

Pointing out that the court had "no leeway as to the disposition that we are compelled to make," Strauss sentenced Olds to "undergo imprisonment for a period of your natural life." He had "hoped that something could have been worked out for this young man," he said, adding:

"I do want the record to note, I know this was a terrible offense, there is no question about it, it was a brutal killing, but this young man was the youngest of three people. It has bothered me... But in any event, there is nothing I can do except to write a letter to the pardon board, which I will do in this matter, suggesting that at the appropriate time he be considered by reason of his age."

Strauss went on to encourage "some of the courageous people in the county" to support this pardon effort.

The Pennsylvania Board of Pardons has no record of such a letter, and since Strauss died in 1995, there is no way to know if he ever wrote it. Letter or not, though, the judge's concern was palpable—in a sentencing transcript that ran a mere seven pages, he made eight references to the fact that Ricky Olds was young. But not once did he actually say how old the child was when he'd been arrested. It's almost if he were embarrassed to sentence a 14-year-old to an entire life inside prison walls.

"It didn't matter that I didn't kill the mailman. It would've almost been better if I had."
–Ricky Olds

Daisy Olds, Ricky's mother, has clear memories of her son as a bright child. "I remember one time I took him for a check-up at the hospital, and he was reading technical words on the signs," she says. "The doctor was surprised he could do it because he was so young." School records back her up: Ricky's IQ placed him in the top 10 percent nationally, and his teachers characterized him as an excellent student who learned rapidly.

"But he was a little bit of a troublemaker," Daisy allows. "He didn't live up to his full potential. He got good marks without even trying. How can I say this? Black kids back then, they got made fun of being real smart. And Ricky kind of covered up his smartness for a minute."

His grades began deteriorating in seventh grade, and by the next year, Olds was close to flunking out. Socially promoted to ninth grade, his troublemaker side landed him in juvenile court—he got in a street fight that escalated to knives and clubs, he broke a window with a brick, he stole nine dollars from a pretzel shop in the Allegheny Center Mall. Olds's involvement in the juvenile justice system produced an unexpected benefit, though: The juvenile court placed him in an honors program at the local high school, and by all reports he was responding well to the challenge of a difficult curriculum.

Then he got arrested for the last time.

Olds's smarts only took him so far in prison. "When I first got to Western , there was no juvenile wing—I was put in with the adults," he recalls. "The guards were giving me a hard time—'That's the kid that killed the mailman, fuck him.' It didn't matter that I didn't kill the mailman. It would've almost been better if I had. The convicts, they thought the fact I was in prison for what I did was a joke. I didn't fit in to either world."

His behavior in prison reflected this state of limbo. In 1982, when he was 17, he picked up seven violations, mainly for refusing to follow an order, and an additional offense for fighting. His next year was only marginally better, but there were fewer and fewer infractions as time wore on. There was another pattern as well—Olds rarely contested the violations. Instead, he often later pleaded guilty to them, as if he thought the transgressions over and regretted them.

"Lots of times I lost my cool," he says now.

Ricky Olds wasn't yet 20, and couldn't figure out how to fill his interminable days. A prison evaluation report from 1984 is illustrative:

"This individual is relative (sic) calm & somewhat complacent for an inmate with so much time. Highly intelligent, his biggest problem is finding anything to motivate him. Slow to the point of seeming laconic at times. May need to go to an institution where he can further his education."

Most people with Olds's intelligence are in college by that age, or else are out in the world working, learning who they are. He had none of those luxuries. The vast desert of a life entirely contained in institutions stretched before him. He needed to find an oasis, or he wasn't going to make it.

"Life in prison without the possibility of parole gives no chance for fulfillment outside prison walls, no chance for reconciliation with society, no hope."
–Justice Anthony Kennedy

Ricky Olds was hardly the first young teenager to face draconian punishment. In 1944, a black 14-year-old named George Stinney was accused of killing two white girls in the highly segregated town of Alcolu, South Carolina. He was convicted by an all-white jury in a trial that lasted less than three hours, then sentenced to death after ten minutes of deliberations. At five-foot-one and 90 pounds, he was too small for the electric chair. A Bible was used as a booster seat to help kill the boy.

The injustices of Stinney's case were addressed 70 years later, when South Carolina Circuit Judge Carmen Mullen revisited the prosecution and meticulously addressed the various rights Stinney had been denied: No request for a change of venue, no request for a continuance, no investigation, no questioning of the improper jury composition, no cross-examination.

Most troubling of all, perhaps, was that Stinney's life had been taken away from him at a startlingly young age. As Mullen wrote:

"Regardless, the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment and the Fourteenth Amendment's protection of fundamental notions of due process were the same in 1944 as today. Sentencing a 14-year-old to the death penalty constitutes cruel and unusual punishment."

Mullen vacated Stinney's conviction, finding that he had been deprived of virtually every fundamental right that due process demands.

By the time of Mullen's ruling, the US Supreme Court had barred the executions of 15-year-olds (in a 1988 case) and all minors in the landmark 2005 decision of Roper v. Simmons. That opinion, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, directly addressed the fear expressed by some of other justices that children no longer fearing execution might suddenly begin committing murder at a higher rate. "o the extent the juvenile death penalty might have residual deterrent effect, it is worth noting that the punishment of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole is itself a severe sanction, in particular for a young person."

The juvenile justice revolution had begun.

But barring the death penalty for juveniles begged another question: If the death penalty for minors was unconstitutional, was life without parole much better? This was presciently forecast in an exchange between the state solicitor for Missouri and Justice Antonin Scalia during the oral argument in Roper:

Solicitor: Well, I... I must assume that if we... if the Court says are immune from the... from capital punishment that someone will come and say they also must be immune from, for example, life without parole.

Justice Scalia: I'm sure that... I'm sure that would follow.

Five years later, the issue of juvenile sentencing was back in the Supreme Court.

Check out our documentary about the morally flexible existence of Howard Greenberg, a high-powered criminal defense lawyer in New York.

Lawyers who handle the most serious criminal cases in the United States tend to be familiar with the saying "death is different." It emanates from a concurring opinion in the 1972 Furman v. Georgia case that temporarily put a stop to capital punishment, and has appeared in hundreds of subsequent cases as a rationale for applying a different set of rules in death penalty cases from all others.

There is no similar distinction between life without parole and a sentence of 40 years or even a life sentence with parole. Or at least there wasn't until the Supreme Court's next opinion on juvenile sentencing, the 2010 case of Graham v. Florida, which noted that "life in prison without the possibility of parole gives no chance for fulfillment outside prison walls, no chance for reconciliation with society, no hope."

The Graham opinion declared that the state had to provide a juvenile with "some meaningful opportunity for release based on demonstrated maturity and rehabilitation." But there was one caveat: The decision specifically applied only to juveniles who had not committed homicide.

Nonetheless, Ricky Olds sought an appeal based on Graham—after all, he hadn't actually killed anyone, and the ruling applied to all non-homicides. But the Pennsylvania Superior Court, pointing out that Olds had in fact been convicted of second-degree murder, made short shrift of that argument. In a coldly ironic turn, the judge who authored the opinion, Robert Colville, was the same Robert Colville who, as district attorney, had so glibly told the press three decades earlier that Olds could be out in 17 years "and maybe far less."

But at the time there were only about 120 children in the entire country serving a life sentence without parole for a non-homicide, with 2,300 serving the same sentence for murder. The Supreme Court changed the status of the larger group in 2012 with Miller v. Alabama, which introduced a new phrase into the lexicon that paralleled the mantra about capital punishment: "Children are different."

The Court, synthesizing themes from Roper and Graham, drew the conclusion that since children were less culpable than adults, a judge had to consider a juvenile's age before imposing a sentence, especially if it was the harshest sentence a child could receive.

This did not mean that a sentence of life without parole was off the table—rather, that such a sentence would "be uncommon."

For Ricky Olds, the Miller opinion was literally the chance of a lifetime. Indeed, the language of the ruling seemed to have been written with his own case in mind, echoing Judge Strauss's concerns in his original ruling. "Such mandatory penalties , by their nature, preclude a sentencer from taking account of an offender's age and the wealth of characteristics and circumstances attendant to it," the Court ruled. "Under these schemes, every juvenile will receive the same sentence as every other—the 17-year-old and the 14-year-old, the shooter and the accomplice."

