Last week, in the wake of a grand jury report that concluded at least 300 priests had preyed on some 1,000 children across Pennsylvania since the 1940s, attorneys general in New York and New Jersey announced investigations into Catholic Church sexual abuse. Missouri, Nebraska, and Illinois have launched state-level probes as well—and more are likely to follow. New York went so far as to issue civil subpoenas in all eight of its dioceses—New Jersey has created a special criminal task force to look into seven—calling for the production of internal Church documents that relate to the handling of abuse cases. The dioceses, for their part, have pledged transparency in working with investigators.

The wave of official scrutiny comes on the heels of what can only be described as a disastrously scandal-ridden summer for the Catholic Church. In addition to the outrageous findings in Pennsylvania, Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, DC, was removed from the ministry and resigned from the College of Cardinals after being accused of sexually abusing a teenager, other minors, and adult seminarians. Pope Francis has yet to officially weigh in on the saga, but has been rocked by accusations from a rival archbishop who claimed the pontiff knew of McCarrick's behavior and went so far as to demand he resign from the papacy.

Even if the pope himself is unlikely to ever face any kind of criminal prosecution over what he did or did not know and when, it does seem as if we're in the midst an unprecedented moment. Francis will reportedly meet with embattled leaders of the US Catholic Church Thursday, and it's fairly clear what they'll be talking about: With these recently-formed investigations coming in a new era of awareness about the scope of sexual misconduct, America is virtually certain to learn a lot more in the weeks ahead about cover-ups, misdeeds, and the general workings of the Church hierarchy.

But where will it all lead? What is the worst-case scenario for the Catholic Church in America, besides more bad press and a handful of high-level priests losing their jobs? To get a sense of the legal terrain, we called up John C. Manly, a sexual-abuse lawyer based in Los Angeles who has advocated for dozens of people abused by Catholic clergymen and others and has seen the spectacular ability of the Church to withstand law-enforcement scrutiny up close.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

VICE: After the bombshell report out of Pennsylvania, the attorney general in Missouri announced that he would launch a similar investigation, and the Archdiocese of St. Louis, for one, pledged its complete corporation. Then, the attorneys general in New York and New Jersey launched similar investigations. Is this something new that we’re seeing—the multiple intensive investigations and the apparent cooperation of the dioceses?
John C. Manly: The scandal has had a few evolutions. The first one was really Gilbert Gauthe, in the late 80s. He was a priest in Louisiana who molested dozens and dozens of children. That was basically the first exposure. And then there was the [Joseph] Bernardin exposure in '92. And then the [Rudolph] Kos case in Dallas—there was a huge verdict. And then the Stockton verdict on [Oliver] O'Grady in '97, which got a whole bunch of press. And [Ryan] DiMaria, my client, a victim who won a huge settlement, $5.2 million, in the early 2000s. And then, of course, Boston, in 2001 and 2002. That spawned Los Angeles, and there was also a tremendous amount of press about Cardinal Roger Mahony.

"If you think Pennsylvania was bad, wait until you get to New York and New Jersey."

So what's different about this, than any of those I just mentioned, is that there was really no effort in any of those evolutions to do anything but prosecute predator priests. For example, law enforcement had Mahony in their sights—they could have indicted him. And Steve Cooley, who was the district attorney in Los Angeles County at the time, didn't do it. And I think he didn't do it because the Church—the hierarchy of the Church—still had a significant amount of influence. What's happened, as time has gone on, is the individuals who hold elected office have had less and less exposure to a Church that's had the sort of political power it did 30 years ago. The Church, now, simply has less political influence now, and can't stop it.

Frankly, if you're the attorney general of Pennsylvania, and you begin getting these calls, and you see the scope of this, why wouldn't you investigate it? It's criminality, really, on a scale that's unheard of. In California, the Church paid $1 billion to settle cases in the mid 2000s. A diocese went bankrupt. And it's not just the number of perpetrators. The real criminal conspiracy, and the real criminality, is the effort to cover it up, and conceal it as a matter of policy and practice. I think a lot of people still want to believe that something like what happened in Pennsylvania is an anomaly. It's not. It's the norm. Every diocese is the same—and the reason for that is the Church is a hierarchal organization, managed from the top-down.

What do you think is actually likely to happen next in the US? Do you expect more and more states to do what this initial handful have done?
I do. You know, the attorneys general talk, and I think that people finally recognize that this is a public health issue. You go to prison, places for drug rehabilitation, alcohol anonymous meetings—you're going to meet child victims of priests in every place like that. The Catholic Church school system in this country is the largest private school system here. Catholic institutions own more real estate than any other private institution in the United States. It's a massive organization. And we happen to have diplomatic relations with [the Vatican].

I think the next step—and I do think it's going to happen—is a federal investigation. Catholic institutions are not only religious, but they're massive receivers of federal, state, and local financial aid through charity and other organizations. And, more than anything else, they're a tax-exempt organization. If Scientology, which is tiny sect, [eventually loses] its tax-empt status because of criminality, then isn't a fair discussion to have that for the Catholic Church [too]? Can you imagine, say, if you found out that 300 United Airlines flight attendants were molesting children, what would happen to United Airlines? And we don't have 300—[we have even more] priests who have been removed for this behavior since the early 2000s. The only reason they haven't been held to the same standard that everyone else has been is the religious works in front of them.

The truth is—no one wants to say it, but it's the truth—we have, basically, a foreign government allowing its agents to run wild over children, sexually.

But the Church has stayed intact for roughly 2,000 years. So if a federal investigation were to be launched, would it really threaten the Church as a core institution in the US?
I think this is different. I used to say the Church would be around long after I'm dead and gone, and I'm sure it will be—but I see this as a greatly diminished institution. I do see hierarchy going to jail. What's needed here, really, is a federally, multi-district investigation. The Church has been given the benefit of the doubt—and multiple chances—like no other institution in the world. And what they've proven is that they will not address the underlying problem that is causing this, which I think is celibacy. It doesn't work; it's never worked. You never hear it debated in any of this stuff.

Regardless, in most of these situations, the statute of limitations will be expired, right?
Yes. That's their only defense, typically. I'll tell you: A case in point of that right now is in California. Jerry Brown, in my view, has always been anti-victim, from the time when he was first governor in the 70s until now. He's also a former Jesuit seminarian. A statute of limitations reform bill came right to his desk a few years ago, and he vetoed it—and talked about how important statute of limitations were, and basically mimicked the bishops. But he's from that generation of people who would never do anything to hurt the hierarchy of the Church. In contrast, Gavin Newsom, who will likely next be elected [for governor], is of a completely different generation.

How long are investigations like in New York, though, even going to take?
If they get a grand jury, as they did in Pennsylvania, typically they're less than a year. We know New York is bad, because we've had some disclosure. But that disclosure to date is going to pale in comparison to what they find. And what I think they're going to find is cardinals in the modern era—[Cardinal Edward] Egan and others—and bishops were doing everything they could to keep a lid on this, because they knew how bad it was. If you think Pennsylvania was bad, wait until you get to New York and New Jersey. These Italian parishes, say, especially in the mid-to-late 20th century—and this is very similar to Latino immigrants today, where their home, and the center of community, is the parish. And, it turns out, many were a feeding ground for predators.

What can realistically happen, criminally or otherwise, to higher-ups—say cardinals—who are foreign diplomats, and most often recalled to the Vatican after their scandal is revealed?
It's an interesting question. They usually have dual-citizenship, so they can flee to the Vatican. Nelson Mandela has this great quote that you can judge the soul of society by the way it treats its children. We're not doing a very good job.

But how does the United States compare to the responses in the rest of the world? I know, for instance, that Australia has seen passage of controversial laws that requires priests to divulge what they hear in confession—which critics argue is problematic because priests often do not know who is on the other side of the confessional. Do approaches like that make sense?
The confession can be used as a weapon, and a tool to access children. I think there is a place for confidentiality in medicine, in psychology, and in spirituality. If someone wants to go to confession, and confess a serious sin, I'm conflicted on that, I'll be honest—because I do think they have that right to do so. There's also a part of me that's concerned priests will also just make things up.

I'd like to also discuss the Church scandal, now, in the context of the #MeToo movement. Are the Church survivors unique in a way, as opposed to other survivors of abuses of power?
So I can tell you why I believe that there has been a long delay, in regards to the Church. It's complicated, but—did you grow up Catholic?

I did.
Me too. So the difference between Catholicism and basically any other Protestant sect is that the only way to salvation in the Church is through the sacramental life. And the only way to participate fully in the sacramental life is to go through all seven sacraments, one of them being to become a priest. And the victims that priests typically target are almost always the most devout kids who truly in their heart believe.

And, remember, the priest at mass actually has the power to literally, in effect, change bread into God through transubstantiation. And at that moment, we're taught essentially in catechism, that the priest is God. So, that's all to say, these children have been molested by a God man. And for most people that's difficult to grasp, but if you truly believe, the impact that has on your psyche is profound. And the level of shame—having represented victims of coaches, teachers, principals—is faraway worse. There's a certainty with Catholicism that you feel no one else really has. Most priest survivors I know cannot go to mass, even if they want to. That delay, and the inability to articulate it, is unique to the Church.

In terms of the #MeToo movement, we're going to hold powerful people accountable no matter what—and that's a very helpful thing to know for survivors. I think we're going to look back on this as a Martin Luther moment, where someone's nailing the theses to the door. I think the Church has destroyed itself. It will exist as a smaller form of what it used to be.

I'm no longer Catholic. I'm sure that shocks you. But the sad part of all this is that the kind, decent theology of the Church—helping the poor, the imprisoned, the weak [gets lost]. We need that voice in our society right now.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Welcome to the VICE Guide to Life, our imperfect advice on becoming an adult.

For many young adults, college is the first place you get a real taste of freedom. You’re free from reputations formed since childhood, free from parents, free from your tired teenage life. You’re also surrounded by a lot of attractive, horny people who are simultaneously experiencing freedom for the first time, and also finally have the bedroom space to enact their desires.

While the last few years have reshaped the way we think about sex and physical intimacy—there is a much greater understanding of consent, and more awareness about the ways communication is misunderstood—that knowledge is unevenly distributed, and many young people really don’t know what they’re doing as they stumble toward their first few sexual experiences. We are frustratingly far away from the ultimate goal that we all deserve: physical intimacy that is not only safe but is also good.

Seeking a good hookup experience can feel like navigating an impossible quagmire, especially given toxic campus cultures that pressure students into having sex and can make intimacy feel transactional even when it’s fully consensual. The lack of clarity around the phrase “hookup” is part of the problem—depending on who’s talking, it can mean everything from a kiss to sexual intercourse. And though a hookup is usually someone that you don’t have a romantic relationship with, it can be anyone from a stranger to an acquaintance to a “fuck buddy” you have an understanding with. So here is what you need to know to make hookup culture work for you:

Where to Start

Knowing how to communicate your needs is an essential first step—both in making sure you are satisfied, but also making sure that your partner(s) are comfortable and consent to everything that you want to do to and with them. It’s also an important skill to develop as you continue to have sex, regardless of the number of partners you’ll have throughout your life.

You should begin with honest introspection about what you want to get out of it, and what you’re comfortable doing. This process can happen in your head, or it can come in the form of an actual catalogue. Burlesque performer and sex educator Fancy Feast recommends making a “Yes and maybe list” to physically commit your comfort level, needs, and wants to paper.

“A yes and maybe list is a list of actions in your ‘playbank,’” Fancy Feast told me over the phone. “You can ask yourself, ‘Is this something I jerk off about, am I really curious about it?’ That would go in your ‘yes.’ If it’s something you definitely aren’t interested in or something you didn’t enjoy, that would go in your ‘no.’” A “yes,” for example, could be a mix of positions or kinks you know you are into, like doggy style, or things you haven’t tried but definitely want to, like being handcuffed or spanked. And if those are things you’ve tried and dislike, or actively have no interest in trying, they go in “no.”

“Anything else would go in your ‘maybe.’ And that could mean maybe on my body but not on someone else’s body. Maybe if we had immediate access to a shower, or something like that. Anything that comes with a caveat. I think that’s really useful whether or not you’re in a relationship, whether or not you’re hooking up. You could even put it in a Google doc and send it to somebody else!”

Formulating this list obviously requires rudimentary knowledge of what you do and don’t like. Some of this may have come from previous relationships or hookups before college. But not having hooked up with someone doesn’t mean you don’t have context for what you may be interested in. Fancy Feast suggests online resources, like the advice site Scarleteen. “It has ‘teen’ in the name, but I’ve recommended it to people who are in their 40s,” she said. She also recommends following sex educators on social media to get more specific advice.

Thinking about it in literal terms will also give you the words to use when you begin to communicate your needs—and this is where a lot of people have trouble.

The Basics of Consent and Communication

Shazidur Talukder is a Communication and Consent Educator (CCE) at Yale. That means he teaches other students through workshops, and acts as a low-pressure liaison to sexual health resources like free condoms or discreet STI tests. “I don’t know where I would have learned the vocabulary if being a CCE isn’t something I decided to do,” the sophomore told me over the phone. “And I don’t think that that’s OK.”

Most college campuses have peer organizations that lead freshman orientation and help students acclimate to college life. At Yale, incoming students get a 90-minute program that encompasses sex ed, communication, and consent. The challenge is that a lot of these kids have gotten through life without learning anything about sexual health and some lack even basic anatomical information. When Talukder asks them what sex ed they got in high school, “most people said, ‘There wasn’t really any.’”

The communication and consent portion of the workshop is interactive and intended to simulate the discrepancies in the ways people judge verbal and nonverbal cues. “There’s a ‘frozen yogurt’ exercise, where there’s one ‘invite’ and four invitees who get asked out to froyo, and each of them have different mindsets,” Talukder explained. “We ask students what affirmative and not affirmative signals look like—even though people don’t say yes or no in the scenario, you can still tell. And you can kind of extrapolate that to conversations about sex. The idea is that it looks similar.”

These exercises are helpful, but freshman orientation programs across the US are complicated by dense schedules that make all of the information difficult to remember. “The schedule is back to back,” Talukder said. Many of these workshops also never touch on communication as a means to having better sex or more fulfilling hookups, because, Talukder said, “institutions don’t want to directly tell students to have sex.” So much of what students learn about sex comes from trial and error. “I tell a lot of students you have to learn by your mistakes,” Talukder said.

Making mistakes with your partner is a healthy part of learning about yourself sexually, but not all mistakes are created equal. There’s a huge difference in having bad sex because you did not like something you tried (or your partner ended up being clumsy), and the kind of bad sex that leaves you feeling uncomfortable and regretful of what you’ve done because you struggled to articulate your desires. There’s also a big difference between both of those and being coerced or being taken advantage of when you’re in a vulnerable position.

