A refugee with a hula hoop at the Moria camp in Lesvos. Photo by Jill Maglio

As the refugee crisis continues, so too does the aid effort. But it's not just food, clothing, medicine, and other essentials that are getting donated. Whether it's local knitters in Greece, Clowns Without Borders, theater groups in Calais, or holistic therapists in the UK, there's a global effort spearheaded by people who want to use the skills they have to help refugees beyond the bare necessities.

The argument for the work these groups do is simple—that people cannot thrive on food alone. "The arts and access to beauty encourage human dignity," says Dr. Anna Kim, a research fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She is the lead scholar on a research project in conjunction with the group Thriving Cities, looking into the roles of arts and beauty in cutting across social divides and in forming basic structures that can enable social justice. As part of her research she will be traveling to the catastrophe-hit Greek island of Lesvos, which saw around half a million refugees pass through it in 2015.

"Beauty, arts, and human expression—far from being just the cream at the top of society when all basic needs are fulfilled, such as medication and health and so forth, are fundamental to human thriving," she says.

LA-based yoga instructor Erin Weber echoes this sentiment. She started teaching art classes and volunteering at Pikpa—a camp in Lesvos for vulnerable women and children—in 2015, before moving on to yoga. "I was more interested in connecting the kids and parents of different ethnicities and creating harmony, thus the yoga. So we did various tactile activities and physical games. By the end of my time at the camp, there was an amazing calm and harmony."

"Often people just wanted to be heard. So I offered a lot of advice with different pranayama , aromatherapy, mouth gargles, and simple therapeutic yoga asanas ."

Constantine Kadel, a Bikram yoga instructor from Boston who has been working in Pikpa camp for the last two and a half months, reports a similar effect. He mostly works with children ages three to 11, and says they're all turning into little yogis. "The more I showed them the more excited they became. All day you can hear them say 'yoga yoga yoga!' You can realize how proud they are and how empowered the yoga makes them feel."

The effect of yoga, Constantine says, is substantial. "It gives them a chance to turn their brains off and connect their minds with their bodies. I see a lot of joy and enthusiasm in the kids. I also see they have a chance to process their emotions. The same goes for the adults. In fact, I continuously see positive results."

This might sound strange when you consider that many refugees arrive in Europe cold, wet, hungry, and tired. CircusAID volunteer Jill Maglio points out that one of the biggest problems the refugees face is profound boredom, which can have a serious impact on mental health.

An occupational therapist from New York City, Jill used circus skills as therapy in Lesvos. Visit any refugee camp and you'll see that it is in equal measure extremely stressful and extremely boring. "It's like being in solitary confinement," Jill says. "Having nothing to do and being in a positive mental state can be hard enough—but having nothing to do and having the trauma you've experienced, leaving your family, conflict at home, all these unknowns... that's quite maddening."

At first she was shy about bringing out the circus equipment, thinking that people wouldn't want to learn to juggle as they'd be busy being, you know, exhausted and traumatized. "But what I found was there was an abundance of volunteers. The impression I got was that people had nothing to do," says Jill.

"I brought equipment to make 25 hula hoops and as soon as the guys in the camp saw what I was doing, they rushed over to help. They wanted something to do. I also brought feather balancing and juggling balls. The objective wasn't that people learn circus skills, but that people were interacting, and laughing, and smiling. They had a bit of time and respite from the trauma they're experiencing to promote their resilience for the next stage of the journey."

On the other side of Europe, the situation's a little different. Bobby is chair of trustees for Art Refuge UK, a group that works in the camps of Calais and Dunkerque, sending qualified art therapists to run sessions through making visual arts. She says that some people "don't get" what it is that they do, but Medecins Du Monde and Medecins Sans Frontieres are both working with them. The stories they hear are sobering.

Related: Watch VICE talk film with Mike Leigh

"Last week we therapists started playing with some plasticine, and this group of boys started joining in," Bobby says. "They were a bit skeptical at first thinking 'what the hell?' After some time one of them made a 2D representation of a boat. And another boy started to make a vehicle out of twigs and plasticine and made it into a lorry. He wrote 'UK' on the side of it. Then he got some paper and he put two figures inside the lorry and also made a plasticine policeman. One of our team made a little cat, and he adapted it and made it a sniffer dog. So it turns out it was about his experience of being faced with police brutality in Calais, and how he's tried with his friends to get into the back of a lorry and the police pulled them out. Meanwhile the other boy had turned his 2D boat into this really robust 3D ship that he said was going to take him to Britain."

Gauri Raje, who works for Tellers Without Borders—an organization that operates in the UK and abroad to help refugees and displaced people process their trauma through stories—tells me a story that perhaps underlines the importance of this kind of work. "On one project I was working with women refugees," Gauri remembers. "They all had their status they had been in the country for about four years—they were stable. One day, we were sharing folk tales, and I told them a few stories. At the end of the three-hour session they said: 'We really enjoyed this, because it was about us and not about the fact we're refugees.' We could examine their hopes and dreams and desires."

Perhaps that's the thing worth considering. Whether refugees and asylum seekers are being treated like goods to be examined, fixed, and slapped with a red wristband, or like humans who become bored and despondent, and need stimulation to think and feel.

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Since his 2014 murder by ISIS captors, disseminated worldwide in a grisly and raw piece of terrorist video propaganda, James Foley has become a household name. The image of Foley kneeling before the camera, looking battered yet resolute in an orange jumpsuit in front of a backdrop of desert and a black-clad, knife-wielding executioner, has since come to symbolize the current conflict against the extremist Islamic caliphate.

But before he became "James Foley," less a person and more of a politicized talking point for pundits and presidential hopefuls alike, he was Jim—journalist, humanitarian, brother, son, and friend. The new documentary Jim: The James Foley Story seeks to reveal that Foley through the impact of his life (and death) on anybody within his orbit. Directed by Brian Oakes, a childhood friend of Foley's who grew up with him in the Lakes Region of New Hampshire, the film features personal, touching commentary from Foley's family and friends, allowing for a portrait of the man through those who knew him best.

I became friends with Jim Foley when I interviewed him about his experience being grabbed by Gaddafi loyalists outside of Brega in Libya in 2011. Jim had been reporting and filming dispatches for the Boston-based news outlet GlobalPost. He later returned to the Middle East, to the disbelief and understandably frustrated shock of his family, chronicling what was then a still-developing story about war crimes and conflict-zone atrocities against the Syrian people. After the interview, I stayed in touch with Jim via email and Skype, and got a series of instant messages from him just before he was kidnapped in Syria in 2012.

When it came to reporting, with Jim, it was always about the people. "That's what Jim cared most about," said Philip Balboni, the CEO of GlobalPost. "Telling the stories of people affected by war. My regrets about not being able to free him is something I'll live with the rest of my life."

Jim's brother Michael said all four Foley siblings and the family screened the final Sundance cut of the film this past weekend in Utah. "There were a lot of tears, really powerful stuff," he told me. In front of the family sat Daniel Rye and Pierre Torres, two of the hostages imprisoned with Foley who were later released. Neither had seen the film yet, and Michael, seeing them visibly moved, asked them for an honest assessment of the film afterward, particularly the interment reenactment scenes. They said it was spot-on.

I recently sat down with Brian Oakes in Manhattan to discuss the film, Jim's legacy, and the truly human side of Foley that continues to shine a light through the tragic darkness surrounding his fate.

VICE: What is the main difference in scenarios between Jim's Libya kidnapping and the Syrian kidnapping?
Brian Oakes: When Jim was captured in Libya, we knew who took him. We knew it was the Gaddafi regime, we knew where to focus our efforts, who had him, and were very vocal about the fact that he had been taken. was a completely different story. We didn't know who took him. ISIS didn't exist yet—the caliphate wasn't created until almost a year later. So we didn't know if it was the Assad government, the many jihadist groups that existed, the mob, or an offshoot of the Free Syrian Army.