There was one other aspect of the Miller opinion that had particular significance for Olds: the Court's decision to reiterate language from the previous Roper and Graham decisions about the "great difficulty... distinguishing at this early age between 'the juvenile offender whose crime reflects unfortunate yet transient immaturity, and the rare juvenile offender whose crime reflects irreparable corruption.'" In other words, it was pretty much impossible to determine with any accuracy what sort of man a 14-year-old boy might become. Was it any easier to evaluate the nature of a 51-year-old man after three and a half decades in prison?

"Like, who could be in jail that long? It's just hard for people to see that."
–Ricky Olds

In 1989, Camp Hill, the aging and overcrowded Pennsylvania prison where Olds had been housed for eight years, essentially burned to the ground during three days of inmate riots. "In the Camp Hill fire everything I owned burned up: my high school diploma, all my photographs," Olds says. "My grandmother had just visited me and we took pictures, they all burned up."

Olds had not been involved in the riots, but all of the inmates had to be relocated, and he found himself at the legendary federal prison Leavenworth, in Kansas, for the next 18 months. By then he was in his mid-20s, and the world started to open up a bit. "I feel like I grew up when I got to Leavenworth—there were people there who read books and could talk about things beyond the prison," he recalls.

When he returned to Pennsylvania from Leavenworth, he was a grown man, and felt as if he had turned a corner. "On the one hand there's maturity," Olds says now. "On the other hand... certain things that would have frustrated me then, you know, you expect it." He began taking courses from the University of Pittsburgh in elementary German, Spanish, Italian, biology and math, even studying literature in a program called the Dramatic Imagination. More recently, he has learned Powerpoint and Word and Excel. One of his many certificates indicates a perfect attendance record for eight years in Navy Seals Aerobics class. He is as busy as life in prison allows him to be.

The disciplinary write-ups have stopped. Olds's last was in 2009, for talking too loud after his team had won a softball championship. Eight years before that, he had been in a dispute with a guard about what he should have done after his belt set off a metal detector. "It was a misunderstanding followed by some poor judgment on my part," he wrote to the prison officials in explanation. In both incidents, he pleaded guilty.

Olds is now closing in on his fourth decade behind bars.

"To these people I'm an old man," he says. "I don't feel that way, but to these people I'm like ancient. And I probably would have felt the same way, like, who could be in jail that long? It's just hard for people to see that."

"I didn't realize how much I'd been holding in. Now there's hope that I can get out—this is the hardest time, just dealing with that hope."
–Ricky Olds

Even after the Miller ruling, courts across the country struggled to decide whether inmates already sentenced to life as juveniles should be given an opportunity to be paroled. Finally, this January, in Montgomery v. Louisiana, Justice Kennedy settled the question once and for all, ruling that all former juvenile offenders must be given the opportunity to show their crime did not reflect "irreparable corruption." If it did not, he wrote, "their hope for some years of life outside prison walls must be restored." Marsha Levick, the co-founder of the Juvenile Law Center and one of the lawyers in the Montgomery case, summed up the evolution of juvenile justice by noting simply that the courts had "recognized the inhumanity of condemning children to die in prison."

Miller and Montgomery make it clear that sentencing children to life without parole should, at the very least, be extremely rare. But determining who falls into that tiny dark category of irreparably corrupted children is no easy trick, and a number of states—including conservative ones like Texas, Wyoming, and Nevada—have abolished the sentence of life without parole for juveniles for all future crimes. Others, while not doing away with the punishment entirely, have taken steps to limit it to only the worst crimes; Pennsylvania has eliminated it for all but intentional, premeditated murders.

But hundreds of children, now grown, still await their fate as states prepare to re-sentence them.

"In some ways it was easier before Miller came along," Olds says now. "You had a certain bit in the jail, and you just went about your day-to-day. You didn't think about the future. You couldn't. Then Miller happens, and your patience goes out the window. Now everyone is thinking they're getting out. You're thinking about the streets. We never thought it was going to drag out like this. Everything gets on my nerves these days—I didn't realize how much I'd been holding in. Now there's hope that I can get out—this is the hardest time, just dealing with that hope."

His mother Daisy can't help thinking about his possible release. The Montgomery ruling has triggered new sentencing hearings for 500 inmates in Pennsylvania, and Olds may find himself in front of a judge before the year is out—a judge with the power to free him.

"I've been praying for that, I've been praying for that all these years," his mother says. "For everything there is a season. I think it's Ricky's season right now."

Marc Bookman is director of the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation in Philadelphia.

Illustration by Antonio Zeoli

This looks exactly like Donald Trump but it's actually an ingenious replica. All photos by Pete Voelker.

Donald Trump's board game is sort of the perfect metaphor for his campaign. For starters, he once announced that the profits from of it would go to charities, and it doesn't seem like they ever did. This fits a pattern of Trump bragging about his record of charitable giving, a record that is... hard to check. It's also possible that the game didn't make much in the way of profits, because it sucks really bad.

"It's not actually very fun." Jessica Mackler, the president of liberal Super PAC American Bridge 21st Century, told VICE. "There's really not a lot of clear instructions. It's just 'making deals.'"

The dice are made in China.

American Bridge was founded in 2010 by a former self-described "right-wing hitman" named David Brock. When the Republican National Convention isn't happening, the group is dedicated to fighting Republican talking points. This week, American Bridge has set up a pop-up museum dedicated to Trump out of a loft space rented on Airbnb. It's situated on top of an unassuming Rust Belt bar just off East Fourth Street, which for the convention has become a sort of Bourbon Street for sober political nerds. The project is a result of a year's worth of research into the man who claims his alleged business success makes him qualified to be president.

"We knew that a convention is about telling the story of a candidate, and we wanted to make sure that we told the true story of Donald Trump and who he really is," Mackler said. "And so we had collected so much of this material and felt this was a creative way to demonstrate Trump as a con man who scammed people out of money to get rich, as somebody who touts himself as a successful businessman but is really a litany of failed business ventures, and as someone who has a history of divisive, dangerous rhetoric."

Mementos from an airline and a football team that no longer exist.

Turning opposition research into a full-blown museum isn't an idea Mackler had ever heard of, and it's hard to imagine a similar series of exhibits on any other candidates being as entertaining. Here's a shirt from the failed football team the New Jersey Generals, there's a metal card passengers used to get onto Trump Shuttle flights. But there are also pieces of a much more serious nature, such as a photo of Trump with the former Miss Universe winner who says he belittled for gaining weight, and a 1927 edition of the New York Times that contains an article reporting the nominee's father was arrested for taking part in a Klu Klux Klan action.

"Over the course of his life there's this history of sexist and racist actions that goes beyond just this election cycle," said Mackler. "It's not just something he's doing to cater to a Republican base or for entertainment value. It's a part and parcel of who he is."

There are also materials that hint at a history of plagiarism, which is timely considering Melania Trump's Michelle Obama impression on the convention's opening night. When asked if that sort of behavior had any sort of precedent with the Trumps, Mackler pointed to a collection of documents from Trump University, the for-profit real estate program that's currently being sued by some of its former students for being an alleged scam. She said that some of the written materials had been lifted from other seminars. (Trump has generally denied being involved with any of the day-to-day operation of the seminars.)

TRUMP: the Game, like Trump the candidate but flatter and in pieces and you can buy it on Amazon or wherever.

Although the museum was open briefly to the public on Tuesday, at night it becomes a war room. American Bridge has 90 employees, which includes 12 staffers here who are conducting research as well as attending convention speeches to highlight any moments that are offensive or egregious or don't line up with the speakers' voting records—which is to say, they are very busy.

A virtual museum will be online at the end of the week, Mackler said, but looking at photos and reading descriptions of TRUMP: The Game won't quite do it justice. When I talked to Kevin McAlister, American Bridge's deputy communications director, he made an attempt to explain why the game was so strange—and it got me think that maybe it isn't just a bad product, but a window into the current state of American politics.

"It's like a crappy version of Monopoly," McAlister said. "First you roll the dice, and step two is literally just 'make deals.' There's no explanation of how you win or even what you're supposed to do. It's completely pointless, and you don't know it ends."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Check out Pete Voelker's website here.

The unlikely path of Jim Cummings's Thunder Road—a short film about an uptight police officer eulogizing his late mother—continues to surprise even as it's released today, in the midst of a month marred shootings of people by police, social unrest, and high-profile attacks on law enforcement.

While not overtly political, this tale of a young, small-town cop fumbling to find the right words to say at a funeral reframes perceptions of police in troubled times. The feelings exhumed are so raw and visceral that all pretense is wiped away. As his masculine identity becomes riddled with holes, he turns into a spectacle at a time when he would rather just be seen as any other grieving person.