“There have been times where my friends have woken up like, ‘Oh my god, where am I?'” Talukder told me. “Almost all of my friends have had bad experiences. I didn’t realize how common it was until I came to college—people not listening, or whatever it is. No one really talks about it.”

This is especially true of women in heterosexual hookups, who struggle to have certain sexual acts reciprocated and who orgasm less than men in hookups. “I still hear from girls that while they may have an orgasm, it's not an expectation the way it generally is for guys,” Peggy Orenstein, author of the bestseller Girls and Sex, wrote me in an email. “Not in a hookup.” Unsurprisingly, women experience post-hookup regret at higher rates than men. And more than 20 percent of college women said they’ve experienced unwanted sexual contact.

Making mistakes with your partner is a healthy part of learning about yourself sexually, but not all mistakes are created equal.

Much of this inequality stems from toxic masculinity and misogyny. Men are socialized to view women as sexual prizes and lack communication skills and emotional resilience because our culture casts these traits as “unmanly.” In these gender roles, women are gatekeepers, cast as either prudes or sluts depending on their decision to hook up. Women are also viewed as objects and told they have to learn how to appease men lest they become victims of sexual misconduct or even violence. This dynamic is especially dangerous for women, but it isn’t good for anyone.

Solving the systemic problems that create toxic hookup culture is far beyond the scope of this article. But a frank discussion of hookup culture necessarily involves acknowledging it so that it can be navigated. Empower yourself to treat your partners with respect—break the cycle of ghosting or shaming. Be vigilant about recognizing behaviors within hookup culture that are unacceptable and do your best to intervene. And (though it should not be your problem) take precautions to be safe when going out.

Alcohol and Parties

This is all obviously complicated by alcohol. In 2015, the National Institute of Health found that 58 percent of college students aged 18 to 22 drank alcohol in the last month. Drinking can lead to sex that students regret, but the fundamental contradiction is that college students (and post-grad adults, honestly) drink to lower their inhibitions and work up the courage to approach someone they like—but when everyone is drinking, communicating clearly can be impossible. “There’s definitely a correlation on campus. If you’re sexually active them you probably drink,” Talukder told me. “If you don’t go to parties people assume you aren’t sexually active unless you’re in a relationship. Most of my friends’ sexual encounters have resulted from parties. Besides frat parties, there isn’t much to work with.”

"It’s scarier and more vulnerable to be sober and with it. That means yeah you might say something awkward—you might say ‘dock’ when you’re trying to say ‘dick’ or ‘cock’ and you can’t choose. That is OK."

Communication and consent workshops also guide students through the effects of alcohol. A big topic is “alcohol myopia, where you don't forget about more distant concerns but they loom less in your mind compared to more salient cues,” Talukder explained. The workshop also explains that consent should not be assumed and cannot be given when drunk (or high), and that alcohol should not be used as a scapegoat in cases of sexual misconduct. “Consent should be a clear, unambiguous, ongoing agreement,” Talukder told me. “If you’re drunk you can still recognize the signals. You need to be conscious of not looking for what you want to see.”

It may be impossible to envision a world where hooking up happens without alcohol, but sobriety is a necessary step in making sure your hookup is consensual—and sober hookups tend to be much better because both parties are present and able to communicate. “I’m not a statistician, but polling the people in my life—like the people who have had experiences when they’re drunk and have had experiences when they’re sober generally rave about the sober ones and tend to not remember or wish they did not remember the ones that happened when they’re drunk,” Fancy Feast told me. “It’s scarier and more vulnerable to be sober and with it. That means yeah you might say something awkward—you might say ‘dock’ when you’re trying to say ‘dick’ or ‘cock’ and you can’t choose. That is OK. We don’t die of awkwardness though it may feel that way.”

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t drink at a party, or that drinking in moderation can’t be enjoyable. It also doesn’t mean that hookups can’t be found at a party. But if you meet someone at the party that you want to hook up with, know your limits. Walk away if you or your partner is drunk. And instead of drinking to develop the courage to approach someone or hookup with them, practice being a better communicator. One of the easiest ways to do this is by being a question asker.

Hookups Are Better When You Ask Questions

“There is nothing more confident than someone who asks a question and listens to the answer,” Fancy Feast told me. “That may seem counterintuitive—for a lot of people, we’re afraid of not knowing something. But having genuine curiosity in the person in front of you is the hottest thing. And it indicates that you’re really interested in what makes them tick. I find that to be the hottest, most baddest shit. All of your peers are too chickenshit to ask questions about what somebody likes!”

Asking questions can be sexy. They’re a fun way to engage intimately with your partner and to learn what makes them feel good. It should be a necessity, regardless of whether you’re hooking up with someone for the first time or you’re in a longer-term relationship (romantically or otherwise). Chloe Yee, a public health educator who teaches consent and health workshops to high school students in New Haven, Connecticut, emailed me a list of non-intimidating and straightforward questions that can be used to obtain consent and make hookups more satisfying:

• I’d love to kiss you. Are you OK with that?
• Can I go down on you?
• Is it OK if I finger you?
• How do you feel?
• What would you like to do?
• Do you want to have sex?
• Are you ready for this?
• Is this OK?

It's also particularly important to ask questions when there’s any kind of power dynamic. Though both partners should ask questions, men should make sure to check in if its a cishet hookup, for example. Everyday Feminist offers a great list of ways to “pay attention to power dynamics” in hookup culture. These include who is older, whose place you’re partying or hooking up in, whether you’ve just bought your date a drink or dinner, and who has more experience. If you’re in a position of power, make sure you act like you’re also in a position of responsibility.

"I think one of the big lies out there is that communication is something for people in relationships."

Abuses of power can happen even with well-meaning partners. The Journal of Interpersonal Violence published a study in 2017 that examined a group of 145 heterosexual men, 92 percent of whom were white, and found that they tended to conflate sexual desire with consent and had difficulty accurately gauging nonverbal cues. This study tested respondents for levels of empathy, hostile sexism, and hypermasculinity, and found that even progressive, feminist men could still be guilty of this behavior. Dear men: Ask questions, and listen to the answers.

Of course, responding to these questions and learning how to speak up about your likes and dislikes takes a bit of practice. But you can take it in steps, like the yes and maybe list that turns the practice of thinking about your sexual preferences into a habit. “Maybe that means practicing by yourself if you’re alone in your room jerking off,” Fancy Feast told me, “or writing it down.” It may seem like a cringe-worthy movie scene—like in (500) Days of Summer when Tom hypes himself in the bathroom by talking at his reflection in the mirror before finally sleeping with Summer—but it doesn’t have to be an out-loud pep talk.

You can rehearse these phrases in your head to the point where they become less intimidating to say to someone else. During sex, asking “is this OK?” is quite simple, and gives your partner a way to navigate the fear of feeling like speaking up is critiquing any aspect of sexual performance or self-worth. And it gives them permission to ask you what feels good in return. “I think people are often punished for their desires or made to feel shame about them,” Fancy Feast said. “It shouldn’t be that way.”

The pre-hookup conversation also doesn’t have to be serious. “Instead of thinking, ‘Wait, we must sit down and think on these matters more,’” Fancy Feast said, “it can be during the walk down your quad. It can be as simple as, ‘Hey, I like having hands in my hair but I don’t want to be choked. I want to go down on you and I want you to go down on me. I don’t like having anything in my ass. How does that sound?’ I don’t think anybody has been like, ‘Oh crap, I wish you hadn’t said that, I no longer want to hook up.’”

This principle of making conversation less serious can be applied to the steps leading up to the hookup. In the daytime, instead of “Do you want to go on a date,” it can be, “Do you want to get coffee?” If you’re out you can ask, “Want to dance?” or, “Want to get drunchies?” Practice accepting rejection as a healthy part of participating—no one owes you a hookup, and just because someone said no doesn't mean you can't or won't find a partner who wants hook up with you.

If you’re inviting someone back to your dorm (“do you want to get out of here/do you want to come home with me”) make sure you clarify your intentions while you’re walking. You should ask your partner what they want to do that night and take steps to make sure it will be safe (at least one party should have a condom). You may want to ask if they want to sleep over. If you’re in a position of power, make sure you don’t pressure them—restate that it's their choice and that you will not be offended by their decision. Continue to check in. Be attentive to nonverbal cues like unresponsiveness or lack of enthusiasm, and don't assume that your partner will be comfortable enough to speak up all the time—so give them space and empower them to say no.

If you’re intimidated by saying this all aloud, it can be “sending a text to the person sitting next to you,” Fancy Feast added. “I think one of the big lies out there is that communication is something for people in relationships. If you’re hooking up, no one talks, and you do your best. It shouldn’t be that way. Use whatever is going to make communication easier. You can fake it till you make it.”

Dating apps make this a bit easier—if you’re meeting through Tinder, Bumble, or Grindr you can easily chat about what you’re looking for because mutual attraction has been established, and the conversation doesn’t have to happen face-to-face. “There’s no shame, and if it’s at night there’s the understanding that you’re probably looking for something,” Talukder said. “Even if you match on Tinder but you never talk, sometimes you’ll see them at a party and they’ll come up and say, ‘Oh we matched on Tinder,’ and maybe something will happen.”

Look Out for Each Other

If you are going out, make sure you’re with friends you can trust and who can make sure you get home safe. Communicate with them about what you’re looking for, and check in with your friends throughout the night to see how they’re doing. “My friends ask each other, ‘Sex or no sex, are we hooking up or not?’” Talukder said. “They will squeeze each other’s hands, or give some kind of sign.” Know where your friends are and who they’re going home with—and ask them to do the same for you.

You can also look out for people outside of your friend group. Bystander intervention is being a good samaritan to your fellow students, and checking in on a shady looking situation before it escalates into something genuinely dangerous. The potential to save someone from assault—or other bad outcomes—vastly outweighs momentary discomfort. (Never put yourself in the path of danger. Most campuses have a hotline for campus security, which is different than campus police or any type of law enforcement, who can escort students or drive students home).

College hookup culture is pervasive, and in many ways, incredibly toxic. It’s what we’ve got to work with—but it doesn’t have to be.

Lehigh University’s Student Affairs group breaks it into five steps: “Notice the event, interpret it as a problem, assume personality responsibility, know how to help, and implement the help.” For example, you see a couple making out, but you notice one of them is cornered. They look uncomfortable. You notice the person blocking the pathway is an upperclassman and their partner is younger. You duck in and pretend to be the younger person’s friend, asking, “Are you OK?” If they confidently say they’re fine or tell you to fuck off, you leave them to it—no harm, no foul. If they say it uncomfortably you can ask again, offering to make up an excuse like you found their phone or pretend to be drunk and get in the way. If they say explicitly say they aren’t comfortable, go ahead and create that distraction.

It can end there or you can take more responsibility by helping them find their friends or walking them home if it’s safe. This works especially well on college campuses, because there is an existing in-group. “To be able to do that for other people is important to how we grow the culture,” Talukder told me. When I was a student, I used bystander intervention in a number of scenarios, from bailing a freshman in my dorm out of an unwanted keg stand to keeping an acquaintance's little brother from being grinded on.

College hookup culture is pervasive, and in many ways, incredibly toxic. It’s what we’ve got to work with—but it doesn’t have to be. Every person who learns how to navigate it healthily brings campuses a step closer to what a great sexual climate looks like. Being asked to dance rather than getting a mystery boner pressed against your back in a dark club. Getting to someone’s bedroom without alcohol, because you asked what they wanted to do that night. Knowing you’re on the same page about what you want, because you talked about it. Feeling comfortable to speak your mind while you’re hooking up with someone, including mentioning silly things like “your arm falling asleep,” as Fancy Feast told me.

“During the CCE workshop, we talk about what an ideal sexual campus climate would look like,” Talukder said. The incoming freshman say that there should be more sober sex, that people should approach each other and ask directly about what they want. That world can exist—we just have to create it.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

It is 2018 and I trust nothing. I trust nothing. It used to be I would trust things, but now I do not. I view internet videos with the same arch cynicism that YouTube atheists express for God. (You know the ones: the fedora, the goblet full of Mountain Dew, the pink pebbled skin ceding to a thin orange beard, the ponytail, the Reddit comment "wow, thanks for the gold!", the cartoon avatar of them pulling a quizzical eyebrow and wearing a monocle, the 90-minute late-night live-stream about the friend-zone, the unpublished eight-volume fantasy novel.) It used to be that you could touch things, and smell things, and see them with your eyes, and you could believe them. Now, there's a viral video every other second and I never know which ones to trust.

By which I say: do I believe these Ryanair lads are racking up fat, fat lines of cocaine on a plane? I do not. But I also don’t not. The coke (or coke substitute) is doing that sort of dusty residue thing that cocaine does. The boy in the aisle seems just the right level of blood-spike adrenalin and genuine laugh-and-smile nervousness when the cabin crew member approaches. Also, please recall this is Ryanair. There is enough evidence to suggest this video is real. But also: it absolutely cannot be real. You see where being a cynic lands you in 2K18? It’s a confusing place to be:

Let’s drive onwards with the theory that this isn’t real, but it could be real, but it probably isn’t real, but maybe it is real. On that shaky platform alone: yes, I have some questions:

CAN YOU IMAGINE BEING SAT BEHIND THEM?

The beauty of Ryanair is that it is a great leveller (the horror of Ryanair is everything else). Ryanair, like many low-cost airlines, flies cheap to semi-nearby sunny destinations, so attracts stag parties and hen nights and sixth formers on their first lads holiday, and extremely broad lads in vests who can consume a quite alarming amount of MDMA without dying, and it also attracts families who dress up to fly like they’re going to church, and quiet couples in matching denim jackets reading books, and middle-aged mums more used to BA who absolutely can’t figure out why they can’t put their luggage in the locker directly above their head, and spend the entire 2h 50m being extremely paranoid that someone distantly down the plane is going to steal their handbag full of tissues and spare pens. I once saw a former Premier League footballer on a Ryanair flight, a man who was the walking inverse of my overdraft, but here we both were, flying with no leg room to Ibiza, together, the same.

There is something joyful about the (now rare) crevices and spaces that level out society: pubs, chip shops, Ryanair flights to Spain. There is no class hierarchy on a Ryanair flight (nobody on Earth is rich enough to buy a cup of coffee and two packets of nuts on a Ryanair flight without sweating the price, not even Diddy). Income means nothing in the air. Your education, your class, your privilege, it doesn’t matter: you still can’t use your phone, you still don’t quite have enough room to put your knees out, you still don’t get a screen to watch a film on. But I very much like to imagine that – behind these three lads either racking up or pretending to rack up, doing whatever they are doing with such vigour and force that their banter becomes a gravitational hole in the entire aircraft, every eye and every scrap of attention on them – that, quietly, behind them, someone flying to Marbella to see their granddad is carefully trying to read Eleanor Oliphant while wearing a long linen scarf.

IS THE CABIN CREW MEMBER HERE BEING EXCEPTIONALLY RUDE?