Did you set out to politicize the film at all?
The film is purposefully apolitical. I don't consider myself having any expertise to take on the very complex political layers that this story brings up. It's a minefield. My goal was to focus on Jimmy, because I think a story on Jim—if were to go political—I don't think he'd want that. He was always very positive, and I think he continues to challenge us to kind of think about the course of humanitarianism, and what's right. ISIS is going to change, foreign policy against ISIS is going to change, all the political elements of this story is going to change or be obsolete. I wanted this film to be timeless, so in 20 to 50 years it's still about Jim, his concerns, what he was doing, and the importance of journalism.

How did you find out Jim was missing in Syria originally? The family?
No, the family was told to be quiet by the CIA and the FBI. There was a blackout. Michael Foley, who said, "Hey just want to let you know Jim's been kidnapped in Syria, and we're not out there public with it, but starting to disperse that information now."

We were handcuffed because we didn't know who took him, we were really unable to do what we had done with the Libya situation because there was nothing we could do. We weren't allowed to talk, and didn't want to talk about it, and were trying to keep it quiet. It was scary. You're completely helpless and just waiting on information from a government that doesn't know who has him either.

Jim Foley and Brian Oakes camping in 1992. Photo courtesy of Brian Oakes

The video of Jim's death was a lightning rod, especially for those who knew he had been missing for two years. Was it a shock to you?
Total shock. I was in Prospect Park in Brooklyn, and I got a text from my wife who said, "I'm really sorry about what's happened with Jim," and I immediately went on my phone. Of course, it was everywhere. Surreal. Shocking. Horrifying.

How did you handle it?
You just deal with the situation that you can't believe.

Why did you decide to make this film your first solo effort?
About two months after Jim's death, inaccuracies "James Foley" being portrayed as things that just made me be uncomfortable. I'm not going to let my friend go out like that.

Like what?
Some of the torture details that were not necessarily accurate, and I saw Michael and the Foley family struggling to control that message what happened. So as a filmmaker and someone who knew Jim, I felt a responsibility to tell a story about Jim that was authentic and through the voices of the people who knew him and loved him—his friends and colleagues—so there would be an accurate representation of what he was doing over there.

How would Jim have reacted to that?
I mean, the image of Jim in the jumpsuit is the second-most recognizable image next to the 9/11 towers in regards to the association with terrorism. Jim would be horrified to know he is known as "that guy."

Jim Foley and Brian Oakes at youth soccer in 1982. Photo courtesy of Brian Oakes

Because that would detract from why he went over there?
Jim was in Syria to get these stories of civilians who were getting bombed by their government killed on a daily basis. That's what was important to him. So I have a responsibility to my friend to show people who are interested in his story what he was doing over there. That [is what was] important for me, and for Jim as a person.

The image of Jim in the orange jumpsuit in the desert become such a recognizable image, and it means a lot of different things both politically and socially. I wanted to re-contextualize that image. If you understand who Jim was and understand and know the person that he was a little more intimately, the causes he was for and how he went about his life that image takes on a completely different meaning. I want to take that image away from . I'm hoping that this film can in some way do that.

" as tragic and horrible as Jim died, his story is very triumphant to me. He exemplifies what a human being could aspire to, or be inspired by."

How worried were/are you about the project being seen as opportunistic, or even exploitative?
That was my biggest fear while making the film, so there was a line that I was constantly aware of. I took each decision as it asking myself, "Is this an honest portrayal of Jimmy, and does it help move his story forward and help show what he was all about?" I wanted the film to feel like it was told from someone who didn't know him.

Sounds difficult.
It was a little hard to do. But in a way, I think that makes the story unique. I think if people who watch the film know that the person who made it knew Jim personally, I think he or she would watch the film in a very different way. It's not just some outsider trying to find the story.

Is there a scene or touch point in the film that you think really captures who Jim was in that sense?
You could never take the humanitarianism out of Jim. He did a story on the Dar al-Shifa Hospital in Syria— kind of the main hospital treating victims in these neighborhoods —and they were shuttling people in with drips in cars and in trunks and the back of trucks, just all day long. So Jim decided to raise money to get an ambulance for that hospital. He sent out an email to his colleagues to try and raise money, and he did it! They got this secondhand ambulance that made its way down from Austria to Aleppo. That, to me, is a microcosmic story that really shows the type of person Jim was.

It's those kinds of stories that make Jim's final one all the more tragic.
Sure, as tragic and horrible as Jim died, his story is very triumphant to me. He exemplifies what a human being could aspire to, or be inspired by. Jim's story is very small, but the messages that percolate to the surface can just really make you think about the world we live in. He makes me look at myself in the mirror all the time, and I've been dissecting Jim as a character my whole life but definitely in the last year, and there have been some amazing epiphanies in the film for people that really resonate, and really make you look at yourself.

How did you orchestrate the narrative and focus on the three years or so the film does? With so much to cover in this story, it must have been a nightmare to establish the thread in order to not have audiences get lost in the point. Which was Jim.
My goal was to always just be honest. I didn't have an agenda, and I wanted to tell a story that was honest and about my friend, and I like flaws. I like mistakes when people make them. I think that's what makes people very relatable. And as you know Jim had lots of flaws. We all do. So you can't tell a story that makes someone look perfect or a saint or a hero, because if you do people call bullshit. If you tell an honest story people will respect that. And to me that makes for a much more emotional and powerful film about someone, "This is my buddy I've known most of my life and this is what I discovered about him and this is the legacy that he left behind and how he affected people." And it's fucking amazing. He just transcends religion and politics. It's really great, and I'm proud of it. And I think he would be too.

Follow Dan on Twitter, and during the New Hampshire primaries when he and the Boston Institute for Non-Profit Journalism (BINJ) are throwing a huge party.

Jim: The James Foley Story premieres on HBO February 6.

A mosquito feeding on a human. Photo via the Centers for Disease Control

Read: How the US Lost Afghanistan

On Monday, the World Health Organization (WHO) designated the Zika virus a "public health emergency of international concern." This is a major step: The three previous times WHO declared such an emergency were for the swine flu in 2009, the Ebola virus in 2014, and the reemergence of polio in Syria also in 2014.

The virus, which spreads primarily through mosquitos, was first discovered in 1947, and has been common in parts of Africa and Asia for decades. However, it recently spread to more than 20 countries in the Americas, which has caused politicians and experts to worry that the United States will also face an epidemic in the summer.

Typically, Zika sufferers have no symptoms or just have something resembling the flu. In countries where it is endemic, people generally get the virus at a young age, like chicken pox. But in places where it is rare, pregnant women are at risk of first-time exposure. After it spread to the Americas, doctors realized it's correlated with microcephaly, or babies born with small heads and potential brain damage. Causation hasn't been proven, but in one Brazilian state the number of infants with the condition went from an average of nine per year to more than 600 in 2015, according to the New York Times.

Margaret Chan, the director general of the WHO, said at a news conference in Geneva that studies on the connection between Zika and microcephaly will begin in the next couple of weeks. Reuters reported last week that a vaccine is in the works and might be ready by the end of 2016. Meanwhile, the WHO will try to coordinate funding from governments and organizations all around the world to combat Zika. The WHO was widely criticized for not acting quickly enough to combat the Ebola outbreak.

"Can you imagine if we do not do all this work now and wait until all these scientific evidence to come out, people will say why didn't you take action?" Chan said.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Illustrations by Alex Jenkins

Breathwork is a type of industrial-strength meditation, believed to replicate the effects of LSD. By hyperventilating for long periods of time you get to experience a non-ordinary state of consciousness: You trip, you rebirth, you visit past lives, see visions, hear voices. Or at least, that's what people say.

Shamans and swamis have used breathwork for thousands of years, but the modern practice was born out of LSD research in the 1960s. Counterculture heroes like Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson were both practitioners, but Stanislav Grof is considered to be its founder. Grof is known for early LSD studies, particularly in the field of "psychedelic therapy"—the idea that hallucinogenic drugs could aid the practice of psychotherapy. When the FBI began cracking down on drugs like LSD, he switched his attention to something you can't be imprisoned for: breathing.