The timing of the release of the Sundance Film Festival's 2016 Grand Jury Prize-winning short is as happenstance as the origin of film. Cummings came up with the idea after hearing about a friend who had sang at his mother's funeral, and decided that Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road" would be the one he'd sing to his mom when she died.

From there, the seed of the idea took typical indie turns—after writing the story, Cummings realized he was the one who should direct it, and act in it, and obviously produce it. He was also dead-set on doing it all in one continuous 13-minute take, in order to lock in on the cop's personality and state of mind. He even went as far to sell his wedding rings in order to fund it.

The explicit use of Springsteen's hit is another of Cummings's more unusual moves, since as a producer he's acutely aware of the difficulties in licensing popular songs. He dutifully ponied up $7,000 for limited rights to the song—but after he won Sundance, Sony Music requested $50,000 for a year if he wanted to put the film online. Instead, Cummings penned an open letter on Medium (that's since been taken down) appealing to the Boss himself for the right to put the song in his film on Vimeo for free. And the crazy thing is, it worked—as of last month, now has the rights to the song.

Thunder Road has now won prizes in festivals all over the world and it's online now for all to see. Watch the film below, and scroll down to check out my interview with the multi-talented Cummings.

VICE: Why did you want to make something where you are so utterly exposed both emotionally and professionally?
Jim Cummings: Professionally, I really wanted to show off, honestly. I knew I was a decent actor, but I would never get cast in something like this, so I had to write and direct it too. I wanted to make something super challenging, so I made it all one take, with lots of memorization, a big dance number, about everybody's biggest fears: mortality and public speaking.

Emotionally, I had seen Celia Rowlson-Hall's film The Audition and Trey Shults's film Krisha and was floored by how pathetic and vulnerable they make themselves on film. It's so rare that actors do that—actors usually try to seem cool on camera or propagate their own personality. There's something so wonderful about watching someone have a convincing breakdown on film to say something about humanity or drama, or in Celia's case, the audition process and the film industry.

You've worked a lot over the last few years producing some great films, but this is one of your first attempts at really taking the creative reins. What made you make the jump?
Ambition, I think. I was surrounded by people who were being celebrated for their movies that were supposed to be funny, but never made people laugh, and supposed to be dramatic, but never made people cry. As a producer I was unable to alter creatively and that turned into ambition. I said, "Fuck it, just let me do it." When I saw Krisha at SXSW I was really floored by it; they made this inventive, big story about family and addiction in a single house in Texas. The message to me was that you can make movies in your backyard, so long as you focus on the right stuff. The time had come for me to make the leap.

The song "Thunder Road" is central to your film and performance. What were you thinking by including it?
It had to be that song. "Thunder Road" has such a weight to it. We were playing with doing a karaoke cover, but it felt dishonest and sounded terrible. At the end of the day, against almost everyone's advice, I said, "Sorry, I'm doing it like this and that's that" and I didn't do too much thinking about it and then it was shot and I couldn't change it.

After you won Sundance, how long did it take before you realized, Shit, people like my film and I'm going to have to get rights if I want to keep screening it?
I'm not able to talk about it. All I can say is that I'm super glad that the movie is now available and thanks to everyone that helped out.

You wrote what became a widely distributed Medium post imploring Springsteen to either heavily discount or gift the song license to you in order to release Thunder Road online for free. What the fuck were you thinking?
No comment.

After that post, you received some negative feedback regarding your asking for something after the fact where you were the main party with something to gain. I know it's something you take very seriously as an artist who has produced art not expecting returns, but also as an artist who would like to make a living doing what he loves. How did you approach that contradiction and what do you think of the result?
Yeah, I was surprised by that. Filmmakers attacked me pretty thoroughly for that, a lot of those people ended up sending me private messages and helping me out! I think there's something about someone succeeding and bending the rules that makes anyone in any field uncomfortable, but you hear stories like this all the time. Yoko Ono gave the rights to the team that made I Met the Walrus. A few filmmakers have reached out to me saying that when they wrote to David Bowie he okayed the use of his music in their film. This stuff happens all of the time.

I rounded the square by telling myself that I'm not a pirate and that if you wanted to hear that song on YouTube or Vimeo, you could find 100,000 other places that were being terrible about it. I think overall, artists should never be in the business of saying, "You can't do that." Sometimes all it takes is a gentle reminder.

So what are you working on now?
Dustin Hahn and I just wrapped a series for Fullscreen, and I'm working like a madman on other stuff. I really want to make this show about astronauts and a kids' adventure movie with my girlfriend.

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as a film curator. He's the senior curator for Vimeo's On Demand platform. He has also programmed at Tribeca Film Festival, Rooftop Films, and the Hamptons International Film Festival.

You get to a point where words are just totally inadequate. Someone is held down and killed in an "officer-involved shooting." An angry young man walks into a nightclub and becomes an "active shooter." A "suspect" fires on police officers; later he is revealed to be a "lone wolf." A truck is steered into a crowd of people. Another cop, another man dying, bleeding to death while his fiancee sits next to him and films. More cops are murdered. Protesters are "taken into custody," sometimes while screaming and crying. Tanks roll through a foreign capital. These are "incidents," they are "BREAKING," they are upgraded to "tragedies," sometimes "terrorist attacks."

Every time, "officials" appear on television after these things to deliver "statements." These are often thoughtful, sometimes even powerful. "I have spoken at too many memorials during the course of this presidency," says President Barack Obama. "I've hugged too many families who have lost a loved one to senseless violence."

"There will be a temptation to let our danger harden our divisions," says House Speaker Paul Ryan. "Let's not let that happen."

The country's leaders always urge calm. They say the words we'd like them to say. Peace. Unity. Temperance in the face of pain. Then something else happens, another shaky cellphone video, another blurry horror on our monitors. We all want it to stop, but it keeps happening. "The vast majority of Americans today do not feel safe," intones former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani at the Republican National Convention. He sounds less like an authority figure than a man ready to lead an angry mob, but you wonder if he's right. When did we get so afraid?

"The world has always been stressful,"Mary McNaughton-Cassill tells me. She's a psychology professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio studying how the news media can affect stress levels. "There's always been disasters and shootings and wars. But prior to this century, if you heard about them at all it was through newspaper clippings. It was kind of delayed and distant."

Thanks to social media, the old saying about bad news traveling fast has been proven empirically true. The press has always trafficked in sensationalism in order to attract eyeballs, but now everyone can record disasters and death in real time on their phones, and everyone else can share those videos in an outpouring of outrage and grief.

Part of the problem is that humans evolved to survive in a world of predators, not smartphone news feeds. "Our brains are wired to look for danger and monitor it. And that worked better when you were looking for danger in the real world so the scope was limited," McNaughton-Cassill says. "But now we're seeing danger everywhere, all the time."

Pam Ramsden, a psychology lecturer at the UK's University of Bradford, says that this constant sense of danger can give some people symptoms that resemble post-traumatic stress disorder. Her studies have found that some people are more vulnerable to this, a group she calls the "supervigilant."

"They're the ones who are constant worriers: They're the ones who worry about the weather; when they're driving car accidents," she tells me. "Those are the ones who are more susceptible to PTSD." These people are also more prone to seeking out these traumatic videos and watching them over and over again. "They are drawn to them, traumatizing themselves, and I can't tell you why," she says. (She is currently studying this question.)

Even if you aren't compelled to investigate images of suffering like a tongue probing a rotted tooth, you still may come across moments of horrific violence casually scrolling through Facebook. And even the toughest-minded among us may feel queasy when faced with a video of murder. Statistics remind us how rare terrorist attacks actually are, and a quick google will inform you about the long trend of falling violent crime rates, but what are numbers compared to the sight of someone being shot and killed by a hate-filled maniac or an panicked cop?

Greg Epstein is the longtime Humanist chaplain at Harvard University and an advocate for godless congregations, a.k.a. "atheist churches"; he's a bit like a priest without a deity. In the past few turmoil-filled weeks, he tells me, he's had atheists, agnostics, and religiously unaffiliated people approach him "who just want some kind of comfort right now."

I asked Epstein, basically, how do you dig yourself out of the hole of pain that you can easily wind up in after seeing death after death on your phone? He told me that in a lot of cases, the news is painful because we are increasingly attuned to the struggles of others—black people fighting institutional police racism, French families celebrating in Nice, Syrian refugees hounded and killed by ISIS, kids in Orlando whose club became a murder scene.

"We're trying, slowly but surely, to figure out how to have compassion for the entire world. And that's really, really hard to do," says Epstein. But even when our anger and sadness are rooted in empathy, it's important to know when to pull back, realize the point at which we are just making ourselves miserable.