Yes. Sorry, but social etiquette demands that, unless you are actively in recovery, when you are cheerfully offered a line: you have to take it. I’m sorry! These are the rules! I don’t care that the crew member is serving vodka to already inebriated persons (good) and actively ignoring potentially illegal activity on the flight (also good). I care that they are being rude! Do the line!

IS IT FAKE? SUB-QUESTION: DOES IT MATTER?

What makes me think it is fake is my day-to-day contempt for anything being real. What makes me think it is real is literally everything else. Is it possible to smuggle drugs through an airport security system? Honestly, yes: they make you take your shoes off and pour your water out, but they never check if you’ve got a baggy taped to your gooch. Could you rack three monstrous lines out in the middle of the air and take them without anyone saying anything? Also, yes: this is a Ryanair flight where there is already a fantastic amount of shouting. Society does not work up here.

Then there are the little clues, the pointers: the aforementioned residue, that particular male emotion of bolshiness covering nervousness, the leaning in, the hide-in-plain-sight loud secrecy. If you're ever going to do a line of cocaine on an aeroplane, you’re going to do it on a private jet or on a Ryanair, and absolutely nothing in between. What makes it believable is that we’ve all lived this flight, we’ve all been in the same pub as these men. What makes this believable is we all secretly suspect, if we had nuts enough to do it, that this could be us.

CAN WE TALK BRIEFLY ABOUT THE QUALITY AND SHEER HENCHNESS OF THOSE LINES

What I suppose gives me the most evidence that this mid-air sesh is legitimate is the cut of those lines, of what British tabloids are calling "an unidentified white powder", and that cynical commenters in response to the original tweet are calling "coffee creamer, chopped out like an idiot might". That line is, frankly, horrible. It is the size and rough dimensions of a breaded fish finger. It is the consistency of glass mixed with gravel. Looking at that line, of whatever it is, is giving me very horrible flashbacks to every time I’ve been up at 3AM when I shouldn’t be, in south London when I shouldn’t be, in someone’s house when I don’t know them, bathed in the skin-paining halogen of bright kitchen down-lighters. That line is basically saying, "Is it alright if I smoke in here?" to an Uber driver. That line has punched a hole in its bedroom wall and doesn’t have a legitimate curtain. That line just put a frankly terrifyingly high BPM. happy hardcore mix on YouTube and stood there in front of you, eyes closed, finger rapidly bobbing. That line is going to turn up at your house in a couple of weeks asking if you remember it and if it can sleep over at yours for a bit. That line just broke a toilet off the wall. That line comes up to you, wide-eyed at a party, and just whispers the single urgent word: “RUN!”

IS THIS PEAK 'BRIT ABROAD'?

I’ve long been attached to the idea that there are two warring factions of the perceived national identity, and they can be summed up as: you are either in The England Band, or you are A Contestant on Great British Bake Off. These are the two English genders, and they don’t overlap. We think of ourselves as either a hyper-refined, cucumber-sandwiches-and-long-gravel-drives, cut-glass accented lover of the Queen, or we are blowing a trumpet because we love Harry Kane so much. So you have this idiosyncrasy: a lot of people, including British people who live in Britain and know it not to be true, have this idea of the nation as a kind of period drama with bunting over it, whereas, actually, we really do lean more towards getting sparked out with one punch outside a nightclub and eating a meat feast in the back of a cab. Essentially, we think of ourselves as a nation of Mary Berrys, but we are actually more this: three lads, tanked up from an airport Wetherspoons, racking out lines on a Ryanair table-tray. I think there is a quiet, noble beauty in that.

@joelgolby

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

This article originally appeared on VICE Italy.

Eight years ago, my father was convicted of both murder and the concealment of a corpse. When I think back on what happened, it feels like a different, distant life.

Before my father became this "monster," and before my friends and extended family started constantly staring at me with either pity or contempt, I had a happy childhood. Growing up, my sister and I were treated to the best toys, picture-perfect Christmases and vacations to the most exotic places. It seemed like a fairly straightforward, mundane life—filled with school and the joys of coming home to my mom's home cooking.

I used to think that someone who was capable of murder must be a constantly violent and mean person who's quick to anger. My father was none of these things. He was a respected businessman who spent much of his spare time acting out various roles in the fairy tales I made up—juggling his way around imaginary castles and kingdoms.

He never raised his voice at us, he was never mean, and he never told us off—even when he should have.

But as I was preparing to enter my teenage years, things started to change. He started to change. My father became increasing detached. His quick wit was soon replaced by long periods of complete silence. Once, he made fun of me because I cried at a news story of an animal being abused. I can still remember how shocked and angry that made me feel.

I would later discover that this profound shift was caused by a secret: He had accumulated a large debt in order for our family to maintain the lifestyle we had become accustomed to. I think it was pride that pushed him to that point. Carrying around such a burden can consume you, leaving you detached from the rest of the world. Years later, without telling me how much debt he was in, my father revealed that he'd even attempted suicide.

Our lives changed forever on a Monday—a day that started with me complaining about not wanting to go to school. That afternoon, my grandfather and I stopped by my father's shop to pick up our house keys before going to grab some ice cream. I'll never forget my dad's face when we walked into his shop. He had turned a dark red, his eyes were wide open, and he had this cruel expression on his face. Suddenly, he screamed, "You were right!" at my grandfather, as I recoiled, afraid of this person I no longer recognized.

What I didn't know at the time was that, 15 minutes earlier, my father had killed a man. Later that night, my grandfather helped him hide the body.

Little did our family know, the victim had been in our lives for a long time, ever since he lent my father a lot of money. Earlier that afternoon, the man had threatened to kill our family if my father didn't pay him back.

WATCH: Ten Questions You Always Wanted to Ask: The Wife of Britain's Most Notorious Prisoner

I've convinced myself that my dad's actions were a result of temporary madness. I don't know if that was actually the case, but it's how I've explained it to myself. But whatever the reason, he was motivated enough to slaughter his victim—the goriest details were later reported in the press for everyone to read.

My father was arrested the following day, though I only found out after several days of hearing my parents' far-fetched lies and excuses, trying to explain away his sudden disappearance.

With a future to reshape, my mother decided to move our family several miles away. We were running away from journalists and curious neighbors while trying to find answers to the questions we couldn't make any sense of.

Over time, I've managed to replace a constant feeling of anger and sadness with one of indifference. The truth is, you get used to it. Perhaps as a way of protecting myself, I've split the figure of my father into two completely different people. The second figure—the one who committed the crime—is a stranger. I don't know him and neither do I want to. And to avoid people feeling sorry for me, I've learned to tell the story casually and neutrally, as if we were discussing the weather.

For the past eight years, prison has become a part of my monthly routine. I show my ID at the reception and am given a key to a locker to put my stuff in. One search is quickly followed by a second, surrounded by visitors struggling to deal with their pain. We walk in a group through several gates of security. Nobody speaks to anyone outside of their own family—those are well-defined lines that you do not cross.

I often don't know what to say to my father. It's not that I have nothing to talk to him about—I'm 20 years old, with an active social life and goals I want to achieve in the future—but he's too far removed from my world. Our conversations are just long periods of silence.

I still love my dad, and I love what he did for us while he was still around. But this is a new kind of love—a more dutiful love. He can't be there for me anymore, and it's not enough for me now to only love him for the past life we shared together

Last month, after years of seeing him between four cold walls—badly painted to hide their bleakness—in a room where your own voice is drowned out in a sea of others, a new chapter began: He obtained a conditional, temporary release into the open air, one which will allow our family to spend entire days with him.

Among the various emotions that have come with his "freedom" is a fear that I won't ever be able to reintegrate him back into my life like I would like to. It was hard to heal the traumas caused by these events, and I've created a new balance that doesn't include him. Opening that wound again to let him in is terrifying. But then again, I want the same bond for us that I see between fathers and daughters around me. I hope to rebuild something I lost a long time ago.

If I've gained anything from this experience, it's the stronger relationships I've formed with those who love me. I've learned to appreciate them more, no matter what their shortcomings might be. I've also learned never to keep a problem to myself because you're at risk of that problem growing in your own head, to the point where it becomes insurmountable.

Most of all, I grew up before I should have. What happened changed me deeply, but I've discovered that you don't have to be a strong person to overcome challenging events. You go on for the simple fact that you have to.

Today, my father is trying to redeem himself. He is committed to motivating his fellow prisoners into rehabilitation and realizing that they can be better than their worst deeds. He's also recently published a book about life in prison, which has won him first place in a writing competition. There's no doubt life would have been a lot better for our family, and for the family of his victim, if my father had become famous for how he writes, and not how he settled that one dispute.

*The author's name has been hidden to protect her identity.

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This article originally appeared on VICE IT.

Controversial professor, self-help guru, lobster aficionado, and noted free speech advocate Jordan Peterson has launched a second lawsuit against Wilfrid Laurier University over how they described him.

According to the National Post, Peterson filed the paperwork for the second lawsuit on Tuesday. This one claims that the University’s statement of defence in which they asked for the lawsuit to be dropped further defamed him by saying he benefited from the press surrounding the controversy in which they compared him to one Adolf Hitler—he is asking for $1.75 million.

In his second lawsuit, Peterson apparently took inspiration from Laurier’s hyperbole and invoked the Holocaust in the court documents, stating that he benefited is like saying “those who survived the Holocaust should be grateful to their oppressors for teaching them survival skills.” The Laurier press release also indicated that the “stated purpose” of Peterson’s lawsuit is “causing academics and administrators to be more circumspect in their choice of words and that the lawsuit is being used as a means of unduly limiting expression on matters of public interest.”

For those of you lucky few who aren’t familiar with the drama that occured last year it goes like this. Lindsay Shepherd, a teaching assistant at the Waterloo university, played a clip of Jordan Peterson in an intro-level communication class. This prompted Shepherd to get hauled into a meeting by her superiors and be dressed down for showing the clip—in the meeting, which Shepherd recorded and released through media, her superiors likened playing a Peterson video to showing Hitler. The incident was quickly launched Canada into yet another free speech on campus debate. Now, almost a year later, we’re still fucking talking about it. Free speech, Rick Flair woooooo!

This debate culminated in two June defamation lawsuits—one filed by Shepherd and one by Peterson. Shepherd is suing the school for $3.6 million for making her “unemployable in academia.” Peterson, for his troubles, asked for $1.5 million in damages over the negative comments in June.

The “silencing” of Shepherd and Peterson at Laurier thrust them into being some of the most covered figures in Canadian news last year. Shepherd has made frequent guests stops on TV and YouTube shows positing herself as one of the youngest “free speech warriors” on the circuit. Peterson, meanwhile, has carried on his merry way of best-selling books and sold out speaking tours. On top of his book and talks, Peterson also has one of the most successful Patreon accounts online, making upwards of $60,000 a month for his YouTube channel in which he posts his lectures on the Bible, free speech, academic drama, and lobsters.

The National Post reports that Peterson’s lawyer says he expects both lawsuits to become a single action and that, in the lawsuit, Peterson indicated that he hopes the result of suing people for insulting him will be more free speech on campus.

The University, like it did when the first lawsuit was originally filed, states that it will vigorously fight this lawsuit.

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On Monday, HBO premiered Swiped, a documentary written and directed by the journalist Nancy Jo Sales, who published a 2015 article in Vanity Fair melodramatically (or perhaps euphemistically) titled, “Tinder and the Dawn of the ‘Dating Apocalypse.’” The piece was, for the most part, a sweeping indictment of Tinder and the entirety of the online dating market. (Tinder, predictably, gyrated with online disapproval. It responded with a 30-tweet rant where, according to TechCrunch, it said: “@VanityFair: Little know fact: sex was invented in 2012 when Tinder was launched.”)

Swiped is a progression of Sales’s Vanity Fair piece. It makes all the same pit stops she made in her original takedown: everyone hates Tinder, Tinder has disrupted love, Tinder has redefined intimacy, etcetera. It even tries (and, admittedly, fails) to address the unique experience of how queer people and people of colour navigate online dating spaces.

And most notably, Swiped advises women on how not to get sexually or physically assaulted while dating, with just six easy steps.

Near the end of the doc, we’re introduced to Mandy Ginsberg, the first female CEO, as of 2018, of IAC’s Match Group—the media and internet holding company which owns OkCupid, BlackPeopleMeet, Match, and Tinder, among other dating apps.

Here, the documentary moves to more serious topics: particularly, how dating apps have complicated the safety of dating, the responsibility they have in the #MeToo era, and the threat of physical danger that has expanded since their popularization. When asked how she plans on “protect[ing], listen[ing], and creat[ing] products that are relevant to women,” Ginsberg has a rather sad response.

“Yeah, I mean, there’s a couple of things we need to do... We have safety tips. First of all, it’s really important that women don’t meet people… they never go to someone’s house, they meet in a public place, they don’t drink, they let someone know where they’re going... they take precaution, they let a person know that they’re on a date with someone else, they never go into someone’s car… so there’s a number of safety tips that we provide for people, and I just think that people have to just take real precaution,” Ginsberg says.

So here are the steps to not being attacked whilst on a Tinder date, courtesy of the Tinder CEO:

1. Don’t meet people (Just don’t go out, ever. Stay home. It’s safer.)
2. Don’t go to someone’s house (It’s probably booby trapped.)
3. Meet in a public place (This one is probably fair.)
4. Don’t drink (Find another way to get through your dreadful date.)
5. Tell someone when you’re on a date (This one is also probably fine.)
6. Never go into someone’s car (Walk! Burn those calories.)

Interestingly enough, nothing in Ginsberg’s makeshift guide to staying safe while dating directs any particular direction—not even a simple “Don’t hurt women”—to men on the other side of the date. The guidelines are all a sort of gentle contract for women (if you’re a woman using this app, just do all these things, or don’t do all these other things, and you’ll be just fine) that fail to really address the people they implicitly fear. Better tips will probably be found on Twitter, or on Tinder’s official “Dating Safely” webpage, which is a more carefully curated list.

But there’s always the safest alternative: just don’t meet anyone, ever.

Follow Connor Garel on Twitter.

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The story of Vancouver’s NXIVM chapter, which grew into one of the most active and star-studded centres on the planet, began with a chance meeting on a cruise ship. More than 15 years before the FBI alleged top members of the self-help group committed sex trafficking and a bunch of other crimes, actress Sarah Edmondson attended a floating spirituality-themed film festival with her director husband in 2005. That’s where she met What The Bleep Do We Know? filmmaker Mark Vicente, who was apparently still buzzing from his first 16-day NXIVM “intensive.”

As Edmondson recounted on a recent episode of the new CBC podcast Uncover: Escaping NXIVM, the cruise itself felt like an opportunity for the 27-year-old basement-dwelling actress to get her life on track. She was barely making ends meet stringing together voice acting and beer commercial gigs—work she said didn’t feel meaningful. While seated together at dinner, Edmondson was trying to hide what was probably a nasty cold virus, but her “seal bark” coughs were constantly interrupting things.

