I don’t think I had any sincere intention of quitting junk the first time I went to rehab. Mostly I wanted to appease my mom’s wishes, without considering the false hope I’d burdened her with.

It was an outpatient rehab, the kind where you show up each morning and leave later in the day, which most hard core drug users will agree are completely useless. If I’m not coming and going in a straight jacket, I’m using just before and as soon as I walk out the door, not even bothering to drive out of the parking lot first. On my first day I arrived bright and early with synthetic urine strapped to my body for warmth underneath my clothes. This particular treatment facility didn’t have someone watching during the drug tests, so I passed each test, my trusty fake pee working like a charm. Monday through Friday I faked my way through my first stint in rehab and on the weekends I went back to work at The Rainbow Bar and Grill, and back home to my Hollywood Boulevard studio apartment. I wasted everyone’s time and hope and quit rehab after just a couple short weeks.

After only barely dipping a toe into what recovery might look like and mostly just witnessing other people’s attempts at rehabilitation—shit got real. I figured, well I tried and it didn’t work, I might as well accept this lifestyle as a permanent one. I quit smoking heroin and graduated to shooting it up, which made me feel like a real junkie. In a twisted but romantic way it felt like a good way of solidifying the identity I was resigning myself to. From there, every aspect of my life began to fade deeper into darkness. I was sadly and severely lacking the natural human instinct for self-preservation. I started adding other drugs into my intravenous cocktails, in an attempt to make things more interesting, and it did. I’d go through days long episodes of drug-induced psychosis that inspired me to scale two-story chain link fences, hide in bushes for hours and run away from non-existent men chasing me through Hollywood. My highs were higher and my lows were lower. I started thinking more and more each night when I’d fall asleep, or every three nights if we’re being honest, that I may or may not wake up the next morning, and that I didn’t care either way.

A turning point in my subconscious suicide mission happened shortly after the holidays. I discovered several long-lost emails from my mother, that I couldn’t shake the thought of. One night after my ex left for work like he usually did, with no reason to suspect he’d be coming home to much different scenery, a tsunami sized wave of dread washed over me. I didn’t want to go to the downtown dealer at night, I didn’t want to do the Sid and Nancy routine anymore, I didn’t want to voluntarily morph into a paranoid schizophrenic, ever again. I called my mom, as soon as she said “hello,” I said, “please come get me.” I hung up and went through my sacred ritual, hitting the underside of a spoon with a flame and watching my brew boil and melt. I found a vein and did my best to savor what I knew would be my one last time. Within the hour my folks, my sister, brother-in-law, and two close family friends arrived with a U-haul and helped frantically pack up everything I still owned. We moved with a sense of urgency, because if I didn’t get out then, while my ex was at work, I don’t know that I would have ever. I left the dope money, a note, and an empty studio for him to discover later that night. We stayed in a hotel so I wouldn’t be found and I fell asleep relieved to be with my mom and relieved something different lay ahead. I was naive.

When I awoke the panic of withdrawal hit me like a freight train. My mom and step-dad rushed me to Glendale Adventist Medical Center Emergency Department. It was an hour drive and my mom had to hold my legs down, fearing I might kick out a window from the amount of seizing and flailing the detox had brought on. The doctors gave me sedatives and anti-seizure medication, but it didn’t keep me from violently tossing and turning for hours on the rough hospital bed sheets. When I came to, I had rubbed the skin raw on my back and shoulders, scabs replacing skin. I stayed there for a week, with not one ounce of sleep, feeling as though I were enduring a brutal exorcism. When the doctors were confident the demon had moved on, they released me for treatment.

When we arrived at Glendale Adventist Alcohol and Drug Services, or GAADS as everyone called it, I was terrified. This time was different, I wanted this for myself, I was the one who volunteered to go. Deciding you need rehab is much different than doing it to placate a loved one or to get out of a drug charge sentence. Turning yourself over to treatment willingly is like having an epiphany that the way you want to live and are comfortable living is harder than living the way you don’t want to, and that’s a rough thing to swallow.

My mother and I clutched each other sobbing over my suitcases, while the other in-patients sat nearby eating lunch. A friendly fellow-patient reassured my mom, “She’s in the right place,” and we both believed him. Taking that as her cue, she left. I felt raw and exposed, emaciated and drowning in my own clothes, embarrassed and uncomfortable. When I entered my first group therapy session, it had already begun. I scanned the room and marveled at how attractive and normal everyone looked. They took turns reading assigned homework, tailored to their own individual “issues.” Everyone cried. Afterward the nightly twelve-step meeting commenced, with nearly 100 outside attendees coming in. Everyone appeared to be articulate, well-dressed, successful in their education or employment endeavors—not at all the image of recovering addicts and alcoholics I had cooked up in my head. It gave me hope.

I made friends with the other in-patients quickly. It’s easy to develop close bonds with people who are mutually afflicted, vulnerable and in a state of crisis. Some of the bonds formed were healthy and supportive, some were indulgent, an attempt to seek out any endorphins I could sense the potential for, my pleasure sensors bereft and desperate. But regardless of the company I kept, I was really trying. I threw myself into my assignments and therapy, I held on to every word of every speaker at the nightly meetings and I trusted and confided in my counselors. I was convinced that if I did everything that was required of me, and that if I did it with heart, I’d be cured.

After being discharged from my in-patient treatment, because my counselors believed I was ready and I felt arrogantly stable, I went back home to my mom’s and reclaimed my old bedroom. Each morning I drove an hour to the outpatient treatment that was recommended to me and I voluntarily attended the twelve-step meetings each night. I announced my sobriety on Facebook and reached out to old friends telling them the happy news. I was driving to meetings with my rehab buddies and working the steps, and then one day on the way to a meeting, I drove past my freeway exit.

Rather than get off and turn around like a sane person would do, I let Dr. Jekyll slip away and gave Mr. Hyde the wheel. There was no internal push or pull, it was the strangest thing—one moment I’m on my way to a meeting and in an instant I’m on autopilot. Before I knew it, I was leaning against that familiar gate in Downtown LA, hoping my old dealer would spot me since his phone number had been lost when, in the spirit of sobriety, my cell phone was demolished with a hammer. It only took a few minutes before he came out, gave me what I was there for and I was on my way. Everything I’d worked for up in smoke.

“Relapse is part of recovery,” they say. I’ve come to the conclusion that they say this so when an addict does relapse in the midst of a recovery attempt, they won’t be derailed and devastated by their own failure but prepared for it, understanding of it’s normalcy. Maybe that works for some people, but it didn’t for me. My recovery ego wouldn’t allow me to have a healthy and necessary fear of my own addiction. I was deeply disappointed in myself and ashamed that I had led everybody on. This particular relapse was a jolting wake up call, illuminating the insanity and loss of control that exemplifies the disease of addiction. For a while I went to the meetings high, surely fooling all my peers, and then I stopped going at all.

Immense failure and disappointment can turn any optimist into a cynic. The pink cloud of sobriety, a feeling of euphoria that occurs when you feel you’ve escaped hell and have only heaven to look forward to, was no more. A gloomy, black, volatile cloud took its place and followed me everywhere I went. It followed me on my bender, and on to the next rehab. It stayed with me through another short and unsuccessful stint. Jails, rehabs, and institutions. AA rhetoric that I had interpreted as a warning but was in reality a dark foreshadowing of what this disease had in store for me. As I twitched and fidgeted from withdrawal in a lonely jail cell, I gave my list its final check.

I opened my eyes the next morning to a suitcase being shoved in my direction. Destination rehab, once again. Rehab is considerably more comfortable than jail, so I’ll take what I can get. Laguna Beach, California, where everybody is beautiful, the ocean runs along statuesque cliffs and even the rehabs have a bar across the street. This rehab was an inpatient facility but allowed patients to go to the beach in between therapy groups. The beach is vast, so trying to spot the addict in the sand or waves is much like playing a game of Where’s Waldo. Naturally I slipped away to the bars, had heroin and paraphernalia delivered to me and walked to the smoke shop to buy more of that handy fake pee. Ultimately I was kicked out for buying underage teenagers alcohol, all five of them who gave my name when they got caught. Amateurs.

Rather than go home, I went straight from the Laguna Beach facility to ol’ faithful, GAADS in Glendale. They were about as thrilled to see me as I was them. During the brief five days I stayed, I had xanax delivered and snorted it off my Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, just to really stick it to the man. Needless to say, this is not the way to find success in rehab.

The final rehab I stayed with several months later required patients to get injected with Vivitrol before being officially discharged. Now I don’t want to scare anyone away from trying whatever treatment will help them, but this was horrific. Several nurses had to hold me down while the doctor came at my right buttcheek with a giant syringe, with a giant needle filled with a weird spongy substance. It took three minutes to inject and got clogged half way through. It did however, successfully hinder any effects of opiates for the month it promised, and trust me, I tried. There are other drugs out there though, so I did those for thirty days and then switched back to dope.