This can be a tricky balance. McNaughton-Cassill tells me that many of her students, who have never known a world without 24-hour news, are inclined to ignore headlines and politics entirely—but that seems to me like a form of surrender. A better way, she says, is to think critically about the stories we read and see, to remind ourselves that terrible events may be dramatic and noteworthy, but they are also incredibly rare. She also advises knowing what sort of material affects you. If, like her, you are disturbed by graphic images, get your news from the radio and text rather than Facebook and other video-heavy social media networks—if that's even possible.

Though it may be difficult, it's important to find ways of disconnecting from the wider universe and all its horrors in favor of the world you can reach out and touch. Many Humanists Epstein knows take a "social media sabbath" one day a week, and the chaplain says that some other parts of religious practice can also be helpful, like finding the time to come together with your community (i.e. church), focusing on what really matters to you (i.e. prayer).

"There are physiological reasons why those religious traditions actually help people," says Epstein. "There are things that happen in our bodies when we take time for rituals that transform our consciousness from a state of 'I'm worried about whatever,' to 'I'm focused on something in particular.' It lowers our blood pressure, it reduces the level of the stress hormone cortisol, all sorts of things."

"Sit quietly in contemplation" is sort of banal advice, but the media's anti-banality bias is maybe its most pernicious bias. It's worth reminding yourself that the stuff of everyday life—that is, actual life—is not made up of active shooter situations or calls for peace from politicians but the small happenings the media never bothers to report: People sitting, talking, coming together, improving what they can, piece by piece.

"You need to look around and find a place you can throw your efforts," is the advice McNaughton-Cassill gives to her students. "Say, 'I can't fix the shooting in Orlando but maybe I can work with a group that's working on mental health awareness... Don't think about changing the whole world, but if something really bothers you, think about whether you can put your efforts into some sort of work that makes you feel like you are contributing."

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

There's never been a time in my life where the subject of race seemed to be more discussed and dissected than it is today. It's fascinating how differently we can view something like death, which on the surface seems to be so cut and dry. Our ideas about race color everything we see, whether it is the extrajudicial killing of a young black men like Philando Castile or the shooting of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge. So when I found out I was going to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland this week, I knew I wanted to explore this gulf of viewpoints on race by talking to some people on the ground.

I've written about race extensively for VICE, and that has really helped me process what being young and black in America today means to me. I believe this country is institutionally racist, and that the violence we see between the police and the black community is one symptom of this painful fact. I believe that Black Lives Matter is a nebulous conglomeration of well-meaning activists who are fighting against this country's entrenched racism, not a hierarchal cabal plotting to kill cops. And I believe that until we can properly address institutional racism, we are likely to see a lot more of the violence that we all fear.

I know what I think, and if you've been following VICE, you probably know it, too. But I'm also curious as to how people who might vote for Donald Trump, a man who I think has used racism as currency in this election cycle, feel when they see the same images and read the same headlines that I do.

The responses I got on the convention floor were eye-opening in many regards. I was surprised at how Christianity could make some people more compassionate for the lost lives of people who don't look like them. I was fascinated by some of the more conspiracy-oriented ideas people had that related black millennial activists with mass shooters. And I was also intrigued by the ideas of blacks who've found their political truth within the Republican Party.

Here's what a handful of Republicans hanging out at the convention had to say to me about our country's ongoing issues with race and law enforcement.

Name: Burgundi Cain, Alternate Delegate
Age: 31
Hometown: Houston, Texas

The situation of race in America is worse than I've ever seen it. Obviously, I'm a millennial, so race has never been a huge issue for me. Some of my best friends are from places like the Virgin Islands and we're really close. There is no racial tension between us. I've also had ex-boyfriend who was Asian. So for me, personally, I've never seen this division. But now I'm seeing it on the streets. I work in downtown Houston and I just see people being aggressive towards each other. There is no connection and they are avoiding eye contact because they are afraid of what the other person is thinking.

The Dallas shootings put some of these issues on the map for people in Texas. These shootings on both sides makes me very sad. I've always believed you should never kill someone, no matter what and that all life at every stage matters, no matter who they are or what they stand for. The police officers need to change the way they engage the public. And groups like Black Lives Matter have the right to speak on those issues as long as they do it peacefully.

For the GOP to help our nation heal, they will have to start with the idea that all lives matter and say "Hey, what's going on is not OK on both sides." They need to pull in different cultures, because when you talk to people you realize that they often have the same values as you.

Name: Kira Inis, Alternate Delegate
Age: 29
Hometown: Los Angeles, California

One thing I have come to respect is our men and women in blue. When I see the police, I know I am safe. I know Johnny Law is there to come and take care of things. I understand how difficult their jobs can be. Will they do everything perfect? No. But it is not out of a malice or racially motivated.

When any human life is taken, such as these police shootings, it is sad. But you can't let that stop you from recognizing the decisions these people made that lead to them getting shot by the police. Look at Eric Garner, a man who was selling loosies and had a rap sheet a mile-long. When he was approached by the police, all the man had to do was comply. A lawful headlock was used on him, it only went wrong because Garner kept flailing around.

If black lives really mattered, don't you think people would do something about the epidemic of death in Chicago? There is a lawlessness in urban America. If you're not going to respect the life of yourself or others who look like you, why should I think you would respect those with a badge? So obviously, I expect when I hear of these incidences that the person who was shot did something ill-advised to get themselves killed.

And Black Lives Matter doesn't help at all. They are a bunch of racist, anarchist monsters who are responsible for the deaths of at least eight cops. All this blue blood is on their hands, because they were the ones who were chanting, "What do we want? Dead cops. When do we want them? Now!" What do you think is going to happen when you spew that kind of inflammatory rhetoric? Dallas and Baton Rouge, that's what.

I think that there was racism back in the day. But today, I think that racism is made up. It's in people's heads. It's manufactured by the white leftist elites whose mastermind agenda is to pit races, classes, and sexes against each other to keep the narratives of victimization of brown people going.

Name: Jim Miller, Delegate
Age: 41
Hometown: Hayward, Wisconsin

When I saw Baton Rouge, the the first thing I thought was just, Not another one. Not again. How long is this going to keep happening? My wife showed me the Minnesota shooting on my phone and I thought that wasn't right, too. I'm a concealed-carry permit holder, just like that guy. Philando seemed like he was doing the right thing. But we will have to wait for all the facts to come out.

I think we look at things by color and gender too much, which causes division. I look at people by what is in their head. I've got friends of all different races, religions, and orientations. I'm sure some of this Black Lives Matter movement is organic. But there might be some who are professional agitators, paid by Big Labor, who want to divide us. When you talk about race relations with the police, there is some justification for the anger BLM has. But there are good and bad people in every industry. So I'm not going to say every cop is an angel, but these people are trying to protect us.

I think the racism in this country really stems form the media. When I was in Milwaukee recently, walking with my 12-year-old daughter, I noticed that when she would see a group of black men, she'd grab on to me like she was concerned. But when we would see a black woman and their daughter, she'd be fine. So something made her do this and I think it is TV that is giving her a bad perception of young black men and it is really unfortunate. I had to sit her down and have a talk about it.

Name: Gale Sayers, Delegate
Age: 56
Hometown: Texas

Over the last eight years, I've seen a heightened division between black and white. I think this comes from the top—the President. When something like the shooting of officers happens, instead of taking the time to honor the policemen and their families, he spent a lot of time talking about gun control and racial stuff. As a black person, I don't hardly ever think or see color when I interact with people. I think that the more you talk about race, the worse it gets.

I never worry about my kids' interactions with police. They know if a policeman approaches them, they need to be respectful because they know that if anything goes wrong, that is who they have to call. So I can't even fathom what is happening now with people shooting the police. The cops are the people we call when we have problems. To call them and ambush them is just unthinkable. I've been watching the Cleveland police officers at the convention and it's just sad that they are putting their lives on the line for us and they have to watch their back.

There are many videos out there of officers interacting with white people and Hispanic people and things go wrong, too. It's not just blacks. People need to learn to stop fighting with the police. Has there ever been a rogue cop? I'm sure of it. But as a whole, they are here to protect us.

My grandkids are black. My father was the blackest shade of black. My brother is very dark skinned. I love blacks. I'm black. But we need to teach people to have more confidence in themselves and stop seeing themselves as victims. A lot of times we get so caught up in how "oppressed" we are and how "everyone hates us," instead of focusing on finding someone to help or mentor. This mentality of, "poor me, I've been oppressed so I am going to kill somebody..." How does it help?