Between hacking fits Vicente took Edmondson aside and asked her a bizarre question she’d never heard before: what would you lose if you stopped coughing? As in: what would be the “downside” if Edmondson wasn’t always so sick. This is the kind of counter-intuitive question NXIVM uses to spark epiphanies, and it prompted a burst of self-reflection in Sarah. She realized her coughs were an attempt to get her husband’s attention—she had subconsciously believed that sickness would earn her the care and love she craved. “I remember thinking wow, whatever Mark from What the Bleep is up to, I wanna do,” Edmondson told CBC.

This new way of looking at her marriage was the first feel-good hook that would eventually set Edmondson on an unparalleled NXIVM recruiting streak. By the end of her first five-day training she thought all of her friends needed this, that she was ready to bring NXIVM to Canada. In particular Edmondson was thinking about her acting colleagues, who she thought needed personal development more than anyone.

One of those actors was Chad Krowchuk, who still remembers the curious way NXIVM rippled through his social network. He first heard good reviews from Edmondson and her husband over dinner one night, and then from his acting friends Kristin Kreuk and Mark Hildreth a few weeks later. But it was his longtime girlfriend, Smallville actress Allison Mack, who finally convinced him to attend his first five-day training with her in Albany.

Both Krowchuk and Mack were child actors who found each other in their early 20s, and built a steady live-in relationship around their busy schedules. Krowchuk was working at Starbucks and bussing tables at a local restaurant while taking acting gigs when they popped up. He wanted to find more time to develop his career as a visual artist, while she was on her way to becoming a household name as Superman’s best friend in a teen superhero show watched by millions.

Mack and Krowchuk were about three years into living together when NXIVM “became a thing” in their group of friends. Grace Park (Battlestar Galactica) was another big name. Though both of them were skeptical at first, it only took a couple months for the excitement to rub off on Mack. When she came home from a women’s weekend retreat in 2007, Krowchuk could tell she was absolutely thrilled, and now wanted to share that powerful experience with him.

“That was the part that scared me the most,” Krowchuk says of his girlfriend’s sudden shift in perspective. “Before we had conversations about it, and we both thought it seemed kind of weird and creepy. I don’t necessarily know if she thought it was creepy, but we agreed it seemed a little messed up.” Now Mack was 110 percent on board, but he still had reservations. Krowchuk wondered to himself, if the tools were really so powerful and the leaders were committed humanitarians, then why weren’t they giving away the teachings for free?

Mack was Krowchuk’s most important relationship at the time, so he sucked up all his discomforts and got on a plane to Albany to meet the NXIVM inner circle. He remembers the Socratic question and answer therapies being very Freudian. It seemed just about any life problem could be traced back to a few moments in childhood—the apparent root of everyone’s mommy or daddy issues.

By this time Vicente and Edmondson were co-founders of a downtown Vancouver teaching space that hosted regular trainings on Wednesday nights and weekends. “I would recruit people, meet people, and it was all word of mouth,” Edmondson told VICE last year. “I welcomed almost every single training. There was only one I missed in the whole 12 years. At the end when they got their sash I would put it around their neck and we'd all clap.”

Though the hand clapping and coloured sashes were weird, Krowchuk says he really liked people he met through NXIVM. They were generally impressive and kind. Sure, there was an unsettling mood in the room that reminded him of obnoxious acting classes, but he liked that coaches gave a name to things he didn’t have a vocabulary for yet.

Over time the self-help group really shifted Mack and Krowchuk’s social landscape. Some preferred to keep a blend of company—both people who knew about NXIVM and people who didn’t care for it—but others started to break away from their old lives in favour of surrounding themselves with likeminded people.

Having a dinner party with NXIVM friends meant constantly dissecting your fears and insecurities. If somebody said they didn’t like sharing the food on their plate, for example, other group members would chime in with probing questions in an effort to overcome the block. What would you lose if you stopped the behaviour? Is refusing to share holding you back? Needless to say, it wasn’t a welcome conversation style for everyone.

Krowchuk could see some of his friends overcoming their insecurities, like Smallville costar Kristin Kreuk, who battled career-stifling shyness. “I felt like I related more to Kristin than anyone there, I could see what the appeal is,” Krowchuk told VICE. But other acting friends grew more isolated, like Battlestar’s Nicki Clyne. “Nicki I know she was the first example of somebody who had a decent acting career, she was doing quite well, and then she took the courses and went fuck it, I want to do this thing instead.” At the time Krowchuk thought there must have been a greater good he couldn’t see, and decided to reserve his judgements.

Mack was invited into NXIVM’s inner circle very quickly, and Krowchuk was able to tag along in the beginning. But he soon realized that he didn’t have the money to go much further with the coursework. “Allison paid for a lot of my courses,” he told VICE. “I would slowly pick away at paying her back, but I couldn’t afford to do it. Most normal people couldn’t afford to do this.” All told, Krowchuk says he probably spent between 20 and 30 grand on NXIVM courses, and by then he and Mack were already on the outs. They both had very different ideas about where their lives were headed, and around 2009 they broke things off for good.

At the time Krowchuk wasn’t concerned for Mack’s wellbeing—he thought her environment was generally positive, and her only goal was bettering herself. This was nearly a decade before allegations of branding, blackmail, starvation and sex slaves would surface.

The courses taught that everyone was responsible for their own reactions to the outside word. But that meant a NXIVM coach could turn just about any bad situation around and blame the student for their flawed response. “If a course like this is in the hands of somebody who means well, it’s harmless,” he said. “But I always felt like it would be really shitty if it was used in a negative way… It gets dangerous when you start stripping away meaning from everything.”

Meanwhile, Mack was a go-getter who was constantly pitching the TV industry people around her, even on the Smallville set. Michael Rosenbaum, who played Lex Luthor on the show, recently recalled her talking about the dorky self-help organization she was involved in. “I remember she was a part of something... doing some self-help stuff,” he told Theo Von’s This Past Weekend podcast. “I remember thinking that sounds a little culty, maybe it’s not for me, but I never thought about it… When I was on the show Allison was the sweetest, most professional, just a great actress.”

By this time Sarah Edmondson was building up the Vancouver business like never before. She had personally recruited big names like Nicki Clyne and Grace Park, and their collective success in the film and TV industry was quickly becoming a draw for new actors wanting to connect with them. And as social media sites like Facebook and Twitter began to rise in popularity, the magic follower boost that comes with fame turned recruiting into an easy numbers game.

But unbeknownst to Edmondson, her biggest opportunity would come at the expense of the woman who taught her everything she knew. In 2009 Barbara Bouchey confronted leader Keith Raniere about his secret sexual relationships with both clients and board members, as well as other improper business practices. Eight other women left with Bouchey, which effectively closed down multiple training centres including the one in Seattle. So instead of Vancouverites commuting south of the border for coursework like they did in the early 2000s, American clients started coming to Edmondson’s thriving new centre.

Bouchey was about to meet a terrible fate involving harassment and lawsuits, but that meant the stage was set for Vancouver to outpace all the other North American centres—even Albany—in its saturation of a young, wealthy market of liberal creative types. This is why one actress and former member described her 2013 recruitment into NXIVM to me like this: “It was like being invited to an Oscar party.”

Sarah Berman is a senior editor at VICE Canada working on a book about the NXIVM sex trafficking trial with Penguin Canada. Follow her on Twitter.

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Perhaps unsurprisingly, there’s a musicality to the way that Hans Zimmer speaks. With over 150 film scores under his belt, ranging from Driving Miss Daisy to Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, he’s one of the hardest-working men in the business, not to mention one of the most in-demand. Just after the announcement that he’s set to score the new Wonder Woman film, he’s at Toronto International Film Festival for the premiere of Steve McQueen’s Widows, for which he also composed the score.

The film, which stars Viola Davis and centers on a group of women coming together to complete a heist after (as the title suggests) being widowed by their criminal husbands, is full of twists and turns, none of which would have any impact if not for the thread of grief running through the whole thing. The balance between action and introspection is one that’s reflected in the score — that is, when there’s any music at all.

As we speak the day after the film’s premiere (which marks Zimmer’s second collaboration with McQueen), it becomes clearer and clearer that one of the reasons Zimmer’s scores are so singular is that they’re all intensely personal. It’s not just a matter of composing something to help the movie get from Point A to Point B: it's a matter of translating a specific moment in time into music, and putting both heart and soul into the work.

I sat down with Zimmer to discuss finding the film’s sound, as well as working on the TV series upon which the film is based, revisiting his past scores, and hiding behind his music.

VICE: This is the second time you’ve worked with Steve McQueen. How did it come about that you worked with him again?
Hans Zimmer: Because I love him. Well, there’s more to it than that. We were talking about what interests him, what projects he’s working on, a few years back, and one of the things he mentioned was Widows. When I first started out, I was working as an intern for Stanley Myers, the composer, he was working on a television show called Widows, which this is based on, so I was the tea boy on the original series. It makes for a funny story, except that the story—by Lynda La Plante, who created the original series — what was so revolutionary at the time about it was that it was about not only four very strong women, but the sort of casual brutality women experience in the world. I remember at the time thinking, “This is an important piece of storytelling, and it’ll change the world.” And of course, it didn’t change the world. In fact, if anything, I felt Steve saying, “Hey, let’s do Widows,” I found it was more relevant than ever.

There are so many ways of thinking about Steve McQueen the artist, and Steve McQueen, but at the end of the day, the reason I love working with him is because he has such a big heart for humanity. I think his aesthetic is based on his love of humanity. And his whole team, from his DP, Sean Bobbitt, to Joe Walker, who I’ve known since 1988, who is really a musician. He started in music. He’s far more sophisticated than I am. I always think, and I think it’s because Steve comes from the visual arts first and became a filmmaker second, when I watch what they do, they’re actually creating a piece of music. They’ve already created the piece of music, and all I am is an orchestrator. It’s a different process. It’s really hard for me to describe, but if you look at the way the shots flow into each other, and especially in Widows, there’s not much music in it, because the music already exists in a different form. I don’t need to ruin their perfect piece of music with making more noise.

That was one of the things that I noticed: the score is very sparse in parts, and only kicks in at certain moments. Was that something you knew right away when you saw the film, or something that came through discussion?
We never discussed, we just did. We just knew. In fact, there’s one note just before the title Widows hits, which we put in at the last moment just to let people know that there might be the possibility of music appearing somewhere. Nearly a gratuitous note, but I think it’s the only time we actually did that.

I was reading a conversation that you’d had where you described your process with Christopher Nolan as a back and forth, where he’d send you some material and you’d send some music back. What’s your process like with McQueen?
We sit around a lot and talk about life. I mean, really, we do! We talk about everything that bothers us and concerns us, or that we love or that we don’t love, or whatever it is. Movies are sort of ultimately made in a moment. They freeze a moment in our life, and that’s how we felt, this is who we were at that moment when we were making the movie. There’s a lot of Steve sitting in my room and me playing the wrong notes or playing whatever notes. I feel very safe around both [Nolan and McQueen], so I don’t mind playing the wrong notes, and I know when something moves Steve. He can’t help himself, because he will interrupt and go, “Oh, don’t stop, that’s great! Okay, carry on!” It’s a very unscientific approach we take to filmmaking.

To that end, regarding freezing a moment in time, I read that you don’t revisit your work that often, but when you do, is that what you’re thinking of?
Yeah, I do. I always remember the experience as opposed to the— I can never remember the characters’ names, and very often I don’t even really remember the story, but I remember what it felt like when we were making it. I keep telling people this, but when we did Batman Begins, we never thought we’d do another Batman movie, and then one day Chris came and said, “I just want to run an idea by you,” and he started talking about the Joker. When all was said and done, we did The Dark Knight. We did three movies, but that was twelve years of our lives. There comes a point where you do have to look at things and the seconds of life lived. Was it a worthwhile experience, or was it not a worthwhile experience? I can honestly say it was a worthwhile experience. I can recommend to anybody, be playful, become a musician, or even if you’re not a musician, just behave like one. It’s pretty good.

Do you get the sense of whether it’s going to have been worthwhile while you’re working on a film or afterwards?
I have this terrible habit that even after the film is out and anybody asks me about it, I’m going, “Yeah, I’m nearly done. It’s not quite done yet.” It’s like everything is not quite done yet. Last night was the first time I saw Widows with an audience. It’s just been Steve, Joe, and I sitting and watching it on a screen, or Joe, Steve, and I watching it on a screen, and sometimes it’d just be Steve and me watching it on a screen. We like it, you know? It’s as simple as that. We like it, but we don’t know if anybody else will like it. It’s our baby, it’s our child, and we want it to go out into the world and we want people to be kind to it, and not beat the living daylights out of it. So putting it in front of an audience is nerve-wracking. There was a large group of us yesterday, the actors and everybody, so you feel very, very protective of everybody who’s been working on it, because you know that everybody really put everything into it.

In terms of the sound of the film, it goes between these two extremes, from these very long, languorous pieces to these very frenetic pieces for the heist sequences. Was there a moment when you settled on how that score would play out or sound?
I knew what I wanted to do long before we started actually working on it. It’s not an action movie, it’s a heist movie. A heist is about working things out, and it’s about using your brain to solve problems and time running out on you. The other part, the longer notes — one of the things I was really concerned with was I knew I wanted to write for strings, and I knew I wanted to write something beautiful, but strings have an automatic way of romanticizing things. They have a way of sounding lush. I love recording in this church in London. I didn’t record there. I recorded in a much smaller room, much drier, nothing epic — the opposite. Part of the dilemma is very often that those notes accompany a woman by herself, grieving, and the last thing I wanted to do was take away from the acting or the performance or the story by giving her companionship, which music automatically does. I had to think long and hard about how to write music that was not ugly, but at the same time wasn’t sentimental in any way, and in a funny way underscored her solitude as opposed to giving her comfort.

Were there any other outside influences that were helpful for scoring the film in addition to the images from the film themselves?
Outside influences? Have you opened a newspaper recently? [laughs] I mean, there’s so much story, so much stuff packed into this movie, so many things that meant something to Steve, and then meant something to us. We’ll see if it means something to an audience, but I think part of what it is, is what all good movie are supposed to be: they’re very personal. They tell the stories that interest the filmmakers, and hopefully are relevant to an audience, hopefully resonate with an audience, because, at the end of the day, Steve—yes, I know he’s a brilliant and famous visual artist, he has a career that’s separate from him as a filmmaker — the way I think of Steve is as a man who loves humanity, and who has a huge, big heart, and that's it. He wears his heart on his sleeve, and it shows in his movies.

Had you been familiar with his work prior to working on 12 Years a Slave ?
Oh, absolutely. I was virtually begging. I didn’t know he was going to make 12 Years a Slave, he just phoned me up out of the blue and said, “What are you doing at 9 o’clock tomorrow morning? I want to show you something.” And he didn’t warn me. So I was bloody and raw for the rest of the day, and I’m not good in the mornings.