So how on Earth could someone this hopeless be cured you ask? Well, I think it was a combination of many factors, some that I have no control over and some that were my own doing. To start with the ones I have no control over, I have a fantastic family that I did not deserve at the time. I had health insurance thanks to Obamacare allowing me to use my parents insurance until 26. I had some killer health professionals who actually seemed to care if I lived or died. Things I can take credit for include, the sincerely introspective work I did while participating in rehab. The years of addiction-specialized therapy I attended with my saint-like therapist. Using long-term medication-assisted-therapy, suboxone particularly, until I was ready to taper down and detox from it completely. Building my confidence and new identity by investing in myself via working toward a degree in journalism, and most importantly finding a beautiful purpose in mothering my twin daughters. Would any single one of these produce the desired result? Doubtful. Combined though, I live a life so far removed from my time as an addict I feel like it was another lifetime completely and for that I am eternally grateful.

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Teddy Perkins may have died a horrific death at the end of his brilliant Atlanta bottle episode last season, but it looks like the guy still managed to somehow make it to the Emmys. The fictional character showed up in all his terrifying, uncanny-valley glory seated in the front row at the 2018 Emmy Awards Tuesday night, presumably ready to storm onstage if the show won one of its many well-deserved nominations.

Unfortunately, Atlanta's "Teddy Perkins" episode lost out to The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, so we'll never get to hear Perkins's acceptance speech. But the internet still collectively lost their goddamn minds when the camera cut to him—especially since no one was quite sure who it was under the make-up and prosthetics.

Donald Glover played the soft-boiled egg-loving shut-in who thoroughly creeped out Lakeith Stanfield's Darius in the episode, so everyone naturally just assumed it was Glover in costume again. But was it? The Perkins at the Emmys looks quite a bit different from Glover's version, and later in the night the camera panned over to Glover in what looks like the same seat, just wearing a completely different suit.

Sure, the fact that they look different might just be the result of whatever radical facial reconstruction would have to take place after the shotgun blast at the end of the episode, but the difference led some to suspect that it was actually Stanfield in costume.

Except, wait.

Photo by Arnold Turner/Invision for the Television Academy/AP Images

Well, there you have it. It wasn't Glover, it wasn't Stanfield—the only explanation is that Teddy Perkins is a real person and the Atlanta team was kind enough to coax him out of his secluded mansion and come to an awards show.

Now there are two reasons why Atlanta should've won all the Emmys: First of all, it was the greatest show on TV this year, and possibly ever—but more importantly—we would've gotten to see Teddy Perkins accept the award himself, probably thanking his father.

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

Some people look back on their school years with warm nostalgia. Others remember school as being a complete, merciless hellhole. Most of us, it stands to reason, fall somewhere in the middle. But if pressed, we could come up with one particular fraught moment in our educational career.

We asked friends and co-workers to tell us their most traumatic back to school story in six words. Embarrassing memories still haunt many of us; things like losing control of one’s bodily functions. Others winced recalling abusive teachers and cruel classmates. One thing’s for certain: reading through these responses is enough to give anyone a serious case of the back-to-school jitters.

“Lied about homework, teacher choked me.” - Razin, 24

“Asshole jocks knocked over my wheelchair.” - Jason, 26

“Accidentally showed up one day early.” - Johnny, 33

“Freshman. Sister, a senior, ignored me.” - Julie, 34

“I got hung by my underwear.” - Timmothy, 17

“Got in fight with ex-best friend.” - Jordan, 31

"Punched in gut by school bully." - Michael, 24

"Realized everyone in my grade sucked." - Tara, 23

"Ex was in all my classes." - Naeem, 27

"Summer beard. Mad principal. Forced shave." - Sean, 30

"Shirts versus skins. Was fat. Skins." - Mike, 25

“Sat by crush. She moved seats.” - Howie, 29

“Was nervous. Puked into my bookbag.” - Kate, 32

“Broke out in terrible chicken pox.” - Heather, 38

“Some kid farted, I got blamed.” - Kim, 37

“Just moved, new school, my birthday.” - Sarah, 42

“Co-ed swim class, sixth grade.” - Jason, 36

“Homeschooled so 'school' never actually ended.” - Julia, 35

“Guidance counselor lit me on fire.” - James, 30

“First ever period. Very bloody skirt.” - Jessica, 42

“Gum in hair, missed the bus.” - Heather, 43

“Kindergarten: threw up on school bus.” - Allie, 26

“Sharted in my first AP class.” - Sab, 24

“Shit my pants in middle school.” - Andrew, 26

“Teacher mocked me. Hyperventilated; hospital admission.” - Joan, 54

“Class bully spit in my hair.” - Olivia, 41

“Swim class. Almost drowned. Class laughed.” - Pete, 32

“Wore white pants. Sat in chocolate.” - Beth, 32

“I forgot to set the alarm.” - Luwi, 23

“Picked on to answer teacher’s questions.” - Sergio, 22

“Female teacher gave me a wedgie.” - Kyle, 19

“Bullied for dressing like a boy.” - Lauren, 32

“Someone called in a bomb threat.” - Billy, 23

“Teacher hit me with her car.” - Kelsey, 34

“I broke out in hives everywhere.” - Noah, 29

“Suspended for something I didn’t do.” - Liz, 41

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BC’s 2018 wildfire season has been described as one of the worst in history, a claim that seems to be bolstered by video of a “fire tornado” sucking a fire hose into the air before melting it.

The footage taken by a Wildland firefighter on August 19 shows firefighters attempting to hold onto a fire line as it gets sucked into the air. In the distance, there’s a tower of whirling fire that looks scary af.

“Fire tornado destroyed our line. It threw burning logs across our guard for 45 minutes and pulled our hose 100 plus ft in the air before melting it. That's definitely a first,” wrote firefighter M.C. Schidlowsky alongside an Instagram video of the incident.

Schidlowsky said the line went more than 200 feet in the air, but smoke made it hard to see.

Fire tornadoes, also called fire devils, take place when hot air rises from the ground and create columns.

I'm not sure if this is metal as fuck or the 'everything is fine' meme coming to life, but it's very 2018.

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When a strange sea creature washed ashore near Darien, Georgia, last March, marine biologists were stumped. With an elongated neck, shark-like fins, and what appeared to be guts spilling out, the green mass looked like the Altamaha-ha, a storied sea serpent legendary to the region—a Southern cousin to the Loch Ness Monster, if you will. Experts couldn't determine what they were looking at with only video evidence, but most of them agreed on one thing—whatever it was, it was probably a hoax.

"That could easily be faked," marine biologist Quinton White told National Geographic. "We think someone's playing a joke on us."

And they were right—the unidentifiable corpse was apparently a taxidermied shark with added papier-mâché elements, left on the shore at the order of Zardulu, the mysterious New York–based artist and self-identified "myth-maker" who says she's staged various viral hoaxes, like the three-eyed catfish in the Gowanus Canal and the raccoon who hitched a ride on an alligator, and is also suspected of orchestrating Pizza Rat.

Hierophant of Zardulu the Mythmaker. Image courtesy of the artist and TRANSFER

But like much of Zardulu's handiwork, the sea creature wasn't just an attempt to shock people. She explained to me over Twitter that the piece, "Ketos Troias," is actually based on an Ancient Greek myth, a recreation of the sea creature Ketos, who Heracles slices open with a fish hook. And what better place to showcase the work than in a region already plagued by legends of its own sea monster?

"Darien is the home of a great American legend of the Altamaha-ha, I wanted to breathe some new life into and incorporate it into my larger narrative," the artist told me. "The slaying of the Ketos Troias is symbolic of a triumph over the frightening creatures in both the ocean of my unconscious, of yours, of all of ours. That's why it was such a compelling story."

Next month the piece will be on view at TRANSFER gallery's Triconis Aeternis: Rites and Mysteries, Zardulu's first solo exhibition where she plans to bring elements of her self-made "myths" out from behind the camera and into storefronts on Canal Street in Manhattan. Along with "Ketos Troias," the artist told me she's showing "several items that were used to create myths," along with paintings, illustrations, and text that "create a broader narrative." The gallery is also publishing a book of the artist's paintings and writings, which shares the show's name.

"These pieces are all crucibles, ritual adventures, I am living out in the real world, in the broadened conceptual space created by the internet and viral media," she explained. "Deep down... we don’t care about the truth. We want myth. We want our feelings and emotions to be represented in symbolic forms. That’s why we gravitate to these viral stories, videos and images," she added.

Zardulu the Mythmaker "Gugalanna" (2018), courtesy of the artist and TRANSFER

Often Zardulu's work uses real or taxidermied animals and is carried out by actors, filmed, seen by unsuspecting witnesses, and then shared online or with media organizations. But the evasive artist, who hasn't revealed her true identity and usually wears a bearded mask in public, has only recently been claiming credit for her elaborate dupes.

During Miami's Art Basel, news sites picked up a video of a man who found an iguana emerging from his toilet. The New York Times reported shortly after that it was actually Zardulu's creation titled "The Usurpation of Ouranos," based on a myth about Ouranos, a god who imprisoned his children in the underworld, only to have his son Kronos castrate him and usurp the throne. The piece wasn't officially submitted to the art festival, but the Times called it "one of the most widely viewed pieces during Miami Art Week."

With Triconis Aeternis: Rites and Mysteries, Zardulu will lift the shroud of secrecy (if only slightly) that surrounds much of her work and bring her shadowy persona out into the public space. She told me she plans to be at the show, and that along with pieces from viral stories people may recognize, "you may see several pieces you had yet to know were mine."