Breathwork is essentially breathing really, really fast, to remove carbon dioxide from the body which leads to a rise in blood pH. The side effects range from dizziness, tingling, and carpopedal spasms, which is basically flapping your arms and legs. Most of these symptoms can be explained as byproducts of hyperventilation, but breathwork adds in a component of guided meditation, with prompts and after-care and some therapeutic suggestions. Plus, there's someone to catch you before you fall over.

On a recent trip to India, I saw a flyer for a breathwork class attached to the counter of a health food shop in Gokarna, a small holy town a couple of hour's flight south of Goa. The class was run by a guy called Franz Simon, who had been trained in Grof's methods. Simon is an older guy, probably in his early 60s, with the strongest of Swiss accents. Franz has written a number of New-Agey books, which have names like The End of Longing and Life Doesn't Care If You Pretend to be Dead, and he enjoys yodeling and playing the harmonium.

Franz runs his workshops out of a guesthouse, and on the day I turned up along with two German backpackers and three Israelis, he'd forgotten all about it. We stood knocking on his door, begging to get in.

"Sorry," he said, "just give me five."

In a few minutes, we were sitting around his room on cushions on the floor. The room was so hot the air felt toasted. We piled in and Franz tried to get the ceiling fan working but the motor was shot and all it seemed to do was push hot air around and around and around. Every one of us had long, looping sweat marks on the front, back, and under the armpits of our T-shirts.

"OK, lets begin," said Franz.

We sat in pairs, each cross-legged and facing a complete stranger. The session began with a series of questions—Who are you? What would you risk to be happy? What can you change to make you free?—and we were supposed to answer as honestly and naturally as possible during the allotted time, which felt incredibly long.

After each question, we swapped partners. The conversations were meant to butter up the mind, trigger its natural existential inquisitiveness, and create a platform conducive to the breathwork to come. Franz Simon darted around the room, eavesdropping, adjusting the ceiling fan, fetching bottled water.

We spent about an hour on the question-and-answer session, which proved insightful and pretty moving. We were complete strangers opening up to each other about our desires, our failings, and the things that stood in our way. Some of the answers I gave surprised me. The energy in the room—maybe the anticipation or maybe the heat—was making us somehow more open and all of us seemed united by our sweat, and the common suspicion that we were a little lost, and maybe a little unhappy too.

On Motherboard: These Short Online Psychedelic Courses Will Bend Your Mind

Then, Franz asked us to stand up. He explained that this was the potentially dangerous part—that our bodies might deform, or that we could fall over, although it had never happened to him before. We were about to begin pushing all the carbon dioxide out of our bodies, which can make the body tighten. Breathwork practitioners call it "the claw": Fingers and toes become paralyzed in claw-shaped positions, and then you fall over.

I was in a trance all right, but nothing so strong that opening my eyes wouldn't have snapped me out of it.

We began breathing through our noses, in time with Franz, bending at the knees with each exhale. Each exhale was longer than the inhale. We closed our eyes; we breathed faster and faster. It was really uncomfortable, and all I wanted to do was stop and take a regular-sized breath. The noise in the room was very loud; my legs got wobbly and my fingers felt numb. Franz came over to me, as if sensing this, and told me to get down on my knees. A few minutes later, he guided me flat on my back. Everything became really quiet and apart from Franz, I wasn't aware of anyone else in the room. I wasn't aware of being in the room anymore.

Then Franz began to sing a mantra—you are made of love—but sung in a yodel style.

On the backs of my eyelids, I started seeing fractal patterns and some animal shapes. There was a fox and what looked like an elephant and, because this was India, a cow.

Some time later, Franz told us to open our eyes. When I did, I could see that everyone else in the room was lying down too. Franz asked us how long we thought it had lasted. It seemed like half an hour, but Franz told us we'd been lying down for 90 minutes.

We took an ice cream break, and when we came back, we repeated the same breathing technique. This time, I breathed even quicker and the trance seemed stronger. At one point, I could even see a long black tunnel and as I got closer to it, I fell in. The effect was similar to a very small dose of LSD or some mild magic mushrooms, or even like going to bed after a heavy night smoking weed. I was in a trance all right, but nothing so strong that opening my eyes wouldn't have snapped me out of it. Still, despite the relative clement nature of the trance, it's power lay in the fact that I'd brought it on doing little more than breathing fast, then faster, then lying down and listening to yodeling.

Franz played one his last songs on his harmonium, then woke us up. He had a croaky, old man voice but in a trance, it sounded as soft as a eunuch's.

"So," he said, "that was it. How did it feel?"

An Israeli girl said she felt vibrations throughout her entire body. A German guy lost all feeling in his arms and thought he was flying. ("You almost were," Franz told him.) Someone else heard Franz's music in a different language. Franz suggested my vision of a tunnel was a vision of my birth.

Franz told us this was merely an introduction to breathwork; people who study over time go way deeper: visiting past lives, cleansing, releasing old traumas. "You can trance for a whole night sometimes."

I've tried breathwork on my own since then, but without Franz—without the harmonium, without the yodel-mantras, the room of strangers and the 95 percent humidity—I breathed and breathed until I was exhausted. And then I fell asleep.

Follow Conor Creighton on Twitter.

Last Sunday, HBO aired our new Special Report, Fighting ISIS, about the rise of the terrorist group, what is happening on the ground in Iraq today, and what the world can do to end the Islamic State's terrifying reign.

The host of our Special Report, Ben Anderson, experienced the battle against ISIS from the front lines. In this clip, Anderson looks back on his time embedded with various military factions, discuss the biggest mistakes the US has made since the Iraq war began, and talks about what it was like to get face-to-face with some captured ISIS fighters.

Watch his debrief of Fighting ISIS above and read an interview we did with Anderson about the experience. Also, be sure to tune in to the premiere of the fourth season of our Emmy-winning HBO show on Friday, February 5, at 11 PM.

Michalina Olszanska as Golden in 'The Lure.' All stills courtesy of the filmmaker

Park City, Utah, is a deeply strange place. Whether it's the altitude, the snowy, craggy landscape, or the movie deals being made in hotel lobbies, Sundance seems designed to throw you off. It is a beautiful, discombobulating nightmare, which is why it's the perfect place for director Agnieszka Smoczyńska's The Lure. The Polish director's debut feature-length film is like Cronenberg at Disneyland, a Grand Guignol musical fairy tale of two mermaid sisters who are quite literally fish out of water.

We first meet Golden and Silver as they are trying to lure a family of musicians to a watery death, only to strike a deal with them that leads to the mermaids joining their band. The Figs and Dates perform in a weird 80s-style dance club in Warsaw, where Golden and Silver shimmy on human legs and use their siren songs to bring in big business.

But who's luring whom? Beautiful, naïve Silver (Marta Mazurek) falls for the shaggy-haired bassist, who is happy to enjoy Silver's attention but tells her as long as she has a tail, she'll always be a fish to him. Golden, her raven-haired sister played by Michalina Olszanska, isn't interested in giving up her life aquatic for any dude.

The Lure's Polish premiere divided viewers whereas Smoczyńska found the Sundance audience much friendlier. (By the time the festival wrapped, Smoczyńska and her crew took home the Sundance award for the World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award for Unique Vision and Design, though the film still has not found US distribution.) "There were people who really , it's OK,'" she told me. "In Poland, they're like, 'Fuck! What is this shit?'"

The sisters perform with Krysia of the Figs and Dates in their new Warsaw disco digs

Granted, a fantastical horror movie with musical numbers can be a hard sell to some audiences, especially given some of the imagery Smoczyńska and painter Aleksandra Waliszewska have cooked up. One scene in particular shows Golden and Silver completely naked, with the band leader, played by Andrzej Konopka, showing the club owner the peculiarities of their human forms—the sisters turn around to show their egg-smooth behinds and sit with their legs spread to show a shocking lack of genitals.