Name: Todd Jennings, Alternate Delegate
Hometown: Tampa Bay, Florida
Age: 35

We've spent a long time politicizing how everyone is different. We need someone who can come in and show us again that we are Americans because we share things that are outside of race, religion, culture, history. We share a love of liberty and freedom and a belief in the dignity of our fellow man and I think we've lost that over the last couple of decades. I think Donald Trump can be that guy. He definitely made the right step in picking Mike Pence as his running mate.

It's tough to say if we're getting better or worse in regards to race relations. It feels like we are worse than we were eight years ago. But sometimes the worst of time precedes healing.

I think it is a shame how these shootings have been responded to. The media over sensationalizes it, which prevents us from having a conversation about it. As a white man, I can't say that I completely understand. But I acknowledge that young black men are targeted differently than whites. But we're going to have a hard time addressing that when the reaction to that is off the charts. We need to cool off to have a conversation about it.

I think Black Lives Matter is one of the clouds over the conversation that we should be having. I think that the initial idea probably had some merit. But when you are out chanting "death to cops," you're kind of defeating the purpose. If the goal is to raise awareness, you need to let people know you can have a conversation that can make things better. But I don't think they are contributing to that at this point.

Name: Richard and Leslie Kalama, Delegates
Home State: Hawaii
Age: 52

Richard: I blame the Democratic Party for our country's issues with race. The Democrats have not allowed blacks the opportunity to progress. They keep them in an economically depressed position to make them dependent on their party. I don't know how a black person in this country could even be a Democrat. The Democratic Party has offered nothing to the black community. Just look at how poorly the black communities are doing in cities run by Democrats. The Republican Party is about progress, business, and money. The Democrats are about making its supporters into victims.

As far as these recent shootings go, anytime anyone is killed, it is a tragedy. Our police have been known to use excessive force. I'm not saying that's the case with the Philando shooting, but it's very unfortunate either way. At the end of the day, I don't think that violence will ever work—whether the police are guilty or Black Lives Matter is guilty. It'd be nice if we had someone like a Martin Luther King, Jr., to come in and bring unity.

I bring up Black Lives Matter because they are the most visible group out there who has advocated for violence. We only know what we see on TV. But we've heard they've talked about killing white babies. You can see that on YouTube.

I do feel like black gun owners are treated differently than whites. I have a lot of friends in law enforcement who will hate me for saying this, but when you see a black person with a gun, you tend to get more afraid, which is racist and wrong. I know black gun owners who are law-abiding citizens and shouldn't be treated any different than me.

I believe the Heavenly Father is colorblind. God created us the way we are. Our diversity is what makes this world beautiful. I would not want to live in a world where there were only white people—it wouldn't be good. Having the variety makes this world a better place.

Leslie: I'm for the law enforcement. They have a very hard job to do and everybody just cries racism so fast before they even know the whole story. You have to put yourself in the situation of the officers. With some black people, I don't even think they really know the history of racism or slavery in the US. Republicans never owned any slaves. It was all the Democrats. But for some reason, a lot of blacks hate us.

These responses have been edited for clarity and length.

Follow Wilbert L. Cooper on Twitter.

The author (on the right) drinking a bottle of vodka he followed to a house party

Years ago, before Clarkson-era Top Gear and protracted political disasters were how the world kept up to date with the UK, the way they'd teach foreigners about this country was to commission renowned writers to write essays about it.

Last week I picked up one that George Orwell wrote during WWII, named "The English People". It was part of a series that was intended to help preserve British culture if the Germans ended up winning the war and immediately launching a campaign to turn all Cumberlands into bratwurst and make English men wear extremely tight swimming trunks. Though it mentions little things like our indifference to politics, dwindling patriotism and stiff upper lips, the true constant over its 50 pages is our obsession with one thing: boozing.

It doesn't matter whether he's talking about the English language or our moral and political outlook; Orwell's observations always seem to end up back at "the basic institution of British life", the pub. Which makes sense, as the pub – the one place where class, creed and company didn't really matter after six pints of 1950s stout – would have been the best place to paint a representative portrait of Britain.

But it's not any more: over the past 20 years, pubs have gone through a transformation, pricing out lower earners, ostracising smokers and replacing billiards tables with venison burgers served on bricks. They've also been closing down at a rate of 29 a week, which doesn't seem like a great sign. So what's happening? Are people not interested any more? Are we now all teetotal dweebs who prefer spending our Friday nights working out and drinking almond milk mocktails? Are we fuck. We have the corpse of Madam Mim as our prime minister; of course we're drinking.

Take Scotland: last year alone, the equivalent of 41 bottles of vodka were sold to every adult in the country. But where is all that vodka going? Where do people of different classes, creeds and cultures go to drink now they're not going to the pub? Their front rooms? Parks? Public swimming pools? Outside primary schools?

To find out, and to hopefully build some kind of portrait of Britain's drinkers in 2016, I hung around in some supermarkets like an absolute creep, waiting for people to buy a bottle of vodka so I could follow them out to wherever they were going.

SAINSBURY'S, EAST DULWICH: THURSDAY, 6:45PM.

It's a sticky Thursday night. The kind of night we all pretend we want a barbecue, when really the absolute worst thing to do is stand next to a pile of hot burning coal. I'm standing in a Big Sainsbury's looking at cat food. I've never owned a cat. There's a conveyer belt of people in the alcohol aisle, but they're not interested in vodka; they're pretty much all going for white whine or crates of Carlsberg.

You'll be glad to know that it takes less than 30 minutes of my watching people and rotating the same box of Whiskers to rouse suspicions. A security guard comes and stands beside me for five minutes, realises I'm not a threat – just a bit fucking weird – and ambles off towards the clothes section. Eventually a bottle of Russia's finest is snatched and I'm onto my first purchaser. I loop around, catching them head-to-head at the rolled oats.

After bumbling through a rehearsed explanation of what I'm up to, the couple embarrassedly start cracking gags about the fact the respective bottles of rum and vodka they've picked out are Sainsbury's Basics, and how I must think they're alcoholics. I assure them that I don't give a shit, asking what they plan on doing with their evening, and they chuckle, explaining they'll be dipping into each bottle at home in front of the TV.

An astonishingly accommodating couple, they don't seem fazed when I ask to join them for a drink. So we pass through the checkouts and join them for a walk over the road. Entering the estate, however, the impulse of the invite has passed and I sense trepidation. After a quick discussion, we decide I should help with shopping bags to the flat but give that shared drink a miss. Three's a crowd, after all.

LUKS SUPERMARKET , STOKE NEWINGTON: SATURDAY, 00:30AM.

I'm heading south after a casual drink at a friend's house, a little bit pissed. Having missed my bus to Waterloo, I decide to head into a 24-hour place for an energy drink, and – lo and behold – a couple are stood in the doorway holding a bottle of vodka. They're having one of those inconsequential drunk arguments all couples have, so I decide to butt in, because that's exactly what people want and need in that situation: a stranger with a Lucozade asking if he can join the party. To my surprise, I can: I'm invited to join them at a gathering just down the road.

One small thing I forgot: I hate vodka. The moment it touches my tongue my entire body recoils and it feels like someone's started a house fire in my throat. People laugh and ask how old I am. "Fourteen," I reply. The vibe is actually really good and people are pretty funny. Responding to my story of how I got this shit haircut, one of the guys tells me I look like Pauline Quirke from Birds of a Feather. I laugh and agree, telling him he looks like Sue from Light Lunch. We get on.

The vodka stops tasting so bad, bathroom trips become more frequent and I get into a heated debate with someone about whether or not the Bowie street party in Brixton was a statement of white privilege. Obviously, by this point, hours have disappeared from my phone's clock, but at some point I remember the vodka: it's nowhere to be seen. I wind down the staircase and my eyes rattle around the room. It's not on the table, under the sofa or in the bedroom – but eventually I find it, being clutched by two girls outside. So with the sun rising, we see it off.

WAITROSE, HIGH STREET KENSINGTON: SATURDAY, 3:30PM.

Waitrose is a portal to another dimension; one that Hyacinth Bucket took control of in 1995. A place where "limoncello dessert" is deemed an Essential. Could this be where Britain's stately drinkers hide in 2016?