Triconis Aeternis: Rites and Mysteries is on view at On Canal, between Broadway and West Broadway on Canal Street in New York City, October 4 through November 1.

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When Derek Black was a teenager, it was basically set in stone that he'd become the leader of the American white nationalist movement. His father, Don, ran the hate-site Stormfront out of their family home in Florida, and seemed to spend all his free time ferrying his rhetorically-gifted son around the South to speak at far-right conferences. His godfather, meanwhile, was former KKK Grand Wizard and notorious Louisiana politician David Duke. By the time Derek was 19, he had already won an election to the Republican Party’s executive committee in Palm Beach County on a platform of banning non-European immigration, and he was hosting his own radio show five days per week.

He was smart, flashy, and unflappable—and making Derek the most famous racist in the world was the project of Don's life.

That all started to fall apart after Derek spent a few years at the notoriously liberal—but also good and cheap—New College of Florida in Sarasota. Once he was outed and ostracized on a school-wide list-serve, a group of students made it their mission to invite him to a weekly Shabbat dinner. One psychology student named Allison kept engaging with his ideas, and even traveled with him and his parents to a Stormfront conference in Tennessee to get a better idea of how to reach him. Although people thought they were crazy for trying, their plan eventually worked, as a new book by Washington Post journalist Eli Saslow shows. Just as Derek's extremist ideology was becoming mainstreamed in America, he renounced it.

I chatted with Saslow—whose book is called Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist—about how Derek slowly became convinced to leave white nationalism and what he might be doing now if things had gone differently. Here's our conversation, lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

VICE: A lot of people are under the mistaken impression that mainstream, modern politicians only started aping white-nationalist talking points starting around the time of the 2016 election, but that's not really the case. Can you elaborate on how Derek's sanitized version of white supremacy entered the political arena in 2012, or earlier?
Eli Saslow: It's really something that began even earlier than that, in the early 2000s. Like, moving toward that election in 2012, Derek and really Stormfront as a whole and large parts of the white nationalist movement worked really hard to sort-of sanitize the language of their ideology and scrub from it the language of violence it had embraced. So for Derek in particular it was: Let's reverse things and make it so that we're talking about white people as victims. So it was phrases like "white genocide," speaking to white Americans about how what was inherently their country was being taken away and turned into something else, something they don't recognize. So enforcing that sort of ownership, which was really effective. Unfortunately, in part because it's built upon a very real and dark truth in American history—which is that white supremacy has always been a big part of what this country is—white nationalists were able to start capitalizing on that and mainstreaming that language.

After his transformation, Derek said the rise of white nationalist ideology in America stemmed from the fact that white people in America, deep down, think they should come first—always. Do you think that's a fair or complete summary of the phenomenon on his part?
I know for Derek, his belief in that phenomenon did not change. He went from an emerging white nationalist leader to believing that the fact that white people believe this is a country set up for white people is the dangerous foundational flaw at the heart of it.

The idea of building a wall or prioritizing European-first immigration is not new. In fact, David Duke and the Klan first turned attention hardcore to the border in the 70s, when Duke decided to go on a tour of the border with Derek's father, Don Black, to promote the idea of building the wall. And for two weeks he drove around the desert with the media trailing behind him. The Klan was trying to move away from focusing on race in the South and focus on anti-immigration sentiment on the Southern border. So different versions of these very racially problematic ideas were present in 2012. Mitt Romney's idea of self-deportation was to make life so untenable and miserable for people that they would actually just choose to leave. And that's a really dark thing. People were also, in 2012, talking about building the wall, electrifying the fence. Unfortunately, America's inherent fear of the other is not new. But it's been capitalized and brought into the mainstream in such a way that makes it feel revelatory.

It seems Allison's ability to transform Derek's beliefs stemmed from the fact that she sought out studies refuting his ideas on racial difference. Do people have a responsibility to read this primary source material for themselves?
It's a super effective way to combat the ideology, because all the facts are against the ideology. It's a misunderstanding of science and history that is totally flawed. So in this story, if there's something hopeful about it for me, it's that Derek is really smart and he was able to deduce the facts. And it's very reassuring to know that the facts are not on the side of racism. All of these myths of black-on-white crime and IQ differentials, or even the idea of white European warriors as this medieval force, are all wrong. When Derek started reading study after study, he was smart enough to see the flaws in that logic. Trying to understand the very flawed concept of race and whiteness itself is hugely empowering to help other people think about this stuff in different ways.

As pointed out throughout the book, Derek is an autodidact with a remarkable amount of curiosity about the world, though. Why did he apparently never take 15 minutes to Google facts about this ideology, which was the great animating force of his life?
That's a great question and something I tried to understand for a very long time. One of the things I kept asking Derek about was that white nationalism is so talked about. Part of the political [situation] now that [is] I think we've lost sight of what avowed white nationalists actually see as the endpoint for their ideology. As his father, Don, says in the book, "We're gonna put people on trains and do whatever we have to do to turn this into a whites-only country." If you're smart, in addition to all the unbelievably awful consequences of that and the humanitarian crisis, the idea is crazy. Who's white? Who's not white? It's something that not even white nationalists have answers for.

So it troubles me that Derek was so smart but spent so much time believing this was the outcome that was plausible. But in Derek's case, he was raised in this very insular world in which every influential person in his life believed this to be true. And all of Derek's relationships were—if they weren't based on ideology, then it was at the center. And so as somebody who was really smart and wanted to achieve things, the way he could do that as a kid was through white nationalism. By trying to work really hard to make the ideology make sense to him, which he did through going to these scary American Renaissance conferences with scientists who work really hard to try and make this ideology make sense.

He very rarely bumped up against people who thought differently than he did. He was homeschooled, and he spent most of his time traveling around the South with his dad. It wasn't really until college that he was spending huge amounts of time with people who were different from him, and people his ideology had dehumanized. If that had happened earlier, my guess is that his transformation would have happened earlier.

Do you think Derek would have found his way out eventually had Allison not made such an effort? Would defining himself apart from his parents have been a natural part of growing up, or was that intervention completely necessary?
The real answer is I'm not sure. The further he went into white nationalism, the more it would have become embedded in his identity, because he would have gotten even more feedback from the people in these circles who meant a lot to him. He got a lot out of white nationalism. It made him known. It made people like him. It made his parents proud. It was a huge counterweight. But another thing that makes his a uniquely college story is that he was in a stage that psychologists call fluid identity. He was living away from home. It was a very natural time for him to form intense relationships and reconsider who he was.

The one other thing I would say is that even in that environment, it didn't seem inevitable that he was going to change his views. He was still going to Stormfront conferences. It took a lot of different approaches. The civil resistance on campus was hugely effective. The fact that when he was outed as a white nationalist, that people were able to cast him out, made Derek reconcile with how awful some of his ideas were. It also made him lonely. So that when [a Jewish student named] Matt would ask him to come to dinner, he was much more likely to say "yes."

Derek's first reaction when he got outed was: Fuck these people. I'm going to throw the biggest white nationalist conference they've ever seen and start bringing white nationalist speakers in and go further in to prove to everyone I'm right. So if people hadn't been patient enough to keep engaging, he probably would not have figured it out for himself.

What about someone like Don? Is he beyond redemption? Or do you think Derek could do for Don what Allison did for him?
I think a part of Derek thought it was possible. Don always thought two things: That white nationalism was right, and that Derek was the smartest person in the world. So when Derek said it was fucked-up and wrong, suddenly his whole pattern of thinking didn't work. Either white nationalism had to be wrong, or Derek wasn't as smart as he'd thought. I think Derek really hoped those seeds might grow, but as someone who's almost 70 and has devoted his entire life to spreading hate—

It would invalidate his life.
So I think that's a very unlikely thing. But Don's lost the energy for it. He's just so broken. He's become much more fatalistic, but he has less energy for the fight than he did before.

Well, why did he talk to you?
My guess is that it facilitated a conversation with Derek that he was not having. And I think Don is sort of in this grieving process and still feels like he's lost the most important relationship in his life. And talking to me about Derek was like having that back for brief periods of time.

What do you think Derek would be doing right now, had he not changed his worldview?
I've asked him this. He thinks he would be a smarter, less odious Richard Spencer. I think that for Don, who's overjoyed about some of the ways that the country is moving, he just feels like this is such a huge missed opportunity for Derek to be a more mainstream political figure on the far-racist right. My guess is he would be organizing a campaign or would have built out his radio show into something more multimedia or like Breitbart or something like that. Right now, Derek's disavowal is basically killing Stormfront.

At the end of the book, Derek says he wants to go public to warn people about an upcoming "critical point?" What do you think that is, if it wasn't the election of Trump?
I think Derek believes that, unfortunately, the 2016 election was an arbiter for more to come given the way the country is heading demographically and the fact that so many white people have the feelings they do about race and about prejudice against them. Basically, that the rise of explicitly white racial politics is only just beginning.

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The new VICELAND show THE HUNT FOR THE TRUMP TAPES follows comic and "professional Trump annoyer" Tom Arnold on his relentless search for rumored recordings of our president that could prove damning to his presidency. On the two-part series premiere, Arnold taps Dr. Justin Frank—a DC psychoanalyst who's written about Bush, Obama, and other political figures—to listen to more than 30 hours of existing recordings of Trump, mostly from past interviews.