"We wanted them to be like angels, like another species," Smoczyńska said, adding that in the film, "The mermaid is a metaphor for growing up as a girl, and what's very important for the young girl is losing your virginity. The pussy is a metaphor in a way—when you are without it, you are not as valuable." The musician's offhand dismissal of Silver's womanhood (and by extension, her worth) spurs her desire to lose her essential nature, to trade her tail and her voice for a vulva.

"When you're becoming mature, you can lose yourself, like our Silver, or you can build yourself. And because she wants so much to have genitals, the pussy, to be a woman, a mature woman because she wants to be with a man, you know—she thinks this is the most important value, and she lost herself because she loses her own nature."

Silver and the Figs and Dates' bassist sharing a moment in a bathtub

Golden and Silver are leagues away from Ariel and her chaste clamshell bra. When they're in their original forms, they're topless, with their long locks just barely brushing their nipples. Silver especially seems like a shy teenager who's aware of the power of her body but also not quite comfortable with it just yet, a feeling that left some audience members unsettled. The stars were both 24 at the time of filming, "But they looked like teenagers, and I really wanted the audience to feel uncomfortable," Smoczyńska said.

Additionally, she told me she wanted each sister to look like "a wild predator. A wild animal," with grotesque tails "full of mucous, full of slime—half woman and half monster." (A splash of water or dip in the tub releases Golden and Silver from their human forms.) Part of their initial display includes the revelation of a vaginal slit in each tail, which the band leader fingers. Complaints about the fishy smell permeating the club echo society's lesson that the female body is disgusting and unclean, but it's that sort of erotic disgust that The Lure leans in to.

Aside from Hans Christian Andersen, Tim Burton, Vera Chytilová's Daisies, Björk, Fever Ray, and Bob Fosse, Smoczyńska's influences include her own life. She used her mother's restaurant as inspiration for the Warsaw club in which the sisters perform. Under Communist rule, she said, the outside world was "very dark and sad and gloomy," but inside clubs like her mother's, there were dancers, musicians, performers, and "plenty of vodka." The end result was a set design that was "full of sensuality, full of sexual intention between people," but also evocative of Golden and Silver's watery world, complete with almost subsonic susurrations and chittering.

The Lure is also an awful lot of fun, from the sexy musical numbers to the sight of Silver trying out her new legs on a treadmill. Ultimately, The Lure is a love triangle: Silver's betrayal of her true nature is also a betrayal of her sister, Golden, and their dreams together.

For Silver, "her tail, and therefore her mermaid nature, could be her strength but she doesn't know how to access it," Smoczyńska said. "And that's her tragedy. Like every woman she needs to discover her true nature. It can be painful, but she cannot be ashamed of it. Even if it costs everything."

Follow Jenni on Twitter.

Photo by the author

Toronto's murder rate has been steadily declining for the past decade, but a burst of violence last month—including a number of high-profile homicides and bloody shootouts—is making headlines. As of today, 38 shootings that have killed eight people, compared to this date last year when 23 shooting incidents resulting in two deaths.

This year's shootings—particularly the shootout that happened in Chinatown this past weekend that left two dead and three wounded—have taken the city by surprise. The last few years, while not totally peaceful, have been on the quieter end of the spectrum. Homicide in Toronto in the last five years have continued to drop to pre-2000 levels, with 2015 sitting at only 55, while Canada's national homicide rate hit its lowest since 1966.

The Toronto Police, plagued by recent scandals like the James Forcillo conviction and the string of police charges over the last week, are on the back foot. The association that represents the police force is even blaming the recent bloodshed on the scaling back of controversial policing tactics such as carding.

Mike McCormack, president of the Toronto Police Association (TPA), told VICE that he has been hearing from officers on the frontline that the rollback strategies such as carding has made police ineffective at their job. He argues that this is one of the reasons that new strings of violence are happening.

"I'm concerned that, what I'm hearing anecdotally from our members, is that there is a lack of intelligence from proactive policing in solving these crimes and preventing them," he said.

"I'm not talking about biased and arbitrary and random policing that people have defined carding as. I'm talking about legitimate, lawful, intelligence-led information gathering, which is something we do in policing that we're just not doing anymore."

Similar to New York City's infamous, stop-and-frisk program (which has been rolled back under its current mayor), carding—sometimes referred to the police as street checks—is the process of the police stopping individuals to document their identification and activity. Many critics called it a practice that infringed upon Charter rights and promoted racial profiling, and there has been no public data that shows its effectiveness in preventing crime.

Since last fall, the use of carding in Toronto has been suspended. Debate about the practice forced the hand of the provincial government, who put an end to it until police could reevaluate and find new ways to gather information from the public. While McCormack argues the practice is a key issue for the police's ability to prevent crime, not everybody agrees.

"To suggest it has to do with a change in their rules—that implies that the police control homicide. I don't think anybody in the world actually believes that," Anthony Doob, a criminology expert and professor at the University of Toronto, told VICE.

"For the police to say it has something to do with changing the rules of carding, what about 2005? What about any other year that has been high? These incidents don't track any known policy, they're purely erratic."

Doob explains that there could be a multitude of socioeconomic factors that can contribute to homicides, but notes that it's very difficult to narrow down what those are or they play off each other. He says that it's disingenuous to suggest that more aggressive policing tactics can prevent violence.

"Homicides are serious things. Whatever it is that we can do, and I don't know the answer to that, we should do," Doob added. "Sixty people being killed is 60 people who are dead, whose lives affected a large number of people. That doesn't mean we should go crazy when those deaths begin to climb. Jumping for quick solutions that have no basis in data seems to me to be sensational."

When asked by VICE whether changes in carding policy has had an impact on violence in the city, Mark Pugash, Direct of Toronto Police Corporate Communications, said that it's short-sighted to associate police initiatives with having a direct link to stopping crime, and would not comment directly on the issue of carding.

Echoing Doob, Pugash added that there are many factors at work when it comes to curbing violence and declined to make any speculations about whether gang activity in the city has had an impact on the change.

"People very often want simple answers to complicated issues. I resist the temptation to identify a single factor. One of things we've discovered over time is that this is not an issue for police alone," he said, adding that a focus on helping young people who have "gone off the track" get back on track is the police's main priority in addressing crime.

Recently, there have been criticisms of the bloated police budget amid a dipping crime rate. Critics have argued that the police force has not only gotten too large, but that the increased spending is contributing to the issue of over policing. There are also concerns about militarization through the acquisition of assault weapons and the hiring of new officers. Peter Sloly, deputy chief of the Toronto Police, recently backed some of these criticisms and faced blowback from the police force because of it.

When asked about the usefulness of a $1 billion police budget, Pugash said that the media has mischaracterized the spending and that a large portion of the money is being spent on salary increases for officers—not being pumped into more direct police initiatives. He also deflected blame for the increases, noting that the budget is negotiated by the TPA and city hall.

As with most numbers, it is perhaps best not to make any concrete conclusions with a small piece of data, such as a month's worth of shootings.

Back in 1991, Toronto had its worst year for homicides ever when 89 people were killed, followed up only by the 84 murders in 2007. 1991 is often seen as anomaly in the statistical data—a year gone bad due to a heap of gang violence.

Following the infamous 2005 Boxing Day shooting in which a 15-year-old bystander was accidentally killed by a gang-related hit during the "year of the gun," a term coined by the media due to the large number of gun homicides that year. This dialogue would continue for years whenever bursts of violence, such as the Eaton Centre shooting in 2012 orthe murders at Muzik Nightclub last year, happened in the city.

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter.

Fake Oxy pills, pictured above, have led to hundreds of deaths in the past year in Alberta. Photo via Twitter

Health Canada has identified through scientific analysis that some pills being sold in Calgary as fentanyl—the typically blue-green, round fake OxyContin pills—actually contained a drug 100 times more potent than fentanyl. The discovery of this drug, W-18, which is a synthetic opioid with no known clinical use, could mean an even greater risk of overdose in Calgary for those taking pills marketed as fentanyl or fake OxyContin. This is the first time that W-18 has been confirmed to exist in Calgary.