It's a weekend, but there are prams marauding and legions of school children dressed in high-vis jackets. The shelves are packed with things like Heston Blumenthal's lapsang souchong tea smoked salmon, flamboyant body gel and 56 different types of herbal tea. I could name most of them from memory, because I've been stood in Waitrose Kensington for almost three hours. And that's not because people aren't buying vodka. They love vodka, they just don't want the creep with the unwashed Pauline Quirke hair and suspicious Strongbow sunglasses taking photos of them or coming back to their houses. I've made the decision to leave and am racing to the checkouts when I notice a bottle of Grey Goose being fondled at the end of the aisle, so I rush over and make my case.

The lady with the Goose seems equal parts sceptical and entertained by my idea. Funnily enough, she arrived in from Moscow last night after a short trip away and has returned with a taste for vodka (I should go, she assures me, as it's "only a few hours away"). Eventually we come to an agreement: I'll not be invited to her house, but if I buy her this bottle of Grey Goose she'll pose for a picture now and send a photo of her enjoying it at home later on. It's a shitty deal, I know, but you take what you can when you've been lingering around in a supermarket for most of a Saturday afternoon.

Still waiting for that photo. 38 fucking quid, I spent, for nothing.

MORRISONS, PECKHAM: SUNDAY, 10:30AM.

It's the early afternoon, the sun is shining and it's too hot to do literally anything. It's the kind of day that would have inspired the sweaty Britons of yesteryear to pack into a pub garden, take shelter under a parasol and complain about the heat with friends and family. So where are they now? Well, there's a queue at the spirits and cigarette kiosk. At the front of it, a trio of guys are having some trouble with a security guard. The tall and lanky youngest of the three is eventually escorted out, which is a weird thing to see on a Sunday morning. I get talking to the remaining two. When I ask what they're drinking, the older one explodes into a story about his home country, Russia.

"Are you drinking it out in the sun?" I ask.

"Yeah, bro. In the sun in a spot not far away."

"Do you mind if I come for a drink?"

"Tell you what – you chip in and you can have a drink."

"Deal."

So I hand over five pound coins to the guy. Next comes a disagreement over what type of vodka to buy, and eventually we all agree on a bottle of Smirnoff. Heading towards the door, a security guard blocks our path. He peeks at the receipt for the Smirnoff, smacks his hand against my rucksack and pushes me on. Outside, our ejected lanky friend shouts excitedly, "Got rum?" We do not. The spot is a wall on the far side of the Morrisons car park. I'm fine to take photos, I'm told, but our lanky man doesn't want to be in them, so runs out of view. After taking a few, he asks if I'd like a photo with me and the other two. "Sure!" I say, handing my phone over.

"Don't hand that man your iPhone, you fucking imbecile!" the Russian man erupts. It takes a moment for the penny to drop, but drop it does as the lanky man cracks into a sinister cackle. He was obviously going to take my phone, wasn't he? I'm not in, am I? I'm as in as Chunk doing the truffle shuffle. I fake laugh and take a swig of vodka. Moments later, the security guard emerges from the supermarket and they quickly assemble. Do I want to move with them onto their next spot? No. I refuse to be a fucking Screech.

Drinking is not just a part of British culture; it is British culture. An autonomous force that becomes the defining factor of whatever we do as soon as we've started doing it. It is one of the only things many of us have in common with each other. It's ingrained into our psyche, and that's why – like a debilitating super virus – it will always find a way to mutate and adapt to our incomes, surroundings or political climate.

I can't say I discovered much I didn't know in my quest. People don't generally invite strange men into their homes, drunk people are the first to invite you to a party and wealthier people have no qualms about taking from the poor (me). But it did make one thing clear: you can destroy the pub trade but it won't stop anyone from drinking.

@Oobahs

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Former Toronto police officer Marc Rainford. Photo submitted.

Marc Rainford is full of mixed messages.

The former Toronto police constable quit his job July 8 following a three-year struggle with depression. It was exacerbated, he said, by racial tensions that have been mounting in the city.

"Seeing the deterioration police and community... listening to the hatred. People aren't being constructive about policing, they're using hatred as a form of empowerment against police and it's not productive," Rainford, 44, told VICE in an interview Tuesday morning.

In recent months, anti-black racism organization Black Lives Matter Toronto has called out law enforcement for perpetuating systemic racism; most recently the group asked that police not have an official presence at future Pride parades. South of the border, the shooting deaths of two black men, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, at the hands of police, were met with fury, sparking protests across the US. In the immediate aftermath, two targeted attacks on police—one in Dallas and the other in Baton Rouge, where Sterling was killed—left a total of eight cops dead. The incidents have thrust a spotlight on racism in the context of policing.

Rainford, who is black, worked as a constable in Scarborough for 10 years, before eventually moving into Police and Community Engagement Review (Project PACER), which was established in 2012 to determine how cops could "enhance public trust and safety, while delivering bias free service."

He said a negative experience he had with with a cop in 2001 is what prompted him to become an officer. He'd witnessed two young men handling a gun at Don Mills Centre and soon after tapped on the window of a nearby police cruiser to report the incident. In response, he said he was treated suspiciously.

"He jumped out of the car came around, he patted me down really quick said 'I need to check you for weapons,'" Rainford said.

"In my head my initial thing was, 'Why not just ask me what these guys look like and go to your radio?' That's not what happened, it was all focused on me." As the interaction was ending, the cop offered Rainford a ride back to work. When Rainford declined, he said the cop asked "'Are you embarrassed to be driven to work in a cop car?' That was the part that really really upset me. Here's a guy that's saying that because I'm a racialized person."

Rainford claims he's not a defender of police, but his views quite often seem to suggest just that.

While he admitted systemic racism was an issue in policing (and called Toronto Police Association spokesman Mike McCormack "reckless" for suggesting otherwise), he supports carding and said he's not convinced BLMTO's tactics are effective.

VICE asked Rainford why he's critical of BLMTO and about some of the major race-based challenges currently facing the city's police force:

VICE: Do you think BLMTO is the cause of this "hatred" against police you mentioned?
Marc Rainford: They're the lightning rod for it. My opinion of them is very mixed. I understand that they represent the lived experiences of the most victimized, I really get that and I really empathize with that position. That voice needs to be heard. By the same token, there are ways to have that heard that motivate and inspire people to be their best selves; I don't believe the way in which it's going about is effective or helpful.

What do you think needs to happen to make progress on this issue?
The hate that goes back the other way is when people get mad at BLMTO and say 'What about black men killing black men?' Society is aware that black men are killing black men, that's not a secret. But to always have a rebuttal of aggression to the other side rather than listen to BLM and say 'We hear you and we feel you and we're going to work towards a better relationship' is not saying that the people currently in power are guilty of something, it is an acknowledgement that historically we've failed. Both sides don't want to own things—that hasn't happened for a small part of the black community and it hasn't happened enough for people in law enforcement, to hear a group like Black Lives Matter say 'Officers we hear you. We hear that the rate of homicide within the black community at the hands of the black community is a big problem for you.' We need to hear BLM acknowledge that.

Did you witness systemic racism at play while you a police officer?
I didn't witness it as a practice but I witnessed it as a lived experience. When you're in a police car and you receive information over the radio that something's happened and descriptions are very vague, people will say 'he's a male black, dark clothing.' You know how many people that covers in a given area? Police officers are not shy people, if they see 1,000 people that match that description, they are going to talk to as many of the thousand as they can and that is a very fair and responsible thing for police officers to do. If they did not do that, crime would not be solved. The problem is in policing is that police officers don't see their job as having any sort of residual emotional impact. So if I come and I investigate you and I don't tell you what's going on, but I treat you like you might have been involved in a crime, when I'm done and I realize you're not the person I'm fine with that. But I've left you feeling like you going to the grocery store has criminalized you.

What are your thoughts on carding?
It is a real shame that it's gone. It's a shame that was misused. If it was used properly there's so much value in it. The simplest thing was solved with a card. When you find a purse, nine out of 10 times it doesn't have a wallet in it because the person has stolen the wallet but they will leave everything else in that purse. When you start to run all the little identifiers in that purse, because of carding you're able to return things to people. I remember carding people where my contact with them at the time was the very contact that exonerated them from something. Nobody wants police to do all the things they do until they themselves are a victim. And then once you become a victim you want police to have the authority to have everything. You want the police to stop every car, talk to every single person, get their fingerprints, you want the police to identify the person that victimized you at all costs.

But there's no hard data that proves carding helps solve crimes. Everything you've said is anecdotal.
It is anecdotal. All people seem to care about is the criminal side of policing. The amount of work that officers do and the amount of that work that turns out to be criminal is relatively low. Because it's relatively low people have now taken away a tool that assisted their daily lives a lot more. The public are the ones that are going to be victims of their own decisions. People weigh in on policing all the time. Everybody thinks they know how to do this job, because they see it on TV, they have an opinion. 'Why does it take three officers to arrest somebody?' Well there's a reason why.