After the long and undoubtably torturous experience, Frank makes his conclusions about Trump's view of women, his paranoia, and his dishonesty.

"He's a professional liar, and he's our president," Frank says. "God help us."

THE HUNT FOR THE TRUMP TAPES airs Tuesdays at 10:30 PM on VICELAND. Find out how to tune in here.

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Flameo, hotman! One of the greatest animated series of all time is finally getting a live-action adaptation that won't whitewash all of it's characters. On Tuesday, Netflix announced a "reimagined, live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender" to be helmed by the show's original creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko. This comes right on the tail of the release of The Dragon Prince, from Last Airbender head writer Aaron Ehasz.

So far all we have is a short announcement and some beautiful concept art by John Staub, but we can at least be sure that the new Netflix series won't be a repeat of the 2010 Last Airbender live-action debacle—the film, directed by M. Night Shyamalan, that whitewashed its original predominantly Asian characters.

In a public statement, DiMartino and Konietzko shared their commitment to making sure the cast is as diverse as its source:

“We’re thrilled for the opportunity to helm this live-action adaptation of 'Avatar: The Last Airbender.' We can’t wait to realize Aang’s world as cinematically as we always imagined it to be, and with a culturally appropriate, non-whitewashed cast. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance to build upon everyone’s great work on the original animated series and go even deeper into the characters, story, action, and world-building. Netflix is wholly dedicated to manifesting our vision for this retelling, and we’re incredibly grateful to be partnering with them.”

It may be a while before additional details emerge, but until then, we'll be watching the original series repeatedly. Yip-yip.

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On September 6, a small solar observatory in Sunspot, New Mexico, essentially turned into the set of an X-Files episode after a horde of federal agents and a goddamn Blackhawk helicopter showed up to evacuate everyone and take over, without any explanation why. The conspiracy theories immediately started swirling (Aliens! Impending solar flares! More aliens!) but the FBI refused to give details to anybody—not even to the local sheriff, Benny House.

And House, like most local law enforcement in those X-Files episodes, is still suitably pissed about being kept in the dark. In a new interview with KVIA, the sheriff ripped into the FBI for continually refusing to tell him why it shut the place down.

"Is there a bomb threat? Is there an active shooter? Is it chemical?" House told KVIA. "We need to know so we know what kind of manpower to send up there, and without knowing, it's dangerous for everybody. We have a duty to protect and we can't protect them if we don't know what is going on."

Earlier this week, the Sunspot Solar Observatory announced it would finally reopen, releasing a statement explaining—sort of—what happened, blaming the whole mess on a "threat to the safety of local staff and residents."

“We recognize that the lack of communications while the facility was vacated was concerning and frustrating for some,” the observatory said. "However, our desire to provide additional information had to be balanced against the risk that, if spread at the time, the news would alert the suspect and impede the law enforcement investigation. That was a risk we could not take."

House's anger is pretty understandable, since he was, uh, literally elected to look after Sunspot, and is now being completely iced out.

"I think it's chicken shit the way the FBI handled it," he said in the interview. "I have a responsibility to protect my citizens. I think it's paramount that we know what the threat is so we can provide safety."

For now, it looks like House won't be getting anything more than a weak-ass PR statement for an explanation, just like the rest of us. Luckily, there are plenty of Reddit sleuths online still working tirelessly to solve the mystery—so House can go read up on Chinese spies and how they've been covertly stealing secrets from White Sands Missile Base or whatever until those "chicken shit" feds decide to fill him in on the truth.

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Last week, a US border official said Canadians who consume weed, or work or invest in the legal cannabis industry could be banned from America for life.

“Our officers are not going to be asking everyone whether they have used marijuana, but if other questions lead there—or if there is a smell coming from the car, they might ask,” Todd Owen, executive assistant commissioner for the Office of Field Operations, told Politico. Lying about it carries a lifetime ban, he added.

Understandably, the issue is concerning to many Canadians, but fear not because apparently the government has some reassuring advice: don’t show up at the border looking like stoner comedy duo Cheech and Chong.

In an interview with CBC’s Power and Politics, Bill Blair, the Liberal minister responsible for border security, said “Frankly if you show up at the border looking like Cheech and Chong, you’re going into secondary. But I think for the overwhelming majority of Canadians, they won’t experience a significant change in the way which the border operates.”

When pressed by host Vassy Kapelos on how to define what Cheech and Chong looks like, Blair said, “I think if one comes to the border looking like one has recently used marijuana or there’s a strong smell of it in the car, one can expect that will draw the attention of the border security agencies.”

For the uninitiated (seriously, could they find a more dated reference?), Cheech and Chong are a comedic pair comprised of Tommy Chong and Cheech Marin, who did stand-up and made movies like Up in Smoke in the 70s and 80s. Chong, who is Canadian, eventually went to jail in California for selling bongs.

Online, many characterized Blair’s comments as problematic—Chong’s father was Chinese while Cheech’s parents were Mexican American.

“‘Cheech and Chong = "brown skin’,” tweeted pot activist Dana Larsen, while Brian Wagner, CEO of Cannabis Compliance Inc, a consulting firm, tweeted, “Why does it matter what we look like? I find this to be poor advice. Our government should be advocating for fair treatment. Or, let's ban every USA traveler for working in the quasi-legal cannabis industry in the USA to make it fair, and see how they like it.”

Blair, who was Toronto police chief at a time when data shows the force disproportionately black men for weed possession, told CBC he’s not overly concerned about any dramatic changes at the border, considering that Canada has had a medical weed system in place for years.

“Close to 4.5 million Canadians advise that that have used marijuana and yet literally hundreds of thousands cross that border each and every day without incident.”

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When undercover journalist Shane Bauer was hired as a prison guard in 2014 at a private prison in Winnfield, Louisiana he found that morale among staff very low. There was very little motive for the guards to do their jobs. The guards were supposed to walk up and down the dorms where the prisoners lived and just check on people every half hour. But Shane almost never saw that happen. Because prisoners didn't like it when guards did rounds. In turn, they didn't.

“I make nine dollars an hour,” was the attitude, and knowing the company wouldn’t fire them, most guards shirked their responsibility. After four months Bauer quit and a scathing indictment of the private prison appeared in the pages of Mother Jones. In American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment, out September 18th, Bauer goes in even deeper. VICE talked to the author by phone to find out what made him decide to go work as a prison guard, how some prisons have no accountability among staff, the link for-profit prisons have to slavery, and how Trump has impacted the industry. Here’s what he had to say.

What made you decide to go work in a private prison? What was your mindset? Your objective?
Shane Bauer: I’d been reporting on prisons for a few years and it sounded very difficult to get access. Typically, if you want to visit a prison as a journalist you’re either denied or you get a scripted tour of a prison that lasts about a half hour to an hour. Interviewing inmates is very difficult. If you want to interview an inmate the prison will provide you with the inmate of their choosing. You can't interview anyone in particular. [You] end up doing letter correspondences and there's usually no way to verify what the prisoners are saying. It's also very difficult to get this kind of data on prisons.

A lot of prison systems that I've interacted with throughout the country don't respond to public records requests unless they’re being sued. All of these restrictions are even more extreme with private prisons because since they’re private companies they're not subject to public access. I’d been interested in looking into private prisons for a while but it was very difficult to know what was happening inside. We've seen very little of what prison life is like inside. I had the idea to apply for a job as a prison guard. I just went on their website, the corporate website, and filled out a job application. I filled it out truthfully and sent it off. Within a week or two I was getting calls with requests to do job interviews.

Were you surprised at how easy it was to get a job at the institution? What were your qualifications?
I was surprised. I didn't think that it was going to work. I kind of applied for the job on a whim. I didn't think it would go anywhere. It's the kind of interview you would imagine at a Walmart or McDonald’s. It's just questions about how you work with other people. In the interview with the prison in Louisiana, which is where I ultimately accepted a job, it was as if the interviewer was trying to convince me to take the job. She gave the impression that they were very desperate for employees. The job paid nine dollars an hour and I had zero qualifications. It was very common for people not to have any qualifications.

I went through a month of training. One day an instructor asked us what we should do if we see two inmates stabbing each other. Of course, my thought was we break them up, and he said that we should never try to intervene in these fights, "If they want to cut each other up, happy cutting.” It's more about covering liability than protecting prisoners. The thing that surprised me was just learning the background of other guards. I didn't go in expecting that the guards would be much a part of my story. I was more interested in prison conditions, but the guards were typically people who were desperate for work, a lot of single moms. I came to learn that they were also being exploited by the system that the prisoners were being exploited by.

Talk about some of your coworkers or one that really stuck out to you in the writing of the book?
When I started the job I worked with [the guy] who was my main partner throughout the job. As a writer, I was a little bit disappointed, this guy didn't seem like he had anything that kind of stood out about him. There's one guard, a former cop who was just a total loose cannon, but I was stationed with whoever they wanted to station me with. What I realized is that [this guy] was actually much more valuable. He was a kind of older man. He was in his 60s, trying to retire, he's collecting some retirement from his time in the Coast Guard, just working the prison to supplement his income. He was poor.