I also wanted to talk about your career more broadly: you recently branched out with the tour and also the MasterClass , do you have any other aspirations as to what else to try?
No! I don’t! I didn’t even have aspirations for any of that. The tour was all my musician friends going, “There comes a point where you have to stop hiding behind having stage fright, because you owe it to people who have been listening to your music to actually look them in the eye. You can’t hide behind a screen forever.” And the stage fright never went away. It was terrifying every night, but I started to use it, in a way. It became, okay, it’s going to be terrifying, because I never script anything I say, so I just go out there, and whatever happens is going to happen. I just sort of went, “Okay, so I’m built that way, and I’ll never get over the fear, but just live with it. Just do it.” And my friends were right, there is something slightly more honorable to actually turning up and looking people in the eye than hiding behind a screen. And making things happen in real time is very different. A lot of those scores were recorded over days and days or weeks, and now I’m asking my musicians to go and play Pirates, which has French horn parts where basically your lips just start bleeding. We would record that over six days, and I’m saying, “Guys, here we are. Go for it!”

The MasterClass thing was really interesting. It seemed like a fun thing to do until I started doing it, and suddenly realized—they were great, and I hated them for it. The thing I found out is, everything I know, I never had to articulate. I learned by learning, I just learned by being there, I never had to put it into words, and suddenly I had to go and explain something. The guys from master class would just be sitting in front of me and go, “We didn’t understand a word of what you just said. Go again.” So I was learning what I instinctively knew. I had to and, as I said, articulate and find the words to describe some things.

Jumping off of the tour, one of the things that I think was written a lot was that it proved that the music you wrote for these films can stand on their own.
Yeah, because I refused to have a single image from any of the movies.

Do you think about that while you’re composing?
I think they need to stand on their own, but I didn’t want to prove that my music could stand on its own two feet. What I wanted to do was let the audience see these amazing musicians I’ve been working with all these years, I wanted it to be about them. I wanted to go, “Look at Tina, look at Guthrie Govern, these guys are amazing!” I didn’t want to distract from them with the images, because I love them, I’ve had the experience of watching them play, so I just wanted to go and see—plus, in a funny way, that was me yet again hiding a little bit, because I can hide behind extraordinary musicianship.

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When Allie Severino was in high school, she was addicted to opioid pills and at one point seemed on the verge of becoming yet another casualty of America’s worst-ever drug epidemic. But after going through recovery, the now 28-year-old South Florida native has dedicated her life to helping others do the same, currently working on community outreach for a local recovery center. She’s even "become everyone in Delray Beach’s emergency contact number” when it comes to opioid issues, she told me.

VICELAND’s new series DOPESICK NATION follows Severino and her coworker Frankie Holmes—also recovering from addiction—as they attempt to save lives in a billion-dollar rehabilitation industry notorious for corruption. While outside scrutiny has helped begin the process of cleaning up the private rehab scene, it’s still an uphill battle and the people most in need of help are often left out to dry.

Ahead of the series premiere on Wednesday, we talked to Severino about South Florida’s notorious addiction-treatment hustle, mental health, stigma, and what this crisis looks like when you’ve seen it from both sides—recovery and treatment.

VICE: From your experience, how long do people who work in the rehab world stay in the industry?
Allie Severino: So many people come and go. And the ones that really stay, they’re so beaten down. There are a few people in the industry who have made it long term, since, like, the 90s. They’re usually larger sober home owners. I think it’s easier when it’s a sober home—it’s nice to see the clients when they’re recovering, right? Not before, while they’re using. You deal with them in an easier state.

But you have to think, in South Florida, there’s really only three industries to be in. It’s tourism, construction, or treatment. So a lot of therapists are going to get paid the most in the treatment industry. A lot of people like our [behavioral health technicians] that work for us get paid more than they would at another regular job. So they try as hard as they can, for as long as they can, to work in this industry, because they need to make a living.

How do you avoid burning out?
My personal mental health is really important, because without that, I’m not very helpful to others. It’s really hard. It would be nice to turn my phone off, but [if] you miss a call and you call that person back, they could be dead. [Usually] when you miss a phone call from someone that you work with, you’re like Okay, I’ll call them back later. In the back of my mind it’s like, Oh, how bad of an emergency is it? It’s so easy to continuously reach for the phone. But I try. I get a lot of massages, but it’s because I need to turn my phone off when I go in there. I hang out with a lot of amazing friends who are super grounded. I just try to have a decent amount of alone time, too, where I don’t have to deal with anyone else’s issues and I can just chill.

Why is Florida such a hotbed for the problematic side of the rehabilitation industry?
It is going on everywhere. California, I have a feeling, will be next. But South Florida was such a big rehab capital, and so when the clients come down here for treatment and they don’t stay sober, they think, You know what? I’m going to use my insurance card to just go back in a couple weeks when I’m done partying. Then their insurance runs out and they’re homeless. They might find a way down here, but they don’t have a way back. Because mom and dad have been sending Western Union this whole time thinking they’re sober, and they use a lot of their loved ones for everything they have. I know a lot of loved ones that are in bankruptcy, because their kids just take and take and take until there’s no more left. And then they’re left here with nowhere to go. They think that they’ll have insurance forever.

Sometimes it doesn’t work that way. Insurance is not going to want you to go to treatment 30 times in a year. That’s crazy. It comes from some of the treatment centers—”Help is a revolving door”—letting clients think that it’s okay to continuously go to rehab over and over again. They go and go and go and then when their benefits are used up and no one can get anything out of them, they’re now a burden instead of making profit. It’s over. They really find out the hard way.

What are some misconceptions about this specific type of addiction?
It can literally happen to anyone. I personally feel like the biggest contender to heroin addiction is alcoholism. Alcoholism is so bad. They’re somehow okay in society, because alcohol is legal. It’s a social norm to drink. It’s just so normal that you can go your whole life being a fall-down drunk and somehow make it through. But the thing is, there’s a ton of people who shot up heroin and went to work today, too. There are people in their office buildings shooting dope, and there are people in their office buildings hiding their alcohol and drinking it. It’s the same thing. I feel bad for a lot of alcoholics, because they’re not going to go and get help. At least with heroin addiction, it usually gets to a point where they are so stigmatized that they have to go get help and get better. [But] it’s all deadly.

What advice do you have for people who are trying to get help?
If you’re trying to get help or your loved one is struggling, I mean, just cut the bullshit. Stop the denial. You’ve got to man up and you’ve got to get on it. I asked my dad, "What would you have done differently?” He said, “I would have paid more attention. If I would have paid more attention, I would have known what was going on.” If we really want to stop this drug crisis, we need to start talking and educating our children when they’re in, like, fourth grade—when they’re still at mom’s hip. Because you lose them when they go into middle school. And parents need to tell their kids the truth. We have to educate the children as young as possible as to what can happen, what can go on, what can go wrong, what to do when you see something happening.

But if you’re struggling, just call and get help, man. There’s no shame in it. There’s a way out if you’re ready. Just do it. The day that you feel like this is enough and you have that moment of clarity, call.

The show deals with negative outcomes associated with addiction, including sex work and homelessness. What is the perception of these struggles specifically in Florida, seeing that it’s a relatively conservative state?
I don’t think political party matters, because most people are in shock when they see true addiction. Almost everyone has empathy for it when it affects them and their family. They’ll care. If it affected you and your family, you will feel empathy for that girl walking down the street. You will feel empathy for that homeless person. Maybe you’ll talk to them. So many cross to the other side of the road when they see somebody homeless. I walk right past them and say hi. They’re human beings. You have no idea what struggles they’ve gone through in their life that they’ve ended up in that situation. Some of the most amazing, brilliant minds out there are just struggling. We all just need to be more human. People are just judgmental. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from, people judge you right from looking at you right away. That sucks. We can change that a little bit.

What are your thoughts on the enduring stigma surrounding Methadone, Suboxone, and similar medications?
Any medication-assisted treatment program has an awful stigma around it. It makes it very difficult for people who need those programs to assimilate back into society. We have clients at the place I work at where—some are on Suboxone and some are not. A lot of programs are introducing medication, because… listen, after your 30th run in rehab, if it’s not working for you, get on medication or you’re going to die. I’ve talked to parents who are like, “I wish I wouldn’t have had a stigma against medication, because my kid might still be alive today.” So guess what? If you’re on medication, I have a place to start working on you from. If you’re dead, I don’t.

Finding employment and rejoining “regular” society still seem to be extremely difficult when people are recovering from addiction. How do you think this can change?
Employment is definitely one of the biggest hurdles and struggles most people coming into recovery are going to face, because most of them have a [criminal] background. If we want to talk about stereotypes—Well, I don’t want to hire this person because they’re going to steal from me. That’s what a lot of people think. They’re unreliable or they’re not going to show up to work. It’s not true. You have to look at that person and see where they’re at and give them a shot. And that’s what the treatment industry does for a lot of people. A lot of the [behavioural health technicians] do have backgrounds, but they’re sober and they have a job. They can move up, go back to school, and they get an education in something that they care about.

That’s why so many people in recovery work in treatment, because they have a tough time finding jobs anywhere else.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity. Those struggling with addiction or related issues can visit the official federal government SAMHSA National Helpline website for treatment information.

DOPESICK NATION airs Wednesday at 10 PM on VICELAND. Catch the first episode before the premiere here.

Follow Sarah Bellman on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

On a remote island, somewhere off the coast of Papua New Guinea, there’s a shipwreck full of cocaine. The vessel was abandoned by drug-smuggling pirates before it drifted out to sea and ran aground near the Siassi Islands: an uninhabited volcanic islet in the Vitiaz Strait. And authorities suspect that more than $50 million worth of coke could still be sitting in the hull.

It was a shark fisherman who first found the stash, on a tiny atoll in the Solomon Sea, after noticing a piece of rope that ran up out of the water and onto the beach. The man followed the cord until he reached a small stick poking out of the ground. And then he started digging.

Buried in the sand were 11 duffel bags full of packaged cocaine, believed to be destined for Australian shores. The fisherman took the multimillion-dollar haul back to his village on nearby Budi Budi Island, some 700 kilometres east of Port Moresby. And within days, a boatload of heavily-tattooed Asian gangsters arrived in the village to reclaim their drugs, as reported by The Australian.

What followed was a 400 kilometer sea chase between the modified trawler and the Papa New Guinean navy. With the aid of Australian air surveillance, PNG police eventually intercepted the vessel and arrested the suspected smugglers: six men from Hong Kong and one man from Montenegro. When officers attempted to conduct a full search of the vessel, however, they discovered it’d been booby-trapped with oil and fuel pumped throughout the engine room.

“Our men couldn’t get into the interior,” said regional PNG chief inspector George Bayagau. “There was diesel poured inside and there was grease all over and it made it very, very difficult.”

With the boat proving too heavy to tow, police were forced to abandon the search while they transported the traffickers to the nearby city of Alatou. Those men are set to face trial on drug charges next week. But the coke boat remains at large.

“All efforts were made to salvage the boat, but it was impossible,” said Mr Bayagau.

All that officers managed to acquire was a small amount of coke located inside a cigarette packet on the trawler. The residents of Budi Budi also held on to one packet from the stash, which contained 6 kilos of cocaine, priced at more than $1.3 million. They eventually handed it over to police.

Authorities suspect that the remaining 55 packets, meanwhile, are still onboard the boat.

The Pacific has become a hot spot for organised crime in recent years. The remoteness of the islands combined with a lack of resources for policing and border control has created an idyllic passage through which cartels can smuggle drugs, weapons, and people to places like Australia and New Zealand.

Those same factors are likely the reason why the boat full of cocaine hasn’t been properly retrieved by authorities. And that means there’s a good chance it’s still sitting out there, lost and marooned on a tropical shore.

Waiting to be found.

This article originally appeared on VICE AU.

If you've ever been to a zoo, you'll have thought about stealing a monkey. Everyone has. There's something undeniably beguiling about their high-jinks and their squished little faces, their childish nature, and their wild spirit. And the fact they're a perfect size to stuff in a tote bag.

Few of us have ever had the courage to go through with it, though: to steal a monkey. And that may well be for the best. Because a 23-year-old New Zealander named John Casford almost died trying.

John admits he was "high as a kite" when he bypassed an unsecured gate, broke through two padlocks and entered the monkey enclosure at Wellington Zoo. He had it in his mind that he was going to catch one of the zoo's squirrel monkeys—a canopy-dwelling species from the Central and South Americas—and take it home to his girlfriend. The squirrel monkeys had other ideas.

"I don't know what happened in the squirrel monkey enclosure," said Wellington District Court judge Bill Hastings during John's sentencing last week. "The squirrel monkeys know. You say you couldn't find them and I don't speak squirrel [monkey].

"What I know is that by daybreak all the monkeys were distressed, two of them were injured, and you had a broken leg, two fractured teeth, a sprained ankle, and bruises on your back."

John reportedly told zookeepers that he'd broken his leg while jumping the boundary fence—but his attempted monkey heist was ultimately foiled by the fact that monkeys are not, as it turns out, just hairy little children with tails. They are savage acrobats that will beat the living piss out of anyone who wanders into their territory unannounced. And in this case, that someone also happened to be a wanted criminal.

Police had been chasing John for a string of unrelated offences over the previous seven months, including an unprovoked assault on a man waiting at traffic lights, an alcohol-fuelled attack at a convenience store, and assaults on a Wellington City Council community safety officer and a night shelter resident who refused to hand over cigarettes, the New Zealand Herald reports.

Judge Hastings sentenced him to two years and seven months in prison for both the attempted monkey burglary and the crime spree leading up to it. The judge pointed out that the 23-year-old would have put the monkey's life in jeopardy, had he managed to catch one, as well as endangering the wider community with a biohazard risk in the event that one of the monkeys managed to escape.

Squirrel monkeys are an endangered species that typically grow to around 35 centimetres and weigh no more than 1100 grams. They have the largest brain-to-body mass ratio of all the primates, live together in polygamous mating systems, and have been described as "small, nervous primates".

This article originally appeared on VICE AU.

The ballad of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a complicated one. The Coen brothers' new project with Netflix was originally announced as a western anthology series, but then, suddenly, Netflix revealed that—surprise!—the series isn't going to be a series after all, but a full-length feature film.

Now, finally, Netflix has released the first trailer for Buster Scruggs and, while it's hard to tell whether the thing will actually work as a film, one thing is clear—it is going to be goddamn beautiful.

The trailer is full of gorgeous frontier landscapes and shots that ride a line between the starkness of the Coens' True Grit and the fantasy elements of O Brother, like a grinning Buster Scruggs blowing a bar away dressed like Roy Rogers and Liam Neeson in some crazy bear suit. The basic conceit follows six separate stories, presumably anchored by Scruggs, played by Tim Blake Nelson of O Brother, Where Art Thou? It's also full of stars: The titular character will likely stumble his way into story lines featuring everybody from Neeson to Zoe Kazan to Tom Waits. James Franco also makes an appearance as a criminal repeatedly sentenced to death in his first major film role following his sexual misconduct allegations.