But when you look at the deaths of people like Jermaine Carby, should police be better at de-escalating situations?
I think all police officers should be better at de-escalating. If everybody in society knew that officers were highly skilled at de-escalation people would be a lot more comfortable. But people are isolating certain factors without looking at the context of policing. There is no other job in which your work environment is constantly changing. If you have to walk into a house that you've never been in before and you're there for a violent domestic and the person you have to arrest is standing in the kitchen, in the kitchen there are a lot of knives. To now put on the police officer you have to stay focused on de-escalation when you don't know how many rooms are in a house, you don't know what weapons are in the house, it is a little bit naive by the public to make this assertion that officers should just be able to de-escalate things in any situation.

Well there's some situations where—when you look at Sammy Yatim—it seems obvious there should have been better de-escalation because the officer was later convicted of murder.
People that have never been in those situations will always tell you they can do it better. People are so convinced that they can do policing better than police officers can.

I don't know if people are convinced that they can do policing better than police officers, I think they think police can do a better job. And as much as you want to argue about going into a house and not knowing who's in there, that's your job.
The Toronto police I think last year received just over 3 million calls for service and attended almost a million calls. If you then go on the police website and see how often use of force was used, it's next to none. When officers are required to use force or if they make a bad call on using force it becomes the trigger point for society to re-evaluate police.The average citizen hates the police. The public is swaying towards let's not trust the police, let's not help the police, let's not make communities safer through the police.

Why don't people trust them?
Because they've had shitty lived experiences and those lived experiences are at the hands of officers who have not empathized with the public. So I'm not blaming the public at all. I don't blame the public, I don't blame police. Within society, we need to change the discourse. The 'us versus them' is not police versus community, that's the wrong dividing line. There are police and community members that are committed to working together to make society better, that's the 'us.' The 'them' are police officers that don't feel working with the community is valuable and community members that refuse to work with the public or with the police because they don't think it will ever produce results. Let's put them in a room and get them to work together and say 'OK children, you need to sort your shit out.'

Speaking of, do you think someone from Toronto police, maybe Chief Mark Saunders should have met with BLMTO protesters during tent city and started a dialogue?
Protesting in front of police headquarters, at best is symbolic. The kinds of things that BLMTO is asking for—the chief of police doesn't have the power to change law. When you have an issue with how policing is done as a profession, there is nothing the chief of police can do. The chief of police can come out and speak to people absolutely and empathize but when you're actually talking about fundamental change, that's the Police Services Act.

I think there's a strong argument that him coming out and addressing that crowd and acknowledging some of their concerns could have gone a long way even if, as you said, it's more symbolic.
I totally agree, it could have. To date we don't get a sense from BLMTO that somebody coming out and acknowledging them would satisfy. It might actually escalate the situation.

BLMTO is not known for being a violent group so when you say escalation, I'm not sure what you mean.
I'm not suggesting at all that people would go violent, but what I am suggesting that to automatically assume that him coming out would have disrupted how long BLM stayed, how they would feel after, we'll never know. So, I don't like talking about the what if. I'm not against or defending either side.

How do you think BLMTO's demand that police not have an official presence at future Pride parades is impacting officers?
For officers a lot of this stuff doesn't change what they have to do as their job, it's one more obstacle that they have to face. The average officer is just in a place now where they're like 'OK, we still have to answer radio calls, we still have to help victims, and now we have to do it with a whole lot of criticism for who we are and what we're about.' Officers are used to being criticized for everything they, that is the culture. It's sad to see people who with the best intentions wanted to do something good for society hear that. But it's also sad to see that the public feels like they're targeted. It's sad on both sides. It is really tragic times right now.

This interview has been edited and condensed for style and clarity.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

(Spirited Away still via YouTube)

There's a quote on Tumblr somewhere that says "Disney movies touch the heart but Studio Ghibli films touch the soul." As sentimental as that is, it's also astute. It's surely part of the reason that anime fans across the world will testify that Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away is the best animation film of all time. On the 15th anniversary of its release in Japan, Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi – translated as "Sen and Chihiro's Spiriting Away" – remains untouched by rivals for its blend of the spiritual, the realistic, the fantastic and the human. For balancing all of those realms, Miyazaki was the master, and since his retirement we'll continue to look on Spirited Away as the film that was the masterpiece of his life.

At its most basic, the film follows a little girl, Chihiro, on a journey to free her parents. She has to navigate the spirit world she gets trapped in by working in a bathhouse run by an overlord called Yu-baaba. Miyazaki said he'd decided to make it based on the 10-year-old daughter of friend, associate producer Seiji Okuda, who came to stay with him every summer. With this in mind, he made the movie for 10-year-old girls. This is exactly why it resonates so well with people of all ages and why Chihiro feels so real. How often can you say a film has been made for young girls, rather than money or mainstream audiences?

Many male critics described Chihiro as a "sullen" and "spoilt" girl, and continue to describe her as such. This is hardly a fair criticism, nor is it an accurate one. When we meet Chihiro, she's being driven away from her home and everything she knows to live in a new town. All she has to remember her friends is a bouquet. "The only time I got a bouquet and it's a goodbye present. How depressing," she says, only to be reminded by her mum that her dad bought her one for her birthday. She shrugs this off, understandably. Few 10-year-olds would behave so well given the upheaval. When the family exit the car, entranced by the lead up to the abandoned theme park which will soon trap them, Chihiro is "whiny" because her intuition is correct. She follows behind her parents, worried by the little shines and the appearance of the food with no vendor, warning that they shouldn't be there. These critics will see that she spends the remainder of the film labouring not only for their ignorance but also the fact that they ignore the voice of a young girl.

(Still via Wiki)

What sets her story apart is that Chihiro isn't forced to triumph over great evil and turn from a "sullen" creature to a good girl. Far better than that, it's a film about honest development. Miyazaki shows her slowly forcing herself to adapt to her environment and be open to the tasks ahead, quietly tackling them as best she can. She has trouble walking down the steps to the boiler man, Kamaji, but eventually manages to make it down. Kamaji keeps ignoring her but she knows she must get a job at the bathhouse to survive in this new spirit world, so doesn't stop until he helps her. Her careful thinking and determination quickly reward her when she realises a stinky spirit was actually a polluted river spirit who needed to be freed from all the junk surrounding it. The fact the film was made without a script only adds to this natural evolution of Chihiro. "I don't have the story finished and ready when we start work on a film," Miyazaki once told Midnight Eye . "It's not me who makes the film. The film makes itself and I have no choice but to follow." The entire team must instead live the character's reality step by step and you can feel this intuition.

Caught in the flow of narrative are some of the most beautiful stills in modern cinema, let alone animation. As critic Roger Ebert pointed out in his review of the film, each frame is made with an overwhelming amount of "generosity and love". Dozens of different creatures are made for each moment, every last detail penned by hand in the corners or background, where anyone else would make shortcuts. Importantly, we have time to breathe and live in Miyazaki's world. He said that these scenes where nothing really happens are called "ma", or emptiness. "The people who make the movies are scared of silence so they want to paper and plaster it over," he said. "They're worried that the audience will get bored. But just because it's 80 percent intense all the time, doesn't mean the kids are going to bless you with their concentration. What really matters is the underlying emotions – that you never let go of those." Interestingly, it's the "ma" moments that have become iconic as the film has aged – Chihiro standing on the balcony outside the bedroom looking out to sea, lost; Chihiro and her friends, No-Face, Boh and the Yu-Bird sat looking lost on a train.

(Still via Wiki)

This beauty is universal, but of course there's subtlety that's lost in translation. Plenty of Japanese speakers have pointed out the visual clues in the film that non-Japanese speakers wouldn't know. When approaching the doomed theme park market in the opening, in one frame we see the Kanji character, 狗for dog, but this could suggest the homophone "kuniku" which literally means bitter meat, meaning something which requires personal sacrifice. Another character here for "bone" seems to hint towards an idiomatic phrase hone-nashi meaning to lack in moral backbone. When the father marches greedily through an arch, a Japanese viewer would note that some of the characters on it are back to front, supporting the unease Chihiro is also feeling. Some viewers have highlighted the repetition of the characters "yu" and "me" in the film since "yume" means dream in Japanese.