I’d been to his house. He didn't have many other options. He’d been there a few years and you could see the way that the job wore on him. He would say things that were pretty brutal and almost sadistic at times, like he wished he could put shock collars on inmates or take them out back and beat them, but he also had relationships with certain prisoners. He would intervene on their behalf when the company brought in outside guards to take control of the prison. It was very chaotic and violent.

Did you find that working at the prison changed you?
That’s something about him that I found in a lot of people. None of them wanted to be a prison guard, they didn't take the job out of some kind of sadistic motive, but the job hardened them and I found the same thing happening to myself over those four months that I was there. It became very difficult to be open and treat the prisoners as regular human beings. There's something about that job where you have to turn part of your self off and on some level dehumanize the people that you're [guarding].

Why do you think private prisons—but also prisons in general—have little or no accountability when it comes to staff conduct and behavior and how the prisoners are treated?
Abuse in prisons is not limited to private prisons at all. The conditions in the entire prison system are quite bad. I think there's that idea that if somebody ends up in prison than they deserve what they get as their punishment.

With private prisons, there’s an added issue, the poor conditions are built into the system. the private prison company saves money by cutting corners. That plays out in poor health care, it plays out in cutting programs, educational programs, cutting rec time, cutting the amounts of guards in the prison, so the prison becomes more violent. To remedy that problem would involve hiring more staff, more teachers, more guards, more doctors, and these things cost money.

A bigger issue on the management level is that the company seems to be hiding a lot from the state. Whenever there was a stabbing I’d take notes of the days and what happened. When I left the prison, I did a public records request in Louisiana to find out how many stabbings had happened in that prison that year and the number was much lower than what I’d recorded. The number for the entire year was lower than what I’d recorded in the four months that I was there. The company has an interest in making the prison seem better than it is. There's just little motive for them to improve conditions, to spend more money, to really make much of a change at all.

Can you talk about the history of for-profit prisons and how they can be directly linked to slavery in the deep south after the Civil War?
These corporations—CoreCivic, the GEO group—started in the 1980s, [but] we’ve had for-profit prisons for almost all of American history. [At times] the profit is going to companies, [at times] it's going to the states, but for most of American history, especially in the south, prisons were intended to actually make a profit. Penitentiaries were invented in America [and were] meant to turn a profit for its factory. Instead of hanging somebody for theft, we're going to give him a sentence to some years in prison. Louisiana privatized its prisons in 1844. Then, when slavery ended, the penitentiary system in the south was used in a way that mimicked slavery. Where slaves were picking cotton, prisoners started to fill that role.

Every prison system in the south was privatized almost immediately after slavery ended. It was the most brutal labor that existed at the time. The death rates were staggering. States averages in the south for decades were somewhere between 16 and 25-percent depending on the state. One in four inmates died every year largely because of the conditions. An important point here is that this system of convict leasing was actually more deadly than slavery was. As we went forward through history, the states, seeing how much money these companies were making, decided to open their own plantations and run them at a profit for the state.

In the 1960s, Arkansas still allowed prisoners to be whipped. Men were picking cotton in cotton fields and Terrell Don Hutto, who came to be the co-founder of the Corrections Corporation of America learned the business of corrections by running a cotton plantation. He lived on the plantation himself, had a house boy, a prisoner who served him, and lived a life that, in many ways, resembled slavery. He was the last person to run these state-run plantations at a profit. Towards the end of that era, in the 1970s, we saw a prison boom that ended up being massive. We had a 500-percent increase in our prison population over 40 years. The prisons became a burden on the states and rather than bringing in money, [they were losing it].

Finally, how has the Trump presidency impacted the private prison industry?
When Trump became president his Justice Department kind of breathed life back into the private prison system. When he was elected, the stock prices rose more than any other companies. Trump has been very aggressive with immigration. Immigrant detention is the frontier of private prison companies. They run about half of the immigrant detention centers. The private prison companies seem very happy with the situation now. I actually went to a shareholder meeting. I bought one share and went to the company's annual shareholder meeting and their spirits were very high. They were very happy with where things stood and their business was growing. I think Trump played a major role in that.

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By now, you're probably painfully aware of why Toad and Mario Kart have been trending on Twitter, but if you've somehow been spared the stomach-turning explanation, well, allow us to ruin your day: It's about Donald Trump's dick. Which, purportedly, looks a lot like Toad from Mario Kart.

The world learned of this alleged phallic-fungal connection from an excerpt of Stormy Daniels's new memoir, which was published in the Guardian on Tuesday. As she tells it, the president's dong is "smaller than average," though "not freakishly small," and—you know what, we'll just leave the rest to the excerpt:

“He knows he has an unusual penis,” Daniels writes. “It has a huge mushroom head. Like a toadstool…

“I lay there, annoyed that I was getting fucked by a guy with Yeti pubes and a dick like the mushroom character in Mario Kart...

“It may have been the least impressive sex I’d ever had, but clearly, he didn’t share that opinion.”

Countless poor, innocent souls out there on the web thought Toad might just be trending because there was some new Nintendo game coming out, or because the internet suddenly remembered how much we all love the little guy. But once the dark truth revealed itself, the denizens of Twitter collectively lost their goddamn minds.

Some, understandably, felt the urge to scrub the image of Trump's alleged "yeti pubes" and "huge mushroom head" from their brains by just going ahead and demolishing the cursed machines that brought them the gag-inducing news in the first place:

Others seemed to entertain the thought of doing irreparable harm to their bodies, because no physical pain can amount to the mental and emotional trauma of having a first-hand description of Donald Trump's "unusual" Johnson:

A few damaged individuals appeared to feel themselves reverting into infant form, rendered helpless and aghast by what may be the most horrifying writing ever published about the male anatomy:

You can't help but wonder how Team Trump is reacting to the revelation, and what fresh hell we might still be in for if his aides—or, God forbid, the man himself—decide to weigh in here. A few folks already have some ideas.

We're very sorry you now have to deal with the knowledge, for the rest of your life, of just how purportedly disturbing-looking Trump's dong is, but hey: As you can plainly see above, at least you're not alone.

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Just when Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court appointment seemed like an inevitability, Donald Trump's nominee was accused of sexually assaulting a woman when they were both at a high school party more than 30 years ago. “I thought he might inadvertently kill me,” his accuser Christine Blasey Ford told the Washington Post. “He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.” The description of the alleged assault in the Post is horrifying:

Kavanaugh and a friend—both “stumbling drunk,” Ford alleges—corralled her into a bedroom during a gathering of teenagers at a house in Montgomery County.

While his friend watched, she said, Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed on her back and groped her over her clothes, grinding his body against hers and clumsily attempting to pull off her one-piece bathing suit and the clothing she wore over it. When she tried to scream, she said, he put his hand over her mouth.

She says she was able to escape when one of Kavanaugh's friends, who also attended Georgetown Preparatory School, "jumped on top of them, sending all three tumbling."

"This is a completely false allegation," Kavanaugh wrote in a statement. "I am willing...to refute this false allegation from 36 years ago, and defend my integrity."

Already, parallels have been drawn between this scandal and Anita Hill's testimony about getting sexually harassed by Clarence Thomas, who was still able to take a seat on the Supreme Court. But even now, in the era of #MeToo, conservatives are doing backflips to justify their continued support of Kavanaugh. As Donald Trump said about #MeToo, according to Bob Woodward's new book, “You’ve got to deny, deny, deny and push back on these women. If you admit to anything and any culpability, then you’re dead.”

Here's how the right has tried to discredit or downplay Ford's accusation:

It was just "rough horseplay"!

On Tuesday, Kavanaugh ally Carrie Severino characterized Ford's sexual assault allegation as "rough horseplay," which I guess is the 2018 version of "locker room talk."

"Her allegations cover a whole range of conduct from boorishness to rough horseplay to actual attempted rape," Severino said in response to a question about whether Ford's claims should disqualify Kavanaugh from serving on the high court.

"I don't think anywhere in there she's saying this is boorish horseplay at all," CNN host Kate Bolduan responded.

"She's certainly implying that it's attempted rape, but I think...there's 35 years of memory that we're trying to play with here and I'm saying the behavior that described could describe a whole range of things," Severino said.

It's not fair that the Democrats didn't tell us about this earlier!

Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein received a letter detailing Ford's accusations in late July, but CNN reported she didn't make the information public because Ford "had asked to remain confidential." In an interview with the New York Times, Republican Senator Susan Collins, who is still undecided on Kavanaugh pending a hearing on Ford's accusation, said it was unfair that Feinstein and the Democrats didn't make Ford's allegation against Kavanaugh public weeks ago.

“What is puzzling to me is the Democrats, by not bringing this out earlier, after having had this information for more than six weeks, have managed to cast a cloud of doubt on both the professor and the judge,” Collins said. “If they believed Professor Ford, why didn’t they surface this information earlier so that he could be questioned about it? And if they didn’t believe her and chose to withhold the information, why did they decide at the 11th hour to release it? It is really not fair to either of them the way it is was handled.”