W-18 is a novel psychoactive substance and synthetic opioid that comes in powder form, and likely derives from Chinese labs where little-known drugs and analogues of known drugs are mass-produced and sold online. It is 10,000 times more powerful than morphine and 100 times more powerful than fentanyl, greatly increasing the likelihood of overdose and death. When it comes to fentanyl, in 2015 alone, there were 213 overdose deaths in the province, according to Alberta Health, and about 21,000 of the round, blue-green pills were seized in Alberta.

The pills found to contain W-18 came from a search warrant in Calgary in August 2015 that yielded 110 tablets, which were then sent off for analysis to Health Canada. Results were returned to Calgary Police Service in mid-December.

"We believe W-18 would be coming from China," Martin Schiavetta, Staff Sergeant with the Calgary Police Service Drug Unit, told VICE. "Certainly organized crime is behind the importation of fentanyl, and I would make the connection that W-18 would be the same."

Schiavetta said that while they were only given analysis showing a positive test for W-18 for three of the pills from the August search warrant, it is quite possible that more of the pills they seized also contained it. He also mentioned that the test for determining the presence of W-18 is extremely difficult.

Additionally, since pills like those containing fentanyl or W-18, also known as "beans" or "shady 80s" amongst users and dealers, are made in homemade labs (not by pharmaceutical companies), the actual amounts of drugs within the tablets can vary.

You can think of this issue with pressing pills as you would making a batch of chocolate chip cookies: not the same amount of chocolate chips are going to make their way into each individual cookie. "The problem with how fentanyl pills are manufactured is that there's no consistency. So one tablet may have one milligram of fentanyl, and then the next tablet made in the same batch could have three ; I think it's about making money here and now, and they have no regard for the customers who they're selling the drugs to."

In 2014, 120 people died in Alberta due to fentanyl. In 2015, when that fatality number nearly doubled, Alberta Law Enforcement Response Team deemed fentanyl the "biggest drug trend" of the year.

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VICE finds out how everyday people and the Canadian government are getting ready for the next pandemic.

In part two of INFECTED, VICE meets with preppers Robert Studer of Survival Central, and Bruce Beach of Ark2, one of the largest manmade underground bunkers in the world, to see how they're getting ready for what could be the next super-flu pandemic. We also meet Dr. Camille Lemieux from Infection Prevention and Control Canada to find out how Canada is preparing in the event a deadly pandemic shows up on our doorsteps.

This video has been made possible by Ubisoft and Tom Clancy's The Division.

Jian Ghomeshi seen with his lawyer on Monday. The Canadian Press

Disgraced CBC host Jian Ghomeshi's sex assault trial is just beginning, but those hoping the high-profile case could encourage victims of these crimes to come forward are likely already discouraged.

Monday's proceedings took place at Old City Hall in Toronto, with dozens of journalists and a few members of the public filling up two courtrooms and also stationed outside. Ghomeshi, who has pleaded not guilty to four sexual assault charges and one count of overcome resistance by choking, showed up in a suit and reportedly said hi to his mother who was in attendance before taking a seat.

Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail. Photo via Flick user Evan Guest

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

US News

Cruz Wins, Clinton and Sanders in 'Virtual Tie' in Iowa
Ted Cruz won a surprise victory in the Iowa GOP caucuses, forcing Donald Trump into second place. Hillary Clinton very narrowly edged Bernie Sanders for the most Democratic delegates, but Sanders declared the result a "virtual tie," with both candidates around 50 percent.—NBC News

Uber Drivers Protest Fare Cuts
Hundreds of Uber drivers gathered outside New York City headquarters to protest against a 15 percent average fare cut and demand the company restores prices. "They call us partners," said one driver. "But they're treating us like slaves."—The New York Times

Feds Investigate San Fran Cops
The US Justice Department has launched an investigation into the San Francisco police department, eight weeks after the shooting of 26-year-old Mario Woods. The investigation will examine whether "racial and ethnic disparities exist with respect to enforcement actions."—CNN

Teens Arrested Over Homeless Camp Shootings
Three teenage boys have been arrested in connection with the deaths of two people at a homeless camp in Seattle known as "the jungle." The boys who were arrested are aged 13, 16, and 17. Police said the shooting was likely over "low-level drug dealing."—The Seattle Times

International News

Jordan at 'Boiling Point' Over Refugees
King Abdullah says Jordan is at "boiling point" because of the pressure hundreds of thousands of Syrians are putting on schools and hospitals. Jordan is hosting 635,000 Syrian refugees. "The dam is going to burst," said the King.—BBC News

Big Deal for the Great Bear Rainforest
Indigenous tribes and environmentalists are celebrating a deal to protect the temperate rainforest in western Canada. Logging will be banned in 85 percent of the Great Bear Rainforest in British Columbia and hunting grizzly bears will be banned within First Nations territories.—The Globe and Mail

UN Announces Start of Peace Talks
The United Nations has announced that Syrian peace talks in Geneva have formally begun. But opposition delegates said without a halt to government bombing, they will not continue to participate. "If there is no progress on the ground, we are leaving," said one official.—Reuters

Rio Olympics to Go Ahead Despite Zika Virus
The Rio Olympics will not be cancelled because of the Zika virus outbreak, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has insisted. But Brazillian President Dilma Rousseff's chief of staff, Jaques Wagner, said pregnant women should not travel to Brazil for the event.—Al Jazeera

Google HQ in Palo Alto, California.

Everything Else

Alphabet Seizes Top Spot From Apple
Google's parent company Alphabet has toppled Apple as the world's most valuable company after its latest earnings report. Alphabet is now worth around $568 billion, compared with Apple on $535 billion.—The Wall Street Journal

NAACP President Resigns Over Chest Comments
The president of the Phoenix-area NAACP chapter has resigned after comments he made about a female TV reporter. Don Harris reportedly said Monique Griego had "nice tits" while being interviewed.—ABC Arizona

Eagles Trained to Capture Drones
The Dutch National Police is training eagles to identify and capture rogue drones. The technique is being tested to deal with unregistered unmanned aerial vehicles.—Gizmodo

Superbowl Costs San Fran $4.8 million
Hosting the NFL's Super Bowl City theme park has meant displacement of protests and huge expense for San Francisco. The city will shell out an estimated $4.8 million in services.—VICE Sports

Done with reading today? Watch out new film 'Martin Shkreli on Drug Price Hikes and Playing the World's Villain'

Solitary confinement cells in Alcatraz. Photo via Getty Images

When President Obama announced the end of solitary confinement in federal prisons for juveniles and as a response to low-level infractions last week, he cited "devastating, lasting psychological consequences." Among them, research has shown that spending time in the hole makes people depressed, anxious, socially withdrawn, paranoid, and ultimately more likely to lash out. Being alone can drive someone crazy, but being alone inside a concrete box can ruin a person.

Prisons have been slowly reconsidering the use of solitary confinement, particularly within the past year: In September, California agreed to drastically scale back its use, including an end to indefinite isolation; three months later, New York promised to rehouse about 1,000 solitary confinement prisoners into less isolated units. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy told Congress last year the practice literally "drives men mad," and in July, President Obama ordered a Justice Department review of the practice, which he determined was "not smart."

But the president's recent actions only go so far as to address the 26 juveniles in federal prisons, leaving many more vulnerable. The practice is perhaps most damning to those who suffer from mental illness (or who are predisposed to mental illness), a population growing within prisons. Clinical studies have estimated that as many as 20 percent of inmates in correctional facilities are in need of psychiatric care, often due to a serious mental illness.

Without treatment, mental illness can manifest as bizarre behavior or rule breaking. As a result, by the US Bureau of Justice's own figures, 29 percent of prison inmates with symptoms of "psychological distress" have spent time in restrictive housing in the past year (in both state and federal prisons). Research has shown that isolation can exacerbate symptoms of mental illness, as well as induce anxiety, depression, distortions, paranoia, and even psychosis.