Names themselves are important as a signifier of identity throughout. Chihiro's name literally means "a thousand" and "asking questions" or "searching/seeking". When Yu-baaba takes a character from Chihiro's name to cruelly rename her and sign the contract handing the girl over to her, Chihiro's new name, Sen, just means "a thousand". She's stripped of that meaning; she's herself but there's a part of her that's missing. The other characters' names also have literal connotations. Boh means little boy or son, Kamaji means old boiler man, Yu-baaba means bathhouse old woman or witch and Zeniiba means money witch.

As with any film that has quickly reached a cult status, you can fall down a hole of Spirited Away theories. One suggests that the whole thing is an allegory for child prostitution, with the bathhouse taking on more sinister undertones. Miyazaki did once say that Japanese society has become like the sex industry. Another reading is that the spirit world represents old Japan, one that is struggling alongside new Japan, the "real" world of Chihiro and her family. In this case, the moral of the story is that, like Chihiro, Japan should learn that both past and present worlds can exist alongside each other but must adapt and change. Some look to the opposing forces of gross capitalism and spirituality shown in the film. Chihiro is moving towns because her dad has a new job. When they approach the theme park, her dad comments that they were going to put a river there but didn't – they built a failed money making venture instead. The other day someone tweeted asking Studio Ghibli what the relevance was of Chihiro's parents turning into pigs . They replied that the transformation is reflective of how people turned into pigs during Japan's bubble economy of the 1980s, which was followed by a 1991 crash, and once someone becomes a pig they gradually have the "body and soul of a pig" which "doesn't just apply to the fantasy world".

(Image via Wiki)

What anyone of any age can take away from Spirited Away is the importance of balance. There's no evil character, despite poor motives. Everyone has a good side or the potential for good – even Yu-baaba, as seen in her twin sister. The mud monster isn't actually terrible but underneath it all is a kama no kami, a god of the river. The opposite of balance is excess and as seen in the parents gorging themselves until they become pigs or the greed and wealth displayed in the bath house, nothing positive can come of it.

This delivery of sensitive spiritual and emotional messages made Spirited Away the highest-grossing film in Japanese history. It won awards across the world, including an Academy Award, an event which Miyazaki politely declined to attend because he was against American involvement in the war in Iraq. Significantly, it was with this film that he introduced hundreds of thousands to the films of Studio Ghibli, who might not have discovered the animation house otherwise. It's a rare film that any young fan will keep with them and show to their children and grandchildren. Ultimately, Spirited Away showed how breathtaking, heartfelt and serious animation can be; its lessons ones that Pixar, Disney and other mainstream animators have still failed to genuinely realise fifteen years later.

@hannahrosewens

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Racism is, inarguably, a foundational element of American society. Fortunately, many Americans have started to address their implicit and explicit prejudices—but if confronting our own racism is difficult, tackling the prejudices of our parents is damn near impossible. Whether it's embarrassing comments we'd rather ignore or destructive reactions that alter our relationships forever, the negative ways in which our parents engage with race has an impact on our lives.

Acknowledging a parent's racism can be awkward and painful, as well as a necessary first step to fostering constructive conversations. With that in mind, here are some stories from some forthcoming souls about the most racist thing their parents ever did.

THEY TOOK ME OFF THE FAMILY PLAN FOR DATING A BLACK MAN

My parents always got stiff anytime they talked to a black person, and they'd quickly change the channel when a "black TV show" came on. When I hit puberty, I found myself almost exclusively attracted to black guys. Meeting black guys in real life was too risky, so I opted for online dating, where my first relationship took place over picture messages and FaceTime calls. I always covered my tracks and kept my phone on hand, but I eventually slipped up: I walked into the kitchen, and my mom was staring down at my phone in horror at a photo of my black beau's smiling face. She looked up at me and—swear to God—shed a literal tear before leaving the room. Later that night, my dad told me I was no longer on the family phone plan. "You won't use something we pay for to talk to those people."

THEY GOT THEIR DNA TESTED

My mom's side of the family has always claimed strong English roots. I've never been convinced in the purity of our bloodline, though, because there's something not entirely European about our facial features. People throughout my life have asked me what I really am and are unsatisfied when I tell them that I come from strictly English stock. At a family reunion, I was sitting at a table with my mother and some family members, so I posed a simple question: "Does anybody know if we're part Asian? Maybe even Middle Eastern?" The idea was quickly dismissed. Later that night, I found out that my mom had spent a ton of money on one of those at-home DNA testing kits. "I thought about what you said at dinner," she told me, "and I just want to make sure nothing is wrong."

MY DAD REMEMBERED NOTHING... BUT HIS HATRED OF THE MIDDLE EAST

My father was born in West Virginia and lived most of his life in Ohio; in both places, he surrounded himself with other white people. That changed toward the end of his life when we sent him to live in a nursing home with a diverse staff. Even though the nurses were equally friendly, he showed a strong preference for the white nurses, saying things to them like, "It's just nice to know I'm in good hands now." He was suffering from dementia and struggled to remember anything. Since he virtually ignored the nurses of color, it was pretty obvious to us what was going on, but we shrugged it off until one day when we found my father watching wall-to-wall 9/11 anniversary coverage. At one point, a nurse who was clearly of Middle Eastern descent and wearing a headscarf walked in the room, and my father turned toward her and yelled, "Get the hell out of my room!" I was mortified.

MY MOM WAS RACIST AGAINST HER OWN KIND

My mom and uncle grew up in the hood. Their mother was chronically ill and their father left them at an early age, so they each lost huge chunks of their childhoods working side gigs after school to support the family. Fortunately, they each built pretty great lives for themselves and their own families. My uncle and his wife's first child was a girl, but some minor complications kept my aunt and baby cousin in the hospital for a few extra days. During that time, my mom invited my uncle to come over for a home-cooked meal, and as soon as she cleared the table, she dramatically clutched my uncle's hands and said, "You need to give that baby girl up for adoption. Black men don't raise girls right." I can still feel the weight of my jaw fall as it hit the floor. My uncle abruptly left, and it took years for them to rebuild their relationship (during which he very successfully raised his daughter, by the way).

WHITE PEOPLE SMELL LIKE SANDWICH MEAT

I grew up in a tight-knit, churchgoing community in rural Virginia. My family, my church, and most of my friends were black, but I had a few white friends from school. When I was 16, everybody from my congregation was going to make a road trip to Atlanta for a church convention, and since my pastors encouraged community building, my parents let my brother and I invite one friend each to come along. I picked my white friend Stacey, but my parents shut me down. "White people smell like wet dog and bologna," my dad said. "I'm not going to put up with that shit for eight hours." I ended up bringing a black friend who threw up in the back seat of my dad's car. It smelled much worse than bologna.

ONLY WHITES SUFFER FROM DEPRESSION

I was a sad, fat black girl without many friends who started cutting at 12. I eventually found my place within a ragtag group of misfit white kids who supported one another when no one else would. A few days after my 15th birthday, I reached a breaking point and told my mom, "I'm so sad, but I don't know why. Something is wrong with me." I'll never forget her response: "Girl, you better get out of my face, trying to be like your white friends. You're not depressed, that doesn't happen to black people."

MY WHITE MOM TOLD ME NOT TO EAT MY ASIAN AUNT'S FOOD

The first time my white family met my Asian aunt that eloped with my uncle was at my grandmother's house during a weekly family dinner. I was nervous about how my family would react, but it was a beautiful day, and everybody was having a great time. My grandmother's dog liked my aunt, too, as she played with it for a few minutes before retreating into the kitchen to prepare a salad. My mother's face froze, and as she locked eyes with my grandmother, I realized that they didn't trust my aunt to wash her hands before making the salad. At dinner, my mother and grandmother avoided the salad, and my mother physically stopped the bowl from reaching me. A week later, I was watching a show that mentioned the Chinese Yulin Dog Meat Festival, and my mother walked by and said, "That's why I didn't let you eat that salad."

MY DAD SAW WILLIAM HUNG EVERYWHERE

Like a lot of Americans in the early 2000s, my family was obsessed with American Idol. Laughing at the bad auditions was our favorite bonding activity—especially William Hung. Watching an Asian man sing "She Bangs!" for 60 seconds was the funniest thing my dad had ever seen, and for years afterward, my dad would chuckle and start singing "She Bangs!" under his breath every time he saw an Asian man in public. One time, we were at a baseball game, and my dad had a few beers under his belt, so he suddenly began singing "She Bangs!" loud enough for me to hear from a few seats away. I looked over and realized it was because an Asian man was walking near his side of the aisle. The white couple sitting behind my family realized what was going on, and audibly said "wow," which triggered the Asian guy to realize what was going on. He looked pissed, but my drunk black dad just sang louder—and he added a little dance, too.

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