Donald Trump Jr. made a similar argument, posting a meme mocking Ford's allegations on his Instagram account, with the caption "Finestein [sic] had the letter in July and saved it for the eve of his vote... honorable as always. I believe this is a copy for full transparency. 🤣🇺🇸🤣🇺🇸🤣 #politics #maga."

This is the 21st-century version of the Salem Witch Trials!

In the Wall Street Journal, Lance Morrow, a fellow at a conservative think tank, wrote a melodramatic op-ed comparing Kavanaugh's sexual assault allegation to the Salem Witch Trials. He explained that 326 years ago, women were falsely accused of being witches and put to death based off "either malicious or hysterical" testimony, which is somehow exactly the same as a woman claiming Kavanaugh tried to rape her in high school.

"There had been no police report, and there were no witnesses," Morrow wrote. "The thing happened—if it happened—an awfully long time ago, back in Ronald Reagan’s time, when the actors in the drama were minors and (the boys, anyway) under the blurring influence of alcohol and adolescent hormones. No clothes were removed, and no sexual penetration occurred." (That single quote has pretty much everything in it: She's lying, plus it wouldn't be a big deal if it did.)

She's a Democrat so you shouldn't believe her, plus it happened a really long time ago!

Fox News alum Megyn Kelly, who accused Roger Ailes of sexual harassment, spoke about Ford's accusations on the Today Show. In an apparent effort to discredit Ford, she said, “Her lawyer is a well-known Democratic activist. Her lawyer, by the way, was very defensive of Bill Clinton when he got accused by Paul Jones, and said that one allegation of Bill Clinton taking out his private parts in front of Paul Jones wasn’t enough for sexual harassment.”

She then opined, “Maybe he blew her off. This is what defenders would say, right? She been harboring—she had an axe to grind about him and she lays the foundation as a Democrat donor, saying I don’t want—I’m just going with the most dramatic theory.”

The 80s were a different time!

Conservative Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle took to Twitter to defend Kavanaugh, writing:

B-b-but, Brett Kavanaugh was nice to me!

Before Ford gave an on-the-record interview about her accusation, 65 of Kavanaugh's high school acquaintances signed an open letter vouching for his character. "I know him very well and I’m 100 percent behind him," Suzanne Matan, one of the signees, told Politico.

"The Brett Kavanaugh I know is a good and decent person, and I have never seen him treat women with anything but respect," conservative pundit Virginia Hume wrote on Twitter.

In a statement given to Politico, former president George W. Bush, who you may remember for waging a war in Iraq based on falsehoods, echoed a similar sentiment, asserting: “Laura and I have known and respected Brett Kavanaugh for decades, and we stand by our comments the night Judge Kavanaugh was nominated.”

Well, that settles that, right?

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On Sunday, the LGBTQ website Queerty ran an interview with Mark Saltzman, a former Sesame Street writer who has had a truly fascinating life and has a lot of great stories to tell—about the show, about being a gay man in the 80s, and about his open secret of a relationship with film editor Arnold Glassman. It's a great read, but people are mostly focused on this bit:

In the writer’s room, you’re all adults. Were you thinking of Bert & Ernie as a gay couple? Did that question ever come up?
I remember one time that a column from 'The San Francisco Chronicle,' a preschooler in the city turned to mom and asked “are Bert & Ernie lovers?” And that, coming from a preschooler was fun. And that got passed around, and everyone had their chuckle and went back to it. And I always felt that without a huge agenda, when I was writing Bert & Ernie, they were. I didn’t have any other way to contextualize them. The other thing was, more than one person referred to Arnie & I as “Bert & Ernie.”

A couple days after the interview was posted, it was speeding around the internet, with dozens of entertainment sites declaring that Saltzman had said Bert and Ernie were gay. Soon the official Sesame Street Twitter account weighed in to say, basically: No they're not.

But though even Queerty tried to spin the interview as the "answer" to the "question" of whether Bert and Ernie were a gay couple in its headline, Saltzman didn't really say what everyone says he said. He drew on his own relationship to write the characters, and like many people he privately thought of Bert and Ernie as gay, but that's all he was commenting on—how he thought of them, not what they actually were in the scripts and on the screen. (Twitter got this right when it compiled a "moment" called "Sesame Street writer says he thinks of Bert and Ernie as a gay couple.")

Obviously Bert and Ernie have become gay icons of a sort over the years, but they weren't intended as gay characters, and to assert that they really are gay actually gives Sesame Street—an extremely progressive, inclusive show in many ways—more credit than it deserves. Elsewhere in the interview Saltzman describes trying to get his bosses to include gay storylines during the AIDS crisis. "I can remember pitching to the education department, the gatekeepers of the curriculum, gay content, just to get it off my conscience," he says. "And I can remember being stonewalled in a way that it made me think it was a lost cause." Later on in the interview, he adds: "And because it was always diversity, diversity, it’s a shame [Sesame Steet] wasn’t leading the charge."

Maybe Sesame Street should have made Bert and Ernie gay at some point. But the show didn't—instead, it has decided to make them nonsexual dude buddies. Legendary puppeteer Frank Oz, who created Bert, offered a pretty tone-deaf defense of this choice on Twitter:

That tweet sparked a backlash from people who thought that Oz was minimizing the experiences of gay people and ignoring what Bert and Ernie have actually meant to viewers. Thanks in part to Saltzman's writing, Bert and Ernie have played a role, however subtle in helping spread acceptance of same-sex relationships. At the same time, they were never actually gay, at least as much as puppets on a TV show can "actually" be anything.

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Get out, and stay out. Or at least, don’t come back and build a high-rise. That’s the message Orrin Pilkey, a climate scientist and emeritus professor at Duke University, hopes Hurricane Florence will send lawmakers and coastal residents when it smashes the southeastern US this week. As climate change warms the oceans, swells the seas, and makes deadly hurricanes a fixture of American life, a massive and permanent retreat from the coasts may be the only way to protect lives and livelihoods in the long run, Pilkey says.

Like Harvey did in Houston and Maria did in Puerto Rico, Florence was expected to bring widespread devastation to the southeastern US coast: demolished buildings, sustained power outages, and death. The worst part is these storms are just the beginning. Global temperatures have climbed one degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and could could exceed 1.5 degrees of warming within the next 25 years, largely thanks to fossil fuel emissions. Climate change is causing storms like Florence to worsen, and those who will be hurt the most are poor people who live in flood-prone areas.

In his 2016 book Retreat from a Rising Sea, Pilkey, whose family’s Mississippi home was destroyed by Hurricane Camille in 1969, argues that unchecked climate change could make coastal regions uninhabitable sooner than we think. He thinks coastal communities should respond to this threat by moving away from the ocean now, before it’s too late. Pilkey takes particular aim at post-storm “urban renewal” projects—replacing modest homes with high-rises and mansions, for instance—that swell coastal populations. But even ordinary residents might have to give up the comforting dream of rebuilding after the storm.

Sooner or later, he says, coastal communities will have to choose from two bad options: hunker down beyond proliferating seawalls, or pick up stakes and move inland, forever. As Florence approached, I talked with Pilkey about his thoughts on the storm, climate change and “managed retreat.”

VICE: First, what role does climate change play in a storm like Florence?
Orrin Pilkey: There are two aspects of climate change that are impacting the nature, magnitude, and direction of hurricanes. One is the warming of the ocean. In theory, warmer ocean water gives more energy to a hurricane. The second is sea level rise. The seas are rising, and with each increment of sea level rise there is an increment of inland penetration by hurricanes. In general, we are getting more severe storms with the rising sea level. This is happening already.

What can be done to prepare for more severe storms hitting our coasts?
Unfortunately, the American shoreline policy is what I call a catastrophic plan. The plan is: We’re not going to do anything until we have a real catastrophe. That is really stupid in my view. We know about sea level rise; we know storms are getting more intense. We should be starting a managed retreat. We should be moving buildings back, or demolishing buildings that are at great risk. We shouldn’t allow any more building next to the beach, and any buildings on barrier islands should be small. For instance, high-rises should not be built on barrier islands.

We should be planning and executing the beginning of a retreat from the shoreline in response to sea level rise and increased storm severity.

"When I’ve talked to people on the coast, I’ve been told to go jump in a lake, and a lot worse than that."

I think people realize cities like New Orleans and Miami are seriously endangered. But what about other cities in the Southeast?
The Charleston Peninsula is quite low. To their credit, they are trying to respond to sea-level rise. They’re even demolishing a building or two. A place like Annapolis, too, is impacted by king tides, and there are signs that the sea level is rising pretty rapidly there. We have several communities of significant size in Florida, like Fort Lauderdale, that are sitting on the edge. It’s hard to think what you’re going to do with a city like Daytona Beach. They need a beach—they’re a tourist community—but they also need a seawall. So, what’s more important: buildings or beaches? It’s a real question, and different communities are going to have different responses.

For a lot of people living on the coast, the idea of retreating—giving up their homes, their way of life—is going to be a tough pill to swallow.
They’re going to swallow it sooner or later. The sooner they swallow it, the better off they’re going to be. I understand completely. When I’ve talked to people on the coast, I’ve been told to go jump in a lake, and a lot worse than that. In many of the communities on the coast, their beaches will become unstable. And if they don’t want to lose their buildings, they’re going to have to rely on a seawall. So, you’ll have a tourist community without a beach. That’s already happening. For instance, Miami Beach is considerably narrower than it was.