Read: Down in the Hole: Why Solitary Confinement in America Needs to Stop

Laura Rovner, an associate law professor at the University of Denver, told me about an inmate she represented, who had no history of violence but a habit of self-harming. Each time he self-harmed, she said, prison officials extended his stay in solitary—"not for any other reason, I think, than that he was annoying them."

Cases like this explain the high rate of suicides and self-harm within solitary confinement: A study of inmates in California between 2006 and 2010 found that while two percent of the prison population were held in solitary, they accounted for 42 percent of all prison suicides. A similar study conducted in New York state prisons found that 53 percent of incidents of self-harm and 45 percent of suicide attempts took place in solitary.

Watch: Inside America's For-Profit Bail System

The Bureau of Prisons' regulations prohibit isolating prisoners who "show evidence of significant mental disorder." But in 2012, the Bureau of Prisons was sued for sending mentally ill prisoners to the US Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colorado—the country's highest security prison, known as the ADX—where they were effectively isolated. ADX houses all its inmates in single-bed cells where they are kept for 23 hours a day in a condition which Robert Hood, the warden of the ADX from 2002 until 2005, once described as a "clean version of hell."

The lawsuit, filed on behalf of 11 prisoners held at the facility, claimed that by putting them in the ADX the Bureau of Prisons had violated its own rules. One of the prisoners in the lawsuit was Jack Powers, a convicted bank robber from New York, who was sent to the ADX in 2001 after breaking out of prison in Atlanta. In the next decade, as his mind started to unravel, Powers engaged in a litany of increasingly shocking acts of self-harm: He cut off both ear lobes, chewed off a finger, swallowed a toothbrush and then cut open his abdomen to retrieve it. He also slit his wrists, writing "American Gulag" in blood on his bed sheets.

The suit alleges that, despite this, prison doctors consistently denied he was mentally ill, refusing him psychotropic medication which may have alleviated his suffering but would also have been an admission that he didn't belong at the ADX.

"The mental anguish of 28 years of solitary confinement is worse than any physical pain I have ever suffered or imagined." — Tommy Silverstein

Rovner has represented a number of prisoners housed at the ADX, including Tommy Silverstein, a former Aryan Brotherhood member who killed a prison guard in 1983 at the Marion penitentiary in Illinois. The murder led to the jail's conversion to an all-lockdown facility, a move that arguably helped usher in the rise of supermax facilities like ADX.

Following the murder, the Bureau of Prisons went to extreme lengths to isolate Silverstein. He was made the subject of a "no human contact" order and housed in a purpose-built unit that became known as the "Silverstein suite" and was equipped with its own exercise yard to prevent contact with other prisoners. Aside from prison staff, he barely saw anyone for the next 15 years. In 2005 he was moved to the ADX, where his solitary confinement continued.

Read: How to Stay Sane in the Hole

In 2011, in a legal challenge to end his isolation, Rovner had Silverstein examined by Dr. Craig Haney, a psychology professor at the University of California and one of the country's leading experts on the psychological impact of solitary confinement. Haney's assessment noted "extreme anxiety, sleeplessness, despair and hopelessness, depression," among other mental ailments.

"His was the most isolated form of long-term confinement I have ever encountered," Haney said in his report. "As a result, Mr. Silverstein has not had a remotely normal social interaction or touched another human being with affection for more than a quarter century."

As part of the same case, Silverstein also wrote a lengthy declaration in which he describes both his remorse for his past crimes (he has been a practicing Buddhist for many years now) and the devastating effect of his isolation on his mental faculties. The declaration describes hallucinations of human shadows outside of his cell window, constant anxiety, a mind permanently fogged, a body shaking uncontrollably at the physical contact of having his hair cut.

"The mental anguish of 28 years of solitary confinement is worse than any physical pain I have ever suffered or imagined," he wrote. "The indefiniteness of my confinement makes my mental suffering never-ending."

Silverstein, who is 63, lost his case and remains in solitary to this day.

President Obama's statement last week acknowledged the substantial population of mentally ill prisoners who are sent to solitary confinement, and pledged to start "expanding treatment for the mentally ill and increasing the amount of time inmates in solitary can spend outside of their cells." But it remains to be seen whether his actions will end the practice altogether and prevent the exacerbation of mental health issues for those who so desperately need help.

Follow Paul Willis on Twitter.

Photos by Nick Gazin

Raymond Pettibon and Marcel Dzama made a zine of their collaborative drawings. They also put on an art show to help promote this zine, and it's up at David Zwirner's Chelsea gallery until February 12. The show and zine are called Forgetting the Hand. I assume that the title is about trying to transmit the images from your mind to the paper without thinking about the drawing appendage.

That makes sense.
And Spike Jonze. Me and him draw all the time.

Spike Jonze draws?
Yeah, he draws in a Gonzales kind of look. You should ask him about it.

Are there favorite pieces of yours in here?
My favorite piece is my son's favorite piece, the one with Superman in it and there's a drawing of Ray and me in it based on a photo you took of us.

The drawing based on my photograph

I'm so honored.
Thanks for taking it.

How old is your son?
Three and a half. I find myself drawing to entertain him a lot of times. There's one where he's in a sailor suit. I drew him in that one, and he was really excited. I encourage the superhero theme because he's really into those right now. He loves Superman because he's indestructible.

How long did it take to make the murals?
The murals didn't take very long. The smaller ones took longer. The freedom of the large pieces is an aspect and with this large pattern we used a projector. It took an hour while the small piece next to it took all day.

With this large mural of waves, who did what parts?
I did the Duchamp-style black lines and Ray turned it into waves. I drew the little surfer girl, and he drew the waves.

Raymond's concentric line wave patterns are so beautiful. Those are some of my favorite things he does.
In some of the drawings, we mimicked each other's style. Trying to draw in his style was fun.

How long have you been working on the pieces in the show?
Not too long. We originally did them for the zine. The larger ones we did in the last month. Some were just finished yesterday. All the larger ones we finished in one late night.

Do you wish you were able to keep any of the murals?
Definitely, especially the one of the bat.

Do you have a favorite piece in the show?
I haven't seen it yet. We were working on it the last couple days but I haven't made it around the room yet.

At this point Raymond's wife, artist Aida Ruilova, popped in and asked Raymond, "Will you sign my boobies?" After which Raymond attempted to move through the gallery with a swirling crowd of fans, assistants, and collectors shuffling around him.

The show is good, go see it. The zine is good, go buy it.

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Stepping into the Whitechapel Gallery in London's new exhibition, "Electronic Superhighway," you are immediately confronted by a huge naked butt. On the rare occasion I've covered art shows before, I've always felt like the biggest ass in the room, using words like "intertextual" and "assemblage" and hoping they make sense when used in conjunction with all the pointing I'm doing. Today, thanks to this massive canvas, I am not the biggest butt here. My nerves are settled. I am ready to art.

"Electronic Superhighway" is all about the internet and how computers have changed the way we interact with the world. Originally, I am told, technology was invented to help simulate reality. Now, we use it to judge ourselves. I've been online since dial-ups went barrang-barrang-weeeee, so I thought it made sense to head along and discover what exactly was to blame for my crippling self-awareness.

The butt's relevance isn't immediately clear—but I like it. It's got a text conversation spread down either cheek, which I suppose could be the artist's way of saying that, while we may all be full of shit, we'll eventually figure out some way to reach across the cracks to find our other half. Maybe? Regardless, it strikes me as the sort of piece the breadth of humanity could relate to.

The exhibition takes work created between 1966 and 2016, and is ordered in reverse chronology, so that visitors can plummet from the now back to the then. It's an overpowering experience, which is presumably very much the point.