Hacking an entire season down into a two-hour film felt like an odd last-minute decision when it was announced last July, like something dreamed up in a frantic 3AM writer's room to fix a series that wasn't working. But this is the Coen brothers we're talking about, the twin brains that somehow gave birth to A Serious Man and Lebowski and Fargo, so they probably know what they're doing.

Buster Scruggs just premiered at Venice, where it won the festival's screenplay award, but early reviews have been mixed. The Wrap called it "a charming footnote in the Coens' career" and Hollywood Reporter dubbed the film "minor Coen brothers," but even a minor Coen brothers film sounds better than a major film from anybody else, so bring it on. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is out on Netflix and in select theaters November 16.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

A Roku is a little device you hook up to your TV so you can stream internet content to your screen. You can use it to watch Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube, and other major streaming services, but also channels made by smaller companies and individual people.

The most basic type of Roku channel is free, and a channel with commercials can be done for as little as $50 a month. As with movies and music and books, the gatekeepers have been removed, and entertainment has been democratized. Which is wonderful. Anyone and everyone can get their message to the eyes of the TV-viewing public.

But this also means means that anyone and everyone can get their message to the eyes of the TV-viewing public, from Scientology to Sarah Palin to homophobic preachers.

Over the course of a few days, I devoted a bunch of hours to scrolling through Roku listings, trying to find the weirdest channels on the service. Roku has both public and private channels, the latter of which are not monitored by Roku and have to be accessed by a code. They’re apparently used for a lot of porn and copyrighted material. I decided to stick to public channels, rather than exploring the private ones. So the quality of private channels like the Bill O’Reilly Channel, the AR15 Channel, and GWAR TV will have to remain a mystery.

Here's what I found:

Relaxing Channel for Dogs

As the name suggests, Relaxing Channel for Dogs is a channel aimed at dogs for the purpose of relaxation. I guess you’re meant to put it on when you leave your dogs at home alone.

When I tuned in, the channel was showing a close-up of a dog’s snout with some new age-y music called “Lakeside Walkies” playing over the top. I watched for about five minutes and nothing really changed. The image of the dog’s face just kinda slowly panned by. I can’t speak for any dogs, but I was into it. Very relaxing.

Weirdness rating: 7/10

The Cornfield of Terror

The Cornfield of Terror channel, which describes itself as “perfect for parties or any get-togethers,” has just one piece of content, a film called The Cornfield.

The film opens with a POV shot of a guy whose car breaks down next to a cornfield. A small child emerges from the corn, and he follows him in. The next ten minutes or so is just POV footage of this guy walking through corn saying things like, "Hello?!" and, "What's going on here?!"

I got bored so I skipped forward ten minutes. It was still the guy walking through corn. I skipped another ten minutes. Still corn. I skipped right to the end. More corn, until a minute or so before the end, when a couple of people in store-bought monster masks jumped out of the corn, causing the film's main character to lay down and die of fright (I think?).

I'm not going to go back through and scrutinize every frame, but it looked like 95 percent of the content available on this channel is footage of a guy walking through corn.

Weirdness rating: 10/10

Only Animation TV

I misread the description and downloaded this channel because I thought it was a channel devoted to people who do voices in animation. It was actually the channel of a guy called Mat Brunet who reviews cartoons.

Brunet seems to be so into animation that he's turning himself into a cartoon character. He was wearing the same outfit in all of the videos I watched (one of those silky Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet shirts and an orange trilby) and spoke with the kind of chipper, inoffensive, Scrappy Doo-esque intonation that doesn’t really exist in the physical realm. The Rachel Dolezal of cartoons.

Weirdness rating: 7/10

The Fetish Channel

When I opened it, this channel was showing the feet of a woman in heels while she did her grocery shopping in some European country. Then she was using an ATM. Then walking around a used car lot. She was wearing a skintight black dress and you never saw her face.

Then a title card came up that said “Bupshi Girlfriends in Heels” and it was footage of two women speaking (I think in Russian), shot from the chest down, also wearing giant heels. Then it was a clip from Cougar Town of Courteney Cox chatting on the phone with no shoes on.

I think it’s safe to say the target audience of the channel is foot fetishists. Though why anyone would watch this when internet porn exists is beyond me. I’m not into feet, but it was kind of soothing to watch. The seemingly random abstract visuals had a nice rhythm to them. Kinda like the video from The Ring.

Weirdness rating: 9/10—horny people are extremely good at being weird.

MoniGarza

This channel seems to just be several short clips of the same baby. From the channel name, I assume that baby is called Moni Garza. She was shown getting a haircut and eating spinach and a few other mundane things. I think I watched the channel’s entire lineup of content in under ten minutes. I have no idea why someone would make this and even less idea why anyone would watch it.

Weirdness rating: 8/10

NRA TV

This was exactly what you would imagine an NRA TV channel to be. The ten minutes I watched were of a man talking about concealed carry while sitting in front of an American flag, some cop/military paraphernalia, a set of Pez dispensers in the shape of the founding fathers, a Charlton Heston doll, and a bottle of hot sauce.

There was also an ad for NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch’s show, which is called The DL. Presumably, there wasn’t a queer person on staff to point out that that term already means something.

Weirdness level: 0/10 if you’re American, 10/10 if you’re from somewhere else.

NRA Women

The NRA also has a channel aimed specifically at women.

I watched some of a show called Armed and Fabulous , which profiles women who like guns (if they had a queer person on staff, they probably would’ve told them that this is the name of the second Miss Congeniality film).

The episode I watched was about a 13-year-old gun enthusiast named Katie. "[Katie’s] begun to catch the eye and interest of boys at school,” said the voiceover at one point, before adding, “but dad's not worried, Katie can handle her own." It then cut to footage of Katie using a pistol to shoot several targets. Which I guess were meant to represent the 13-year-old boys at her school that have crushes on her?

Weirdness rating: Again, probably 0/10 if you’re American.

The Anglophile Channel

The Anglophile channel is a channel devoted to anglophiles. Which, if my Greek is right, are people who are sexually attracted to British children. (Just kidding, it actually refers to people who are obsessed with British culture and/or people. Which, as a British person, I find only slightly less distressing.)

I watched all of the episodes of a show called Stories from the Anglophiles, which claims to be the first reality show about anglophiles, a claim I didn't fact-check but definitely believe.

The show is a talent contest to decide who will get a free trip to become the Anglophile Channel’s overseas correspondent in England. Each episode features an American explaining why they should be picked.

One of the episodes was devoted to a woman named Dawn who said she had lived in England in a past life and started crying when reminiscing on time she spent in London in her current life. She also cried when talking about being denied a UK work visa. And again while explaining how much she likes Westminster Abbey. She wanted to be in the UK more than I have ever wanted anything and it made for extremely uncomfortable viewing.

The episodes seem to have been made about five years ago, and there are no new ones showing the results of the talent search or featuring footage of the winner in the UK. Which makes me think they never actually followed through on their promise to send one of these people there, and poor Dawn did all that on camera for nothing. Heartbreaking.

Weirdness rating: 6/10

Depressing Prospects Films

Depressing Prospects Films is the production entity of a Seattle-based amateur filmmaker called Brian Labrecque. The channel’s description says it shows “Strange, pointless and slightly offensive films in the tradition of South Park and Beavis and Butthead.”

I started with a 2009 movie called Effing Brutal: The Full Motion Video Graphic Novel. It was a painfully unfunny “cartoon” that tells the story of some superheroes, including a “transvestite in denial” who believes they’re Tori Amos, and a “Manic depressive femme dyke” whose superpower is that she’s “a raving lesbian.”

I’ve put cartoon in quotes back there because I don’t think it’s actually animated. I’m not 100 percent sure but it seems to have been made by running photos through a filter on an online photo service that make images look like a comic book. Nothing actually moves.

I find few things to be unwatchable, but I literally couldn't bring myself to point my eyes in its direction for more than a couple of minutes. I’m almost certain I’m the first person to watch any of it who wasn’t directly involved in its production.

I skipped to the end, and it seems like I missed some pretty edgy stuff. Before the credits, there was a disclaimer that “words like transvestite, faggot, bitch, raving lesbian and whore and jokes about gay sex are fine in fiction, but its [sic] not how you should talk about people in real life.”

Next I clicked a film from 2004 called Josh/Tori Live which is about… a man who think he’s Tori Amos. This one was filmed out in the real world, with a guy dressed as Tori Amos hanging around outside a (real) Tori Amos concert, bugging people as they entered.

Next up was a film, also from 2004, called Far Too Gone, WHICH TOLD THE STORY OF A GUY WHO THINKS HE’S TORI AMOS. It was 47 minutes long. I made it about five in.

I guess that’s a problem with this type of zany, intentionally offensive art. If you created it, it’s easy to convince yourself that any criticism being leveled towards you is because the person giving the feedback doesn’t get it or is triggered by your use of terms like "raving lesbian." Before you know it, you’ve become so convinced of the greatness of your idea you’ve made multiple films and a Roku channel devoted to the character of “guy who thinks he's Tori Amos.”

Weirdness level: 10/10

Atheist TV

Like NRA TV, this channel is exactly what you expect when you read the name: people in bad hats reading weird passages from the Bible and then looking at the camera like Jim from The Office and going, “Ohhhhhh kayyyyyeeee…”

The channel has a Christmas section, which features parody Christmas music (“Have yourself a merry little mythmas/come on don’t be shy/do your part to help us propagate a lie”) and an animated Christmas movie (pictured above) that quickly overtook Effing Brutal as the worst piece of animation I have ever seen. It feels like it would actually be difficult to make something look as shitty as it did. Like a Johny Johny Yes Papa parody made using a Tony Hawks level editor.

The plot of the film concerned Santa mistreating his reindeer because he’s unable to think for himself and has outsourced his morality to "the good book" (*sigh*) and also featured a subplot with Megyn Kelly and a character called White Jesus (*sighing so hard I deprive myself of oxygen and hallucinate myself heading towards the light, having what I believe is a religious experience that will be smugly picked apart by a guy in a flat cap on a Roku atheist TV channel*).

Weirdness rating: 9/10

House of Yahweh

I clicked on this one because the name sounded culty. A Google search I did while watching confirmed my suspicion.

House of Yahweh is a doomsday cult that's been plagued by accusations of bigamy and use of child labor. It also made headlines in 2007 when a seven-year-old girl died after being given home surgery by two people reported to be church members.

The channel itself was pretty dull. Just long, dry sermons delivered by people who weren’t massively charismatic. The outfits (pictured above) were pretty cool, though.

Weirdness rating: 2/10

I’m Inside Jew

The first show in this channel's listing was called Christmas message from Herbie and the May Pole of Doom. The description read: “Dick Cheney and Negrodamus celebrate in this family Christmas special.” It seemed like a promising start.

It opened with a title card explaining that Herbie Pearlman, the channel’s proprietor, is available for executive coaching and live performances. Then Herbie appeared: a kind of new-agey Buffalo Bill, sitting in front of a Christmas tree, wearing three button-up shirts and a Snuggie. He launched into an hour-long monologue that covered A LOT of territory. "Extinction 2112 is coming, that's my prediction,” he said at one point. “It's a Basian Bardot business as usual, capitalism is taking us down the drain, but that's OK, us 36, the Lumidvuvnichs, we're here with you, you can talk to us about what it's like to be in hospice for the planet. Think of it as the Buddhist Alzheimer’s home for the hospiceless.” (Some of those words might be spelled wrong because I’m not sure that they’re actual words, so I had to make my best guesses.)

After he’d touched on Fukushima, shoplifting, Coke, Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, trans people, Zionists, Kwanzaa, Keystone XL, Einstein’s theory of relativity, and ebola, I checked to see how far in I was. He’d been talking for five minutes.

I googled Herbie, and his website says he’s a guru. But, in a weird coincidence, since there are literally thousands of channels on Roku, it also came up with videos of him being interviewed by Brian Labrecque, the man behind the Tori Amos drag channel. So maybe the whole thing is a really elaborate bit?

Weirdness rating: 10/10

Crossbow Nation

I clicked on a show called French River Bears. It showed some people in Canada putting out bait to attract a bear, then killing it with a crossbow. Fuck these guys.

Weirdness rating: 5/10

Kids Comedy Hour

I watched a video of seven-year-old twins doing stand up. It went like this:

Kid 1: People think we’re exactly the same.
Kid 2: But we’re totally different! He doesn’t like broccoli, but I do.
Kid 1: That’s not true, I like broccoli. It’s pretty, but I just don’t like to eat it.
Kid 2: See what I mean? He doesn’t eat anything healthy.
Kid 1: Hey! I’m the healthy one. He has a big tummy because he eats too much ice cream.
Kid 2: I don’t have a big tummy! I have a six-pack.
Kid 1: Yeah, a six-pack of Häagen-Dazs.

Obviously the stand up skills of seven-year-olds have to be judged by different standards than adult ones, but it’s hard to imagine what type of person would want to watch this.

Also, I don’t think six-packs of Häagen-Dazs are a thing?

Weirdness rating: 7/10

The Jack Blood Show

Jack Blood, who I assume is the operator of this channel, is a standard Alex Jones-type conspiracy theorist who creates content about things like chemtrails and globalism. I was actually shocked I didn’t encounter more of this kind of content on my Roku quest.

I clicked on a documentary called Illusionati. It opened with a bunch of clips of like, the Ghost Whisperer, and André Leon Talley talking about Andy Warhol, and some movie where Don Cheadle is on a spaceship. While I was trying to figure out what tied the clips together, Jack Blood appeared and started talking about the Illuminati and said something about “control belief systems” that I found almost impossible to pay attention to.

A few minutes after I zoned out, I started to wonder about whether there’d been times where conspiracy theorists had stumbled upon actual real information and been ignored because of the medium. Like that guy who leaked government documents to 4chan that were dismissed as “fake and gay.”

So I zoned back in. It was an impenetrable wall of people saying things like “Israel is all about the Vatican” and stuff about the Knights Templar influence on the Iraq War and I decided I’d rather stay in the dark if it meant I got to change the channel.

Weirdness rating: 7/10

Holland TV

Holland TV is a channel that shows content about the town of Holland, Michigan. When I opened it, it was showing unbelievably lo-res footage from the town’s annual Loving Day Festival, which is thrown to celebrate the legacy of the Lovings, the interracial couple at the center of the Supreme Court Case that overthrew state laws banning interracial marriage.

“Hello my multicultural and inclusive city I love,” said the lead singer of a band called Beaver Xing, which was mostly made up of children, before launching into really-quite-terrible-but-adorable-all-the-same covers of “Havana” and “Shake it Off.”