Yes, it’s painful, no question about it. When you look at South Florida, you’re looking at 4 million people who have to get out. They’ll be climate refugees. We’re talking about a really major upset to our society. There will be a lot of unhappy people, of course. But we can’t go back to just building seawalls. We have to go against the grain. If we don’t go against grain we’re going to lose it all.

Who would coordinate this kind of mass relocation?
If you’re going to move 4 million people, you need to make sure they have housing and employment down the road. Whether it’s planned or not, this is something that’s going to happen in 30 to 40 years, and it’s going to happen pretty quickly. First the grocery goes away, and next thing you know the doctor goes away and then the minister goes away. Communities will disappear. Nobody at this point is thinking about what to do with refugees.

This is a many-faceted problem that we should be thinking about now. For the communities who might accept these refugees, those that plan now will be ahead of the game when the rush begins. It’s true that most people don’t even accept the fact of a refugee rush. But if all the ice melts—the mountain glaciers, the ice sheets, the Antarctic ice sheet, Greenland—the sea level will rise 220 feet. If this happens, all of Florida will go away. Think of the number of refugees there would be. Of course, 220 feet of sea level rise is probably not going to happen. But we’ll see somewhere between zero and 220 feet, and three to four feet is very likely.

How do we make sure a massive relocation is fair and just? How do we make sure the most marginalized communities—like the Gullah in South Carolina, whose entire way of life depends on the coastal environment—are prioritized?
There are 34 native communities on the shoreline in Alaska. There are lots of communities that subsist on fishing and hunting. What are we going to do with them? The cost of moving those villages is huge. The Gullah situation is not unique. The plight of some of America’s native tribes remains largely unknown to Americans, but it is serious.

Are you hopeful that a managed retreat might actually happen?
It’s a terrible thing that we’re not joining the rest of the world in trying to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. A few communities—like New York City, Charleston, and Norfolk, Virginia—are doing something, but the feds are not involved at all. The towns that are involved right now are those that have no choice. In New York, 40,000 people live below three feet. Charleston is low. The communities that are trying to do something are doing so because they’re forced to. In the future, the same thing will happen to other communities. But in terms of federal response, I am completely unoptimistic.

"Money rules the world. I see no common sense, no real concern for the future."

Anything else you’d like to add?
I’m hoping that this storm shows us that the first step in the southeastern US, and probably in much of the rest of country, is to stop “urban renewal” in response to storms. Urban renewal is why North Carolina and South Carolina have such densely populated shorelines. Every time there’s a storm, we come back and take the attitude that we are courageous and not turned off by nature, and we will rebuild, by god, and we will rebuild better than ever. That’s what happens continuously.

If we do that after this storm, we are in real trouble. We’ll get rid of mom-and-pop cottages and replace them with McMansions. It doesn’t make any sense, except for greed, except for money.

It sounds like greed is a big problem here.
Money rules the world. I see no common sense, no real concern for the future. There has been very short-term thinking guiding the development of the coasts. There’s been no concern for environmentally sound development, no concern for future storms.

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

Casey Williams is a writer covering environmental politics and culture based in Durham, North Carolina. Follow him on Twitter.

Social image of a Greenpeace protest by JUAN BARRETO/AFP/Getty.

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Most cultures expect women to be delicate and thin. And those women that push back on this tired stereotype are often met with anything from strange looks and quite sniggers, to physical and verbal abuse.

"Muscles have historically been associated with masculinity because testosterone is what helps to convert proteins to muscles," explains physiologist Piero Galilea. We spoke to four athletes about the abuse they receive for their bodies and if they believe society's expectations of women will ever change.

Teresa Pérez, Bodybuilder

Photo: Teresa Pérez

"The worst reactions I've experienced have usually come from other women. For example, when I was 15 years old, my mother was horrified when I told her that I wanted to do weightlifting. She told me that it would turn me into a man.

"This other time, I was walking down the street when I came across to women. As I walked past them, I overheard one of them call me disgusting. For a moment, I thought about turning around and saying something, but I decided it wasn't worth it.

"I had another pretty unpleasant experience at a shopping centre. I went into a shop to buy myself a drink, and when I stepped in, a couple started nudging each other and giggling towards me. Generally, it doesn't bother me when people look at me because I understand that having a different physique grabs people's attention. But being that openly disrespectful is a completely different thing. If you don't like how I look, then simply don't look. I definitely didn't ask for your opinion."

Photo: Teresa Pérez

"I think it's a cultural problem more than anything. Most people expect women to be quiet and submissive, so they're surprised when they find a women who's different to their expectations. It's the same with our bodies – they expect women to be weak. Still, it seems to be more shocking for women than men. The macho stereotype associates muscles with masculinity. But I consider myself to be very feminine."

Ely Merino, Pilates instructor

Photo: Chechu Pajares

"I have loads of stories about the times I've had to put up shit for having the body that I do. A very close friend of mine was once asked why they hang out with 'that transvestite'. I've also been called 'RoboCop', and told that I shouldn't leave the house looking like the way I do. I have supper strong legs and abs, so comments like 'you could destroy me with one kick', really piss me off.

"I think women in particular make negative comments because they're jealous. And it's hard to see guys look at me the way they often do. Sometimes, I even stop feeling feminine.

"It used to really annoy me even more when I was younger, but there came a point where I had to stop paying attention to the comments. I have worked hard emotionally to accept myself as I am, and now I'm delighted with my body."

Photo: Chechu Pajares

"And on top of all this, trying to find clothes that fit me can be a traumatic experience. It’s difficult to buy high boots, for example. None of them fit because I can't get them around my calf muscles. The same goes for trousers. I wish more people would accept that there isn't a single female body shape.

"In our society, men constantly have to feel like they're strong. Often, when I'm loading up the paddle boards, there are guys who come over to me and offer to help. When I turn around and they see my biceps, they’re a bit caught out, and I think it's because they suddenly don't feel as manly as they would like to."

Rita García Herrera, South European CrossFit Champion

Photo: Rita García Herrera

"My body represents my work and my training. I actually train to improve my performance and not to have a good body, but one thing naturally leads to the other.

"I've been told many times that I'm too strong and that I look like a boy. But these kind of comments don't really matter to me. The truth is, I've heard it all. Once, a guy told that if his girlfriend became as strong as me, he would break up with her. But how I see it, your partner should love you for your personality, and not for your physique. Obviously it's a look that you have to like, but luckily I haven’t had any problems with any of my partners.

"Fashion and culture are what dictates that a girl should be slim and trim. I think things are starting to change, though. At least that's the way I see it."

TJ García, Physiotherapist and CrossFit athlete

Photo: Gonzalo Manera

"For me, my body is the vehicle I use to enjoy what I like: sport and physiotherapy. I've been called a man and a bull, and told that no guy will ever want to go out with me. At one airport, they even mistook me for a man, and the person behind the counter ticked the male gender box. That really crossed a line.

"Those comments and behaviours represent society's prejudices and fears. People don't understand that women can have a variety of body shapes. They're afraid of what is different, what they can't control themselves, so they try to attack. We are dedicated to judging others when we should all be pointing looking inwards, and not getting involved in things that are none of our business."

This article originally appeared on VICE ES.

Ah, yes, CBD. It’s the new health supplement that will temper your anxiety, cure your migraines, fix your sex life and reverse all the terrible decisions you’ve made up until this point. Or something like that. The New York Times called it “beauty’s new high”. Bon Appetit have written about it being “the wellness world’s new favourite drink”. It’s “The Only Thing That Helps My Period Cramps”, said one Buzzfeed writer. Truly, it sounds like (and could just be) a miracle ingredient.

Taken from cannabis, CBD is the part of weed that doesn’t get you stoned. IE… you’re not going to develop a penchant for Neil deGrasse Tyson and disappointing your parents. Instead, various people claim, you’ll be very chill. Or medium chill. Or maybe not that chill at all, since there are very few long-term human studies into its benefits and no single substance can completely alleviate the crushing weight of being alive.

Still, the potential for CBD to be a life-improving supplement is there. Short-term human studies suggest CBD exhibits anti-inflammatory and anti-anxiety properties. One study also hints at its potential in easing seizures. For now though, it remains a trendy cure all – loved by the GOOP glitterati as much as self-medicating stoners who want to put down the pot. You can even buy yourself kush flavoured CBD vapes.

It’s worth a lot, too. Business Insider says CBD is a $1 billion industry. But without the right science, how do you know what products you can trust? You’re going to need a proper non-scientific and completely anecdotal review on all the goods out there, across a range of price points and various formats, to see what works best for you based on someone you don’t know! To do this, I got a bunch of stuff from a bunch of people and tested out their best CBD products (ie the ones with the most cannabidiol in). Lessgeddit!