When the curator—the affable and fascinating Omar Kholeif—arrives to begin our tour, one of the pieces begins to talk over him. People smile, and some even have the temerity to chuckle. I am stoic. I am checking the Australian Open scores on my phone. I am a living exhibition. I am Young Man Brought to Distraction. I'm not even that young. I'm just rude, really. A woman scowls at me and I whisper, gently into her ear, that Federer has just won the third set. She smiles—perhaps scared—and I fear she is a Djokovic fan. Tan skin, white hair pulled back tight against her scalp, lips showing evidence of sun damage, she looks like she's enjoyed a Wimbledon or two in her time. Perhaps even a French Open. But then we're being moved on and I am, again, alone. I consult my Twitter. "Massive Attack" is trending. I dimly wonder if we are in danger.

I spend a lot of my time on Twitter. I check it, roughly, 30 times an hour. Mostly, I read my own tweets. I then bump them into other people's feeds, despite being fundamentally aware that they've already read, processed, and dismissed them. It's a strange habit. I bump something from earlier. I shall not be ignored. I give it 30 seconds. I have been ignored.

I don't blame others for my lack of engagement, because I feel that everyone else is secretly doing the same. Twitter is a gamified social experiment where we all try to get this abstract thing called "numbers." I have never gotten numbers. I am entirely unnumbered. If I were a mathematical object, I would be zero. To give the internet public its due, I do tweet such banal, everyman shit. Here, by way of example, is of one of my earlier tweets. "Chelsea, Chelsea, Chelsea!"

Works from Amalia Ulman

Looking up from my phone, I notice that Paris Hilton is skiing in front of me. To my left, Amalia Ulman poses for an Instagram shot. A gentleman begins to sing karaoke in the adjoining room. The words wash over me. They are from a Dickens novel that everyone has read. His voice—gravely, nearing death—reminds me of one of my old school teachers. Above my head, seven CCTV cameras connected by DSL cables comprise a chandelier. Someone takes a photo of it.

At one point I consider taking my phone out of my pocket again. But I resist. I wonder if I should throw my phone in the trash and become a luddite and start a farm. It would be tough, I guess, adjusting to a new way of life. I know what you must be thinking: How can this man—who is so charming, so observant, and so engaged with the world around him—possibly not know how to cultivate a ripe harvest? I check my phone and search for the easiest crops to grow in Britain. Radishes. I don't like radishes very much, so I file this idea away in my "Last Resort" folder alongside "stand-up comedian" and "freelance journalist."

I have been moved upstairs. Before me is an entire wall of 52 monitors by Nam June Paik. It is entitled "Good Morning, Mr. Orwell." In 1984, Paik broadcast live material from artists across the planet to over 25 million people as an anti-Orwellian statement. I try to picture 25 million people all doing the same thing and struggle. Kevin Hart has 25 million followers. Kevin Hart is a stand-up comedian. I wonder if I've made the wrong career move.

I am sitting down at a TV station that is showing a classic movie transformed into ASCII. The green writing goes up and down the screen. I decide that it's Die Hard, because what else would it possibly be. One hundred and forty-nine other human beings in the exhibition quiver carnally all around me. I have hardly noticed them this whole time. We have moved from one end of the exhibition to the other, seamlessly. I find myself in front of piece after piece, without remembering precisely how I got there. Click-click-click. I go from a gigantic butt to Die Hard in a few blinks. I am more than familiar with the process, but usually it's the other way around. They have made us living browsers. As I think that, I realize that browser is already a word for someone who looks at things. I decide to leave.

It's a cold day. The street is full of people. Terrified, I go into a café. I open my laptop and ask for the WiFi password. The place doesn't have any WiFi. After a moment's thought, I go back to "Electronic Superhighway." A text alert tells me that Novak Djokovic has beaten Roger Federer in four sets. I look for the lady I spoke to at the beginning, but she is busy at a computer that simulates the impossibility of expressing yourself completely to someone else. I don't have the courage to tell her.

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Joseph Coward, right, as a child

The Newfrontiers is a socially-conservative Christian group created in the 1970s
that today has more than 1,000 churches across 70 countries. While its neo-charismatic style—exorcisms, preaching in tongues, etc.—give it an American edge, it's actually rooted in the working-class Pentecostal tradition of England and Wales.

Twenty-three-year-old singer Joseph Coward was brought up as part of the church, in Essex, when it was known as the New Frontiers International. While he feels the NFI might be a different organization today, his experience was one of homophobia, control tactics, and a system that bore "all the calling cards of a cult." After suffering a psychiatric breakdown five years ago, he cut himself away from the group.

My earliest memory is being told about the existence of hell, and that it was something that could only be escaped by being part of this "thing" and believing in Jesus. That was by my mom, who had converted to New Frontiers International at 17 and brought me and my sisters up as part of it.

The NFI interpreted the Bible as literally true, with a particular emphasis on the real presence of heaven and hell. The community was very tight-knit, and as I only really socialized with people from the church, the whole thing was just part of my reality. I certainly didn't pay lip service to it—to me, what they taught was as real as gravity. And anyway, when you're seeing people falling over on the floor during services or praying in tongues, it looks pretty fucking real.

There were all kinds of things like that going on. At one particular Bible camp when I was about 12, a girl was "possessed" and a well-known charismatic preacher was called in to exorcise her. She started roaring and convulsing as the "demon" was cast out.

We'd also pray in tongues—a language that is unique to you and your communication with God. Actually, it's just a noise you make that doesn't mean anything, but you're convinced it does because it feels like it's coming from "somewhere else."

In hindsight, I think it was a case of mass hysteria and mass hypnosis—everybody sort of buys into the same thing, so it just starts happening. During the worship sessions, for instance, the congregation would get whipped up into a frenzy with this fast-paced music, before everything slowed down, creating a sort of trance-like, euphoric state. Everyone's basically hypnotized.

If you don't know about those techniques, which I didn't at the time, you're incredibly suggestible and will do what's expected of you unconsciously—especially when you've got 1,000 other people doing the same thing. So that thing you see on TV where the pastor touches a congregation member and he or she falls to the floor? I've done that and it was real. I wasn't making it up.

I think the people leading the congregation and using these techniques aren't necessarily aware of what they're doing. What's probably happened is they've seen it done, and then do it themselves without really understanding it, calling it the Holy Spirit.

When I look back at it now, there was so much that was just bizarre.

When I was about ten or 11, I was at my friend's house and we saw smoke coming up from his patio. It was summer, so we thought they were having a BBQ, but it turned out they were burning Harry Potter books. I didn't even think much of it at the time.

Joseph now

We also used to go to NFI youth camps, where we were strongly encouraged to attend these seminars on how to live a Godly existence. There was a heavy emphasis on your sex life, and I remember having to sit through quite a long talk on why you shouldn't masturbate. It's funny now, but I took it seriously at the time. I thought, OK, this is real shit and we shouldn't be making fun of it.

There were really harmful aspects of it, and it had all the calling cards of a cult: the tight-knit community where everything's in-house, the psychological trappings, intended or otherwise, and the fact that people donated a lot of their personal assets to the group. People made a living off the church.

There was a small group that would make life decisions for people, and the whole setup was far more invasive than it first seemed. One of my friends in particular had a really hard time. When she was 16 she had a boyfriend, and that was just not OK. She felt very restricted and ended up developing an eating disorder. She wasn't allowed to seek treatment because it was firmly believed that this was something that could be solved by church and by prayer.

One thing I'll always remember is a guy who was gay, and who obviously felt conflicted about it because it was against the Scripture. He must have approached a pastor about it, because it was then decided that he should "out" himself in front of the congregation and renounce his homosexuality.

Some leaders were there for the power, but I think a lot of people involved were genuine and didn't necessarily realize that what they were doing was manipulative or unhealthy. If you have a core set of beliefs, why wouldn't you use these techniques to convince people they're true?

But when something's based on fairly shaky foundations, one crack appears and the whole thing falls apart—and in my late teens I started to have questions.

I'd been told a certain type of person wouldn't get into heaven, but when I started getting into the music scene I had a wider group of friends, and I could see they were good people. I also had questions about my budding sexuality.