The whole thing was extremely pleasant, and had me briefly Zillowing real estate prices in Holland (I definitely can’t afford to live there).

Weirdness rating: 2/10

Scam Alert

I clicked on a video at random. It was cell phone footage of a woman filming herself for several minutes as she told the story of being messaged by a woman named Linda on Facebook. Linda had told her that she'd won a cash prize, but after exchanging a few messages with her, she determined it was bullshit. “Watch out for this chick,” the narrator said. “She’s bad news.”

The video that autoplayed after was a guy talking about a scammer that’s targeting people in the Facebook hot sauce enthusiast community. The one after that was a woman filming herself on the phone with a scammer pretending to be from the IRS. It didn't seem like an incredibly efficient way of learning about scams.

Weirdness rating: 9/10

Screw Channel

I watched a show called Twerk and Bake, which was one minute long and consisted of several women twerking to a Rihanna song while in a kitchen.

Weirdness rating: 10/10. Horny people make some very odd creative decisions.

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On the 17th anniversary of September 11th, Trump arrived in Pennsylvania for a memorial service honoring those who died on United 93, making a beeline for the crowd gathered before him and greeting them like a WWE star about to walk into the ring:

Given Trump's past insensitive and downright bizarre comments regarding 9/11, the display wasn't all that surprising. But his jazzed demeanor quickly circulated on social media on a day dedicated to mourning the loss of nearly 3,000 lives in remembrance of an unparalleled national tragedy. Seeing as Trump's fist pump would be more at home at a monster truck rally, or really literally anywhere else than a September 11th memorial service, artist and writer Rob Sheridan offered the internet a way to give the out-of-place snapshot a better home—turning Trump's celebratory thrust into a handy PNG.

There was an entire series of fight memes:

The expected, straight-up demeaning ones:

And then, perhaps most fittingly and definitely most disturbingly, there were memes of Trump reveling in disaster, from the Hindenburg to the violence in Charlottesville:

Somehow, no matter what you photoshop Trump doing—whether he's perched on a toilet, gnawing into a massive hunk of corn, or cheering on the explosion of a zeppelin—none of these images are as absurd as a president who actually acts like this on a national day of mourning.

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Colette was one of the most prolific and venerated female writers in France, publishing more than 30 novels and novellas over the course of her career during the fin de siècle. Her works were intimate and deeply introspective—many of them semi-autobiographical, like her breakout The Vagabond, which traced her music hall experiences. She also became an internationally renowned figure and feminist icon, known for her complete independence and high visibility queer relationships at a time when it was illegal for women to even wear trousers.

But at the start of Colette's literary career no one knew her name. Her husband, Willy, took the credit for Colette's Claudine novels, even as they became an international sensation. Colette, the film—starring Keira Knightley and Dominic West, and directed by Wash Westmoreland—recounts the story of Colette's rise to literary success and the coercive marriage that stole her byline.

Below is an exclusive clip of one of the film's most tenuous scenes—in which Colette begins to realize that her work ought to be hers, and that her husband is dangerously manipulative. I also spoke to director Wash Westmoreland about Colette's work, and the process of making the film.

VICE: What led you to Colette?
Wash Westmoreland: It’s Richard, my partner. He was an avid reader, and when he started on Colette—I’ve never seen him fall into a book like that, and that guy can fall into a book. We’d be in the house, and he’d be like, “oh my god” and “oh my god.” My curiosity was piqued, and I started reading Colette too. We were very much of one mind that this would make a great film. Colette’s life is a natural narrative for a four or five season TV show. But for a two hour film, Colette’s marriage to Willy is a natural narrative about a woman that was struggling to have her voice heard, and a man controlling it. He eventually feels threatened by that, and does everything he can do to keep her down. It’s the core dynamic that runs through the story, and it can be told a thousand a ways.

It’s been compared to Big Eyes, but I don’t care. It's happened a thousand times today already—in the workplace, a woman dealing with a male superior saying the same thing five minutes later and claiming credit for it. All of the instances like that. I feel like that’s why Colette’s story resonates, it’s about a woman struggling to get out.

What research went into this film?
Reading a lot of Colette’s novels and biographies. We stayed in Paris and visited all of the places the Belle Époque had made famous, and then we traveled to her village in Burgundy and saw her family home—the museum. We did all of them, and periodically thought, "Oh that would be neat, that could go in the film." I didn’t know it would be 16 years until that came to fruition.

That's quite an amount of time to pass! Why did it take 16 years to make the film?
The place we were in our careers. Colette is quite an elaborate production and you have to have a certain momentum. There was also, I feel the script needed time to distill from a million details of Colette’s life, into what would be on screen. Choosing the story. In that time we went through about 20 drafts.

When we first started writing Colette, Keira Knightley was also not an option. After [our film] Still Alice, when [that] film reached its peak, we were able to cast her. She needs to go from 19 to 34, which she does beautifully in the film—the way she grows on screen is just incredible. I think she’s a brilliant actress. She has a special ability to convey things with an emotional translucency where you truly understand what is happening to her. Colette begins the story very much at the whim of her husband, and we needed to have a strong character capable of becoming what she becomes at the end—and the start of The Vagabond.

Photo via Bleecker Street

Colette was such a subversive, queer, feminist icon—do you also feel there's a sense that audiences wouldn't have been ready for this film until 2018?
When we first finished the screenplay, we thought, “Oh this will happen straight away, it’s such a great film.” We’d pitch the film, “and then she becomes part of the lesbian underground, plays with masculinity, and is a forerunner of what might be considered today’s butch-lesbian community. And Missy is a forerunner of transgender identity.” And people would just be staring at me. But now, of course, that conversation has come very much into the public eye. So much progress has been made with trans visibility.

There are trans actors in the movie, though many of the characters are historically cisgendered—and it works perfectly well. We’ve cast lesbian actresses, and recast historically white characters to be played by Asian British actors and black actors as well. It’s time that period pieces were more inclusive. It shows that society is more complex and that there’s a way to tell the period story that’s not starched white—white people, white hegemony. That there’s a way to tell these stories with an inclusive, diverse cast. Just invite everyone into that process, that’s what today is about.

In Colette, it’s the hand that holds the pen that writes history. And the hands that held the pen were always the hands of a white man. That’s how history has been defined—and in re-exploring history I think it’s important to note other voices who didn’t have the same access to creating narratives. It’s interesting that when Colette champions that phrase on Willy, she’s the one who holds the pen. She’s the one, now, who’s able to give a different perspective on the world through being able to write and being able to be published.

It’s the same issue with women in film today. The predominance of men directing in Hollywood, the idea that women don’t make films that aren’t as commercial—it’s exactly the same. In the 19th century so many women writers had male pseudonyms like George Eliot. Writing, putting things to paper, is almost like going into people’s minds, and the female point of view was so threatening to men who control of the literary and art scene. That was a barrier that had to be broken through, by Colette, by great women writers who have come since.

Photo via Bleecker Street

How much is the film Colette true to history?
All of the major events in the film are true. This is especially true of the events in Colette’s relationship and marriage. What we have done in adapting it, is we’ve refreshed the timeline in certain ways, and we’ve tightened of the story to foreground her development. That became the defining principle and the core narrative—Colette finding her voice as an artist through this oppressive marriage. The historical details were essentially around that core principle of that story.

If you sat down with an expert, someone who knows everything there is to know about Colette—there are various artistic licenses taken all the way through. But we tried to pay tribute to Colette’s own way of writing, which was to take her advice that she’d gotten from Willy and kind of create narrative out of it. I feel like it was something that was resonant with Colette’s working method, with the way this film was written.

It’s interesting—in the initial phases when Willy is looking at the text he’s in charge, he’s the one making the edits. But further on you see that she has now got more control of the narrative. He asks her to change things, and she says “no, I won’t.” It’s because he’s a thinly disguised character within the Claudine novels. She now controls him, and at one point even threatens to kills his character off. He’s intimidated by the growing power and the creative force in her marriage.

What are your favorite Colette novels?
I think my favorite is just her highest style of literature, it’s Chéri and The Last of Chéri. They’re beautifully written works, incredibly insightful, into the dark mind and the human heart. During the period of her story, The Vagabond, I think stands out.

That one is also my favorite, of her semi-autobiographical works.
Colette had dropped out of bourgeois society—she was not doing high Shakespeare and theatre. She was doing music hall with the show girls and the Russian acrobats and the dog trainers. She was touring, she was staying in these cold hotel rooms and earning her own money, and having the kind of freedom to be a woman of her own, living independently. And she expresses that in The Vagabond in such an interesting way.

So many stories, like The Vagabond, actually came from Colette’s real music hall experience. And that was when she was recognized as a great writer, nominated for the The Prix Goncourt. Probably would have won if it wasn’t all male judges. She was a force to reckon with. It’s amazing to read her novel in one hand and her biography in another hand, because so much of what happens in her novels comes out of her real life experience. I think so many novelists are like, “She’s a great writer, but what’s her secret, hidden life.” Whereas with Colette, it’s all out there in the public space. I mean, she was dancing on the stage naked at a time when women would be debating about whether or not to show an ankle in public.

She set such a wonderful example—if you’re stuck behind a barrier, be inspired by Colette, and think about how you can get through it.

Interview edited for length and clarity.

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There are 1,624 humans on the Pacific island of Niue, but there’s only one duck. He is, more specifically, a mallard, and named after a New Zealand politician by the name of Trevor Mallard. So there is one duck on the island of Niue and his name is Trevor.

New Zealand is the closest country where mallards are known to breed, but it’s 2,400 kilometres from Niue, so nobody really knows how Trevor got there. A lot of people seem to think he flew from New Zealand or maybe Australia, while others have argued that no, that’s way too far. Another theory suggests that Trevor stowed away on a boat, possibly a yacht, and sprinted off into the Niuean wilderness once the vessel made landfall.

Whatever the case, it looks like Trevor’s there to stay. He’s even become something of a national celebrity, owing to the fact that there’s nothing else like him on the island.

“We have whales and dolphins, we have a lot of things in the water, but not land animals,” said Felicity Bollen, chief executive officer of Niue Tourism. “There are dogs, but we don’t have anything else. We don’t have sheep, we don’t have horses, we don’t have cows. So for a duck to be wandering around the island, that’s why it’s so interesting.”

Not only is there a depressing lack of land animals on Niue, however, there’s also a severe shortage of wetlands and ponds—meaning Trev’s had to make-do with a puddle near the airport for his home. The Guardian reports that people have been taking buckets of water to refill the puddle, and the island’s fire service has been conducting regular top-ups to make sure it doesn’t go dry. Locals have also started bringing Trevor daily offerings of baguettes, peas, corn, rice, and the occasional dish of bok choy. He is fast approaching godlike status.

"Everybody knows about the duck," said local resident Randall Haines. "We drive into town every few days and you can't help yourself, you just sort of look over and see if it's still in the puddle, and it is.”

Randall told the ABC that Trevor “seems quite happy, although it doesn’t have many friends.”

And that’s what’s got some people worried. What kind of life is this for a duck? Is Trevor lonely—and if so, what can be done to make him less lonely?

So serious is this concern that the Niuean department for agriculture, forestry and fisheries is considering a raft of options to alleviate Trevor’s social isolation, including the possibility of bringing in a companion duck or, at the very least, getting some wooden decoys to keep him company.

"It's got no mates and ducks prefer to have mates," said Deputy political editor of the NZ Herald Claire Trevett, who first came across Niue’s celebrity duck while holidaying there recently. "A rooster has also discovered it and realised it's being fed and now the rooster has started bullying the duck and chasing it around everywhere."

While many of the island’s residents are fretting over ways to look after their duck and satiate his various appetites, however, others insist that Trevor is quite capable of taking care of himself.

“If he’s come to Niue to make it his home, whether that’s temporary or permanent, we should just let him be [and] provide him with clean water,” said Bollen. “If he wants to stay, that should be up to Trevor the duck. No one should interfere in that process.”

This article originally appeared on VICE AU.

Robert Nevin gathered his two teenage daughters and their friends, powered up his motorboat, and ventured into the Manasquan River. It was a great beach day in Manasquan, on the Jersey Shore, and Main Street was crowded with families enjoying the Labor Day sun. But Nevin’s serenity vanished when two boats of young men raced directly toward him in what felt like the start of a threatening encounter. “All of a sudden I've got two boatloads of guys coming over to my boat,” he told me. “Why are these guys racing over to me? I wasn't sure what their intentions were. I was really concerned about being on a boat with a bunch of teenage girls and protecting them.”

One of the boats stopped and came close. A passenger actually jumped onto Nevin’s boat. Then one of the young men gave him a thumbs up while another yelled, “Can we get a picture with you?” What they were drawn to wasn’t the boat or the girls but the Trump 2020 flag.

If America is increasingly sorted into communities that share political identities both online and in real life, the Jersey Shore is where the red and blue tribes mingle, however awkwardly, especially on weekends. Jersey is clearly a blue state but the Shore is largely a red enclave—the coastal counties of Ocean and Monmouth were two of the seven out of 21 Jersey counties Trump won in 2016. Yet the Shore’s summer and weekend residents, many from “Up North” as they say here, come from New York and northern New Jersey. Among them are many Trump-haters who are often not shy about expressing their disdain for 45.

A Trump sign can inspire a cheer, as Nevins saw, but it can also lead to an argument. Brent Shibla, a history teacher who works as a lifeguard in Manasquan during the summer, has witnessed feuds over Trump in bars and on the beach. “Fortunately it has never escalated to violence,” he said.

While we spoke, he pointed to a beachfront house. “A bunch of white males in their young 20s in the house were waving a Trump flag,” Sibla told me. “People were calling them idiots and they were cursing at people. You can physically see the political division just in the party area of Manasquan period between young 20- and 30-year-olds. I've never noticed that in 18 years working here to find people arguing so much over politics.”

Shibla was in a bar earlier this summer when a woman started screaming at Trump supporters. “You get a mix kind of reaction especially, with your white men wearing Trump T-shirts and Make America Great Again hats, sometimes arguments occur," he said. "And just in general you can see the tension even the small peaceful Shore town.”

Alexa Mills, 27, and Greg Ceruti, 33, a pair of weekenders, were going for ice cream when I soured their moods with a question about Trump.

“Oh, he’s an asshole. What’s your point? Next point,” said Mills, a makeup artist.

“I feel the same way, yeah,” added Ceruti, a paralegal. It was as if I was asking about the color of the sky.

Ceruti owns a house in Manasquan, where the two spend summer weekends. On the Shore, they face a greater chance of running into a real-life Trump supporter than in their hometown of Madison, New Jersey. “Most of the people we know who voted for Trump regret it and most of the people we know want him impeached,” Ceruti told me.