High Tide CBD Infused Cold Brew Coffee

Price: £5
CBD: 5mg

Just gonna say it: this product was created by the devil or someone with a severe hatred for humanity. If you’re into stabbing chest pains, hypertension-like symptoms and dizziness, then by all means give it a whir. Maybe you just like coffee in which case you probably won’t feel anything. But it does beg the question, why purchase this product (which is more expensive than normal coffee) when the anxiety-inducing effects of caffeine are undoubtedly going to counteract any potential positive effect of CBD. Consider one of the selling points on their website is “Stress Free” and it’s all a big noooooooope. You might also be shitting for hours ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Rating: 0/5
Value for money: 0/5

CBD Living Water

Price: £5.99
CBD: 4mg

Mmmmmmmlovelylovelylovely water. The juice of the gods, nature’s gift, basically just rain filtered into a plastic bottle and into my mouth – you gotta love it. Of course you’re gonna want to add CBD to water, the world’s most refreshing and strangely flavourless beverage. It’s a good idea! Thing is: this one sells itself on a degree of elitism with a “powerful enhanced hydration beverage” top line, which also brings about a £5.99 price point.

Did I feel refreshed and calm? Yes. Do I feel the same from drinking water and not much different despite having ingested 4,000,000 nanograms of CBD, whatever that means? Pretty much! Not really sure what was to be expected here, it’s just a bottle of water with a veneer of being even more powerful. If I had more money I would buy it everyday and leave it stocked in my fridge, like a weird health goth episode of MTV Cribs. Alas, however: I will drink once more from the lead coated bathroom tap.

Rating: 3/5
Value for money: 3/5

CannabiGold Intense Tincture

Price: £215
CBD: 3000mg

This is the real deal lab tested stuff for the CBD connoisseur. Then again you could probably tell that from the sleek spaceship like design and price point. Clocking in at 3000 MG, this has 30x the amount of CBD than the smallest available tinctures (basically drop bottles, where you squeeze the liquid out onto your tongue). This shit made me want to sleep like a beautiful little baby and it felt as though the edges of my day had been given a nice cannabidiol influenced buffer.

Cheaper products are available, like this one for £20. That said, they’re useless, with a small amount of CBD, and you’ll want to get a tincture that has at least 500mg minimum to feel even the slightest effect.

If the weight of my bank account could lift a drop of CannabiGold’s sweet nectar into my mouth every day for the rest of my life would I do it? You absolutely bet. Of course I would. But I’m broke and despite the fact the bottle supposedly lasts for a month and a half at the recommended dosage, it’s perhaps not worth numbing away that much of my pay cheque.

Rating: 5 / 5
Value for money: 3 / 5

Hemp Hookahzz CBD Platinum E-Liquid

Price: £399
CBD: 3000mg

Wassup all my fellow hemp hookahzz! Since we’re doing an e-liquid, this is the one that’s supposed to be a little bit like smoking weed. I decided to go for the most expensive product here, the real primo shit, because if that’s not good then why bother with the rest right? I will say on smell alone DO NOT GO THERE. Days later it continues to follow me around, its sickly aroma haunting me – the run-off from a “pink diva” flavoured e-ghost. Sadly, this is like inhaling perfume for dogs.

Perhaps it chilled me out a little but nothing is worth being around that scent. The product is gloopy, a lot more thicker than your average e-liquid. If you’re a big baby who really must smoke a CBD vape rather than hitting some weed or any of the other products in this review then my advice is to go to a head shop where you can probably sample something if you ask nice enough / already buy weed from the people in there.

Rating: 1/5
Price: 1/5

Ohana – Prasanta Lavender Soothing Balm

Price: £40
CBD: 200mg

First off, this smells bomb. Obviously that’s the lavender talking but god damn, this is exactly the kind of thing you want to put on your body. Unlike a lot of the businesses on here, Ohana is a relatively small operation. It was founded by a woman called Jasmin who – after she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis – developed a love for the therapeutic use of CBD. It’s not some big multi-million business like CannabiGold. Still it is hard to tell exactly what this balm does with regard to CBD. I don’t have MS, I’m just a dude who wants to chill the fuck out, and topical use isn’t really having much of an effect on my brain compared to the range of tinctures on offer. However all things considered, like I said, this does smell real fucking good!!!!!

Rating: 4/5
Price: 3/5

Raised Spirit – Coconut Oil Pro

Price: £59.99
CBD: 1,000mg

Smells bad, this one, like someone yacked in a jar and let the residue ferment. But, if you like, you can put the coconut snot in food, which is good? Because we all eat food, and a lot of people use coconut oil, so this seems like an easy way to get some CBD into your system. Again: does it work? At this point I’m so CBD’d out I’m not sure what’s real, what’s placebo, and what my general state of mind is on any given day.

Rating: 3/5
Price: 3/5

In conclusion:

You’re going to need to splash out to feel any real benefit from CBD. When you do, make sure it's on a tincture as this feels like the most effective way to be chilled out. Then again who knows? You might eat and drink nothing but CBD infused meals for a week and feel nothing.

@ryanbassil

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Listen: The why isn't important here, but Tom Arnold—right, the comedian—has become deeply, deeply involved in trying to find tapes of President Donald Trump saying or doing terrible things, and Arnold's quest is now a show on VICELAND that premiered Tuesday night.

In advance of each episode, we'll be taking a look at what exactly Arnold is searching for and answering some basic questions you may have about his quarry.

Q: What Are the Trump Tapes?

Donald Trump has been a celebrity for a long, long time, and that means he’s been on camera, interviewed, and mic’d up much more than the average human. We’ve heard one horrendous backstage tape involving Trump and we’ve seen hours upon hours of other TV and radio programming featuring the man, so one can only assume other noteworthy things have been said and captured behind the scenes, right?

The OG trump tape is the Access Hollywood tape that came out a month before the general election in 2016 and found Trump bragging to Billy Bush about sexually assaulting women. That's the tape that got Arnold interested in this in the first place.

Q: What Tapes Is Tom Arnold Looking For?

After the Access Hollywood tape came out people who had made appearances on Trump’s own shows—The Apprentice and the Miss Universe shows—came forth to attest that Trump had all but certainly said upsetting things on those two sets that the American people should know about. Then there’s the rumors of a “pee pee tape”—a video made by Russian intelligence from 2013 reportedly showing Trump at a Ritz Carlton in Moscow watching two prostitutes pee on a bed Barack and Michelle Obama supposedly slept in. That alleged video is at the center of a whole host of theories about Trump being blackmailed by Russia, but its existence has never been proven.

There’s also a rumored elevator tape of Trump doing something bad in a Trump Tower elevator.

Q: Why Are These Tapes Important?

By now, hardly anyone is under the impression that Trump is exactly a model of restraint and Christian virtue behind closed doors, but it's one thing to hear stories about Trump behaving badly and another to hear and see that for yourself. If, for instance, it turned out that Trump was caught on tape throwing around the N-word, as his former aide Omarosa Manigault Newman has alleged, that would make it a lot harder for people to deny that Trump is a straight-up racist.

Q: Wait, So Why Is Tom Arnold Doing This Again?

We told you: The why isn't important.

Tune into The Hunt for the Trump Tapes with Tom Arnold Tuesday nights on VICELAND.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

The rest of Canada is right—Toronto does suck.

According to new figures released by Padmapper, a rental listing website, the median price of an available one-bedroom in Toronto is now $2,200.

Obviously, that is deeply unaffordable for most people in the city, particularly young people. But how unaffordable, you ask? The answer will make you want to move to Montreal or back to whatever godforsaken Ontario town you came from.

The rule of thumb has usually been that you should be only spending about 30 percent of your income on rent (although, that rule, which Canada defines as “affordable," is increasingly under scrutiny, given the current market). OK, here comes some math from a guy who got a B in high school math.

And in order for you to afford $2,200 a month—or $26,400 annually—at only 30 percent, you need a before-tax income of about $88,000.

Yes, dear reader, you need to pull in nearly six figures to rent a completely average one-bedroom in a completely average city. Given that the median household income in Toronto was $65,829 in 2015, according to government data, this is highly problematic.

Besides the obvious advice of moving to Montreal, here’s the best solution I can think of—shack up with the first person you get to three dates with and I’m sure it’ll all be fine. Just like late capitalism.

Follow Josh Visser on Twitter.

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As Martin Scorsese and Joaquin Phoenix prepare to flip the story of the Joker upside-down, a new Batman comic book reveals a new, darker side of the Dark Knight: the inside of his tights. Bruce Wayne's semi-flaccid member is revealed, lurking in the shadows of his exposed crotch, in a panel midway through the debut of a three-issue miniseries called Damned. Much like the World's Greatest Detective stalking a criminal, it's a dick so sneaky you might miss it. To see it, swipe to the third panel.

Catch it?

Honestly, it's kind of, er, hard to make out. So here it is again, brightened and circled in red. Because why not?

The Bat-phallus was revealed in Damned #1, the first issue from DC's mature Black Label imprint. The story follows the Circumcised Crusader as he grapples with amnesia and tries to solve the Joker's murder—and no, the culprit isn't Tommy Wiseau's awful impression of the supervillain. There will be two more issues of Damned, which means at least two more opportunities for writers Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo to give the Bat-Schlong the spotlight it deserves.

Black Label also has a gritty Superman series called Year One slated for November, and The Other History of the DC Universe in December, which means readers may get to see all manner of super-cocks before the year is out. Let's just hope none of them bear a horrifying resemblance to Toad.

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Follow Beckett Mufson on Twitter and Instagram .

This article originally appeared on VICE US.