Trump supporters like Nevin point to the booming economy as evidence Trump must be doing something right. He urges Trump-haters to merely take a walk down Main Street and see the “help wanted” signs. “Right now I'm amazed at what's going on with the economy,” said Nevin. "Five years ago, the conversation down at the beach was all about the lack of employment opportunities for the kids right now. It's the opposite. There aren't enough kids looking for jobs to fill all the opportunities.”

But those who oppose Trump don’t buy those arguments and point to the data that shows the economy actually started recovering under Barack Obama. “They’re prejudiced assholes,” said Harry Neil, a white man with an adopted black son. “Well, it's a lot of scared white people. I think this country does a great job of scaring people nowadays and that's really the way people control other people, through fear and they've created a lot of fear. Fear that people of color are going to take over or somehow diminish what they have. Scaring up white people against that dreaded immigrants. They don't inform themselves. They listen to Fox News, which is state-run media practically, and they don't bother to read anything or get educated on the facts.”

Neil, a physics teacher and head lifeguard at Manasquan’s Town Beach, said he and one of his oldest friends in town stopped speaking for over a year because Neil made a comment about Trump supporters being stupid.

Evander Duck Jr, a physician and actor, has lost many friends over Trump signs. Though he lives in Manalapan and grew up in Neptune—both towns in Monmouth County—Duck has deep roots in Asbury Park. “My entire family, including my father, my mother, aunts, uncles, grandparents, they all went to Asbury Park High School," he said. "My grandfather was not allowed to have privileges at the Jersey Shore Hospital, so he used to deliver all the black babies there in his home in Asbury Park. He had his private practice there. Black doctors couldn't go into the hospital and provide services. My grandfather delivered my father. He didn’t know that was eventually going to be his son-in-law.”

Duck told me his morning walks say volumes about the differences between the summer, weekend atmosphere and the year-round attitudes. As the liberal summer crowds thin, Duck said, his presence triggers a different response among the almost entirely white Shore crowd.

“You get less of the warm friendly smiles and more of the dismissiveness,” he said. “I get less of the New York guy living in the Upper West Side who came down to the beach for the weekend looking at me and saying, ‘Hey man’ and more of the Monmouth County Trump voter walking past me as if I’m not a member of the human race. You walk past a person and you give them a little nod or something just to acknowledge them, a hello and good morning. Don’t kiss my ass. Just acknowledge my humanity.”

That gulf between Trump supporters and his detractors is obvious when it damages friendships or causes brawls, but it can manifest in quieter ways. One local Shore couple I talked to, Frank and Sue, asked that I not use their last names partially because of their support for Trump, which he hides from coworkers at his Wall Street firm’s New York headquarters.

Sue told me she was just on the beach and happen to end up in a conversation with a woman from “Up North.” Trump entered that conversation and Sue confessed her support. “She looks at me and says, ‘Wow, you are so intelligent. I never would have thought that.’ Of course she wasn’t for Trump,” Sue told me. “They think we’re all idiots and racists.”

“I don’t like everything he says and does, but I did not like everything Obama said,” added Frank, who prides himself with voting for all winners in the last five presidential elections—George W. Bush twice, Obama twice, and then Trump.

However, he added they have relatives “cheating the system and getting food stamps when they should get jobs like everyone else.” He wants to Trump to put an end that and thinks he will. Sue said she’s appreciating the coming of fall. Though the 2018 midterm campaigns are accelerating, she thinks the discussions will dwindle with the declining presence of the summer crowd. In the past, she has easily avoided politics when it drained her by just refusing to watch the news. There was not any true escape this summer. “I’ve got family members who are not speaking anymore over this. It’s crazy,” she said. “I’m tired of it.”

David J. Dent, an author and associate professor at New York University, holds a joint appointment at the Arthur Carter Journalism Institute and in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis. He is editor of the blog bushobamaamerica.com and the author of In Search of Black America. Follow him on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Among the many things Donald Trump seems to hate (wind turbines, Hillary Clinton, the "Fake News Media," Kristen Stewart cheating on Robert Pattinson), he harbors a few bitter grudges for no discernible reason. The guy can't stand dogs and has a weird thing against sharks, for instance—and, inexplicably, it looks like he's also firmly anti-braille.

According to a column published in the New York Daily News Wednesday by Barbara Res, a former Trump Organization executive in charge of construction, he once flew into a rage after spotting the reading tool on an elevator in Trump Tower. He reportedly demanded that his architect remove it, which is not only (a) weird and (b) discriminatory, but also (c) completely illegal. From the Daily News:

Trump looked at the panels where the buttons you push to reach a floor were located. He noticed that next to each number were some little dots.

“What’s this?” Trump asked.

“Braille,” the architect replied.

Trump told the architect to take it off, get rid of it.

“We can’t,” the architect said, “It’s the law.”

“Get rid of the [expletive] braille. No blind people are going to live in Trump Tower. Just do it,” Trump yelled back, calling him weak.

The first thing worth noting here is that Trump apparently had no idea what braille was. But that doesn't seem outrageous, given the guy has said people are born with a finite amount of energy and doesn't seem to know the difference between HIV and HPV or napalm and Agent Orange. What's more baffling, though, is why he would be virulently against something so innocuous and objectively helpful.

According to Res, the story indicates one of many ways Trump bullied people over the 20 years she worked for him.

"Ordering an underling to do something that was impossible gave Trump the opportunity to castigate a subordinate and also blame him for anything that 'went wrong' in connection with the unperformed order later," Res wrote. "A Trump-style win-win."

But the story also seems to indicate that Trump has long been the kind of person who would mock a reporter's disability, who would get sued for discriminatory housing practices, and who would stick to his baseless hatred of something, even if that means making life harder on those more vulnerable and disadvantaged. These kinds of stories no longer feel surprising, but that doesn't make them less disturbing.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Last month, Miranda Thompson set up a rendezvous with a new client in Vancouver, where she was spending a few weeks visiting a friend, paying her way by working as an escort.

Thompson, a 32-year-old with a carny tattoo on her chest, put on a low-cut gothic minidress, a purple wig, black lipstick and flip flops and went to the client’s condo near the Olympic Village.

He invited her in, paid her, and opened a bottle of wine. They were having a nice time chatting so she stayed past the hour he had paid for. Eventually, though, she told him that if he wanted her to stay longer, he would have to pay her more money.

The session, which had been pleasant until that point, suddenly turned nasty.

“He started acting crazy,” she told me in an interview this week. “He was like: ‘Wow. I didn’t even think you were like that.’ ”

The client worked himself up into a state of rage, accusing Thompson of stealing a thousand dollars from him. She showed him her empty wallet but he wouldn’t believe her and tried to take her purse, preventing her from leaving.

“I was terrified.” She started to think he might want to kill her.

“Do you think I give a fuck if I go back to jail over you?” he said.

Thompson pushed away from him, grabbed the half-empty wine bottle and threatened him with it. But she didn’t hit him with it. Then she remembered there was a balcony, threw the bottle to distract him and made a run for it, and climbed down the side of the building.

Using window ledges as hand and footholds, Thompson climbed from the 11th floor to, she thinks, the sixth floor, knocking on balcony doors and windows without luck. She had to jump several times onto railings and ledges.

Finally, a shocked young woman let her into an apartment, where Thompson collapsed on the floor, sobbing and hyperventilating. The young woman got her a glass of water and called her a taxi. Thompson, still terrified, ran to the cab. As she drove off, she saw the client standing on the sidewalk with his hands in the pocket of his hoodie, watching her.

The experience motivated Thompson to start working as an activist, pushing for a change to Canada’s three-year-old anti-prostitution law, which sex workers and academics say makes the work more dangerous than it needs to be.

Thompson, who has been working in the sex business for seven years, would rather work in a brothel, both because it would be safer, but also because it would be a structured environment.

“If there was a brothel, we wouldn’t have to spend out of pocket on hotels and condos. It would be a better environment.”

Sex workers despise bill C-36, which was passed by Stephen Harper’s Conservatives in 2014 after the Supreme Court struck down the existing prostitution laws. The new law, which was supported by social conservatives and feminists who oppose prostitution, is aimed at eliminating the sex trade by prosecuting clients.

But sex workers say it makes their work unsafe because they can’t work in brothels, can’t hire security and can’t properly screen clients, because they are afraid to provide their real contact information for fear of prosecution.

“It’s made it harder for people take this as a real profession,” Luxe Mulvari, an Ottawa escort with 11 years in the industry, told me in an interview. “Girls will say, I won’t screen you. I will do it for less money. Girls who want to keep it safe, and screen their clients, it’s been harder.”

Mulvari, who attended a rally organized by Thompson in Ottawa on Sunday, says sex work allowed her financial independence after a childhood spent in poverty.

“I want to pay my taxes like every other Canadian citizen, and I do, but I want the same rights as every other Canadian citizen. I want my industry protected. I want health and safety regulation.”

Catherine St. Clair, an Ottawa escort with 31 years in the business, wants decriminalization but a law against unprotected oral sex, known as bareback blowjobs, because without such a law, providers are under financial pressure to work without condoms.

“It’s criminal to offer unsafe service or receive them.”

Christine Bruckert, a University of Ottawa professor and former sex worker who has been researching the industry for 20 years, says that working as an escort isn’t more dangerous than working as a home care worker, but unlike home care workers, escorts can’t rely on police.

“(Home care workers) can call backup. They can call the police, someone to help them. Whereas, sex workers still don’t have access to police protection.”

Cecilia Benoit, a professor at University of Victoria, whose research helped win the legal argument that brought down the old law, says that research into C-36 is still incomplete, butit doesn’t seem to have helped sex workers.

“It’s difficult to estimate whether it’s made the situation worse,” she said. “Overall, the aim of it was actually to improve the health and safety of sex workers and I don’t think there’s any evidence that that’s been the case. But whether it’s made things worse, we don’t really know for sure but we definitely don’t see any improvement in people’s situation.”

Sex workers are pressing the government to repeal C-36, but the Liberals are not expected to do anything before the election in October 2019.

In a statement to VICE, David Taylor, director of communications to Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould, pointed to recent meetings with stakeholders and said the government is continuing to review the law.

“This issue is challenging, but it is incredibly important and as such, it is something our Government is committed to continue working on.”

The Liberals do not face political pressure to change the law. Neither the New Democrats nor Conservative Justice critics responded to requests for comment for this story.

Thompson says that’s unfortunate, because the industry has provided a way for people like her to be productive. She suffers from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and bad anxiety.

“In my whole life I’ve never been able to keep a job more than three months,” she said.

She has been happy in her work since she started the day she got fired as a bartender at a strip bar.

“I was terrible and they fired me and I came back that day and got naked, and I was really good at that.”

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The latest professor being exalted as a free speech martyr may have been fired for being an asshole who was bad at his job—not for his political views.

Rick Mehta, a tenured psychology professor at Acadia University in Nova Scotia was fired on August 31. Since then Mehta, who taught at the university since 2003, has made a lot of noise arguing that his axing was over his edgy and outspoken political views on sexual assault, multiculturalism, and residential schools.

Well, a letter outlining the reasons for his termination seems to tell a different story, one about a man who showed little regard for his students, the subject he was teaching, and his co-workers. The letter was reported meticulously and printed fully by CBC yesterday—you can read the article here and the letter here.

For a little background, Rick Mehta is one of a very particular subsect of professors floating around on the internet who aggressively seek out controversy. He’s fond of saying things like multiculturalism is a scam, the wage gap is a myth, residential schools weren’t necessarily bad, and (according to the letter) that sexual assault survivors are responsible for putting themselves in dangerous situations.

Mehta and his crew, for whatever reason—seeing the money and power attained by Jordan Peterson couldn’t have hurt—position themselves as “truth sayers” while preaching endlessly about how they’re the real victims. Mehta, while never gaining much of a following, has been living in this space for a while now.

The going line has been, since his dismissal, that Mehta was fired for his political opinion, something that was, rightfully, troubling for many out there. Mehta has been offered the op-eds, fawning adoration, and media appearances one gets when something like this happens. That conversation surrounding his termination would have, most likely, kept on that same path except that Mehta (for some reason) released the letter written by Acadia's vice president of academics Heather Hemming outlining complaints against him and they are, well, pretty damning.

In a statement following his termination, Mehta stated that the reasons for his firing listed in the letter were simply “broad categories of misconduct instead of providing any specific examples of misconduct.” But the eight page letter appears to be chock full “specific examples of misconduct.” The incidents range from the mundane, like rolling his eyes and laughing when a student presented an honour thesis, to the extreme like outing a rape victim.

The letter references a three-month report into Mehta’s actions and a separate internal investigation—these two documents are not available. It is clear to say early on that what fills the eight pages are “only examples” and much more was documented in the reports.

Perhaps the most egregious complaint leveled against Mehta is that he outed a sexual assault survivor when he publicly posted a recording of a class in which she detailed being raped in a publicly available Dropbox. The letter describes this action as “reprehensible” and states that when he was asked to remove the posting by the university he instead asked his Twitter followers to “make copies to preserve the audio recordings online."

“This action further demonstrates your disregard for the privacy rights of students and suggest you are more concerned with public online support than the interests of the students,” reads the letter.

The letter goes on to say that Mehta tended to be hostile towards some students, allegedly harassing them online through social media. The harassment was apparently widespread with, as the letter reads, "virtually every faculty and staff member identified situations of harassment and discrimination of women, transgendered individuals, black students, victims of violence, and Indigenous people."

"You seem to be under the impression that your rights of 'free speech' and academic freedom trump all other obligations to the university and members of the university community," wrote Hemming.

Hemming also says Mehta failed to do what he was hired to do—teach the courses to a satisfactory level. The letter alleges that Mehta left his students ill-prepared for future classes because “a significant amount of class time (in some classes 90% of more) was spent on topics which are irrelevant, or not connected to the course syllabus." The letter questioned Mehta’s non-academic sources whose “relevance to psychology are dubious.”

Speaking with the CBC about the letter, Mehta denied that these were the reasons that he was fired and said he has “never done any of the acts that have been attributed to me.” He copped to the fact there were “disputes” but countered that “perspectives are subjective.” He also stated that the majority of coworkers stopped speaking to him after he became “outspoken.” Online Mehta tweeted that “In my view, the letter consists of baseless allegations.” Mehta and his union are appealing the decision to terminate his employment.

One of the final portions of the letter outlines that Mehta was allegedly told about his actions but instead of listening and possibly correcting course he “doubled down” and was unable to accept his actions may have been harmful. The letter states that Mehta attempted to turn his actions into a free speech or academic freedom issue—something he is attempting to do with his termination.

“In summary, your conduct, commentary, deviation from teaching curriculum and the poisoned teaching and collegial environment you have created is totally unacceptable and cannot be justified by rights to academic freedom or free speech,” reads the letter.

At the end of the day I think we can all agree, there is a difference between someone fired for their political beliefs and someone fired for being an asshole who performs poorly at their job. After reading the letter it seems pretty clear which camp Mehta falls into.

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