I prayed a lot and wanted answers, and my aim, when I was around 18, was to find out as much as I could so I was able to defend my position intellectually. I didn't want to just believe something out of a sense of faith; I wanted to actually study it and figure it out and make sure that what I believed was legit. I'd hoped that this way, my faith would get even stronger. The opposite happened—the more I studied, the more I realized how much of what we were led to believe was based on logical fallacies and blind faith.

I stopped believing altogether and a huge part of my reality fell apart. Where there had been a lot of promise and hope there was just a sudden blankness. I had a breakdown, tried to kill myself, and was committed to a psychiatric institute.

There was no real support for me, and after I was let out of the hospital I went home (I already lived by myself at this point) and just got on with it. I've been "getting on with it" ever since, and haven't spoken to my mother in years.

I do run into people from NFI—it's interesting how quickly you're shut out once you leave. There's a lot of fear involved. Probably on some level people understand they've been sold a dud and really don't want to confront it. Their whole life is centered around this belief, and doubts are too much to consider when you're that far in.

I do carry a lot of resentment about it; it's hard not to. I just fervently wish it hadn't happened. Believe what you want to believe, but don't push it onto other people. I would consider that a form of abuse because we weren't given a choice, and it really fucked us up.

The church Joseph attended has since disbanded. VICE contacted Newfrontiers prior to the publication of this piece and it declined to comment.

Follow Joseph on Twitter.

Photo from an ecstasy legalization "loophole party" in Dublin that time Ireland accidentally made the drug legal. Photo by Sarah Elizabeth Meyler

One evening, a friend and I were drinking at a bar in Paris when this random guy came and sat at our table. He didn't say much and he frowned a lot. His name was Alexandre and he was from Russia. Alexandre had apparently come from Siberia to Paris by foot when he was ten or 11. We didn't tell him his story sounded fake because he was terrifying. His leg moved up and down frantically and he constantly scratched his head. Every time one of us would address him, he would stare into our eyes for about ten seconds before uttering even one word. Then, in the middle of this semblance of a conversation—just after I asked him whether he felt all right—Alexandre announced that he had taken a pill ten years ago and had never "come down."

According to the French Drugs and Addictions Observatory (OFDT), the use of pills has been regressing for about a decade. Nevertheless, 2013 saw a 163 percent increase of the number of pills seized in France, as well as a 70 percent raise in the total weight of ecstasy seized—from 279 kg in 2012 to 474 kg in 2013. The situation in the UK is similar.

I called Dr. Daniel Bailly—a psychiatrist and professor at the Saint-Marguerite teaching hospital in Marseille—to ask whether what my new friend claimed happened to him could actually be true.

VICE: What exactly happens in our brains when we take ecstasy?

Dr. Daniel Bailly: Ecstasy destroys the serotonergic neurons. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that plays a part in many functions like mood, impulsivity, sleep, and regulation. This drug also affects the dopaminergic pathways regulating motivation.

Ecstasy is a weird drug. It was used a lot in psychotherapy back in the days of Gordon Alles—the chemist and pharmacologist who invented amphetamines. This drug is supposed to improve our empathy. It's also a stimulant—it makes you feel euphoric. It gives us a sensation of well-being and the feeling that we are in communion or in harmony with our environment.

The other day I came across this guy who spoke incoherently and was generally acting strange. He said he had been high for ten years after taking one single ecstasy pill. But of course that is also an urban legend. In your opinion, is that even possible?

The problem here is causality. Is ecstasy alone capable of creating such troubles? The answer is very likely, no. But it could probably act as a precipitating factor. These kinds of effects depend a lot on the personality of the person or what he or she is going through before using ecstasy.

So it could happen to someone with a predisposition for mental instability?

Yes, that's it. At the end, the effects felt do not depend so much on the dose or the frequency of use, but you can become mentally unstable after one single dose of ecstasy. I've had patients who went completely insane after taking ecstasy only once.

But there are many unanswered questions concerning the nature of the factors acting on the effects. We think there could be some factors concerning genetic vulnerability and personality playing a part in the whole process.

Are we necessarily empathetic when ingesting a pill?

As with all drugs, it depends on the person taking it. 
Ecstasy could also have the opposite effect. It can make someone sad or depressed, but generally it's a drug sought for the fact that it stimulates feelings of euphoria and empathy. This is why it is often used by young people at parties.

I see. How do the long-term effects manifest?
Some users speak about long-term effects that take over months or even years to manifest. They can come with symptoms of depression, phenomena of depersonalization—or they can come in the shape of flashbacks or even hallucinations. That is not something happening only with ecstasy. We find it in different hallucinogens.

Do we know the factors predisposing someone to stay high?
No, because genetics are very complicated. The problem with every toxic substance is that you can only know your individual sensitivity by experimenting with the substance in question. The problem with ecstasy is that the experiment can become dramatic from the first use.

Realted: Watch 'Spice Boys,' our documentary about people addicted to synthetic cannabis.

Once someone goes insane, is there a way back?
No.

To come back to my encounter with that stranger, is it really possible that he's been high for ten years?
Completely. But in order to know, we should have met him before. I cannot be sure about what was up with this man, but from what you told me, he sounds psychotic.

Do we have to worry about people taking ecstasy?
I personally think this substance is like arsenic. It is a highly toxic substance that comes with unpredictable effects. It's similar to Russian roulette. Many will say, "I took some and nothing happened." Sure. But if something does happen and you go crazy, then there could be no way back.

I'm not worried at all about the increase in cannabis consumption, but I think consuming ecstasy is really dangerous because it's a poison: It's neurotoxic—it destroys neurons. So any problem that comes with it could be long-term. As we age, our stock of neurons decreases. If you start with a stock that is already amputated because of a neurotoxic substance, at 40 or 50, you might encounter dementia problems.

If I told you, "I took some and nothing happened." What would you say?
Maybe next time you'll be totally fried.

"Come to the kitchen, I'm making pancakes!" "Oh, you... you shouldn't have." Photo via Flickr user Paul Albertella

OK, so: February is a trick month, in that you think January is over—"January, January cold and gray / what basic food item can I not afford today"—and you go a bit mad on payday and you yell things like "SHORT MONTH" while throwing wads of $50 bills at your Uber driver, and then you realize: Hold on, February is actually low-key quite miserable.

Like, yes, the ground is dewy and the plants are slowly blooming into life, but also it's still the gray abyss of winter, still everything sucks, still sometimes the wind can hit you so hard you start involuntarily crying out of one eye. And then on top of that, all the shops have Valentine's teddy bears holding little squishy hearts piled up by the tills. How can we love when the world is clawing against us? How can we feel hope when our New Year's diets have already gone by the wayside, dumped in the lay-by of January like a truck driver's murder victim?

Anyway, here's all the stuff you're going to have to deal with this February!

Photo via Flickr user Tejvan Pettinger

IT IS SPRING AND EVERYONE IS HORNY IN A WAY THEY CAN'T EXPRESS

"Look at those firm, stiff daffodils," everyone says. "Heh: lambs, right? You know where lambs come out of? Sheep vaginas." They pause. "After a ram has sex with it. With the vagina." Everyone takes another chip. You are sitting outside in a pub garden, even though it's not quite warm enough to sit outside yet. Everyone is fidgeting and looking from side to side. The sap is rising. Everyone is, ever so subtly, pushing his or her crotch against his or her jeans. Thin sunbeams make everything look bright in that washed out way. Wispy white clouds smudge across a periwinkle sky. "I want to fuck," you croak, your voice dry with an unknowable arousal. "I have to fuck something."

On NOISEY: This Is What It's Like to See Tool Live Again After 21 Years in Prison

IT IS A LEAP DAY AND THAT IS INTERMINABLE

Remember last year when we had a "leap second"—a rare atomic clock thing that meant high-functioning terrestrial clocks were more in tune with distant astronomical time—and it was essentially a complete non-issue for normal God-fearing folks like you and me, because it happened at midnight, and it lasted for a second.

Still, did that stop Terry from accounting from stopping you in the kitchen that day and asking you, "What are you going to do with your extra second, then, eh?" and nudging you while you were trying to pour the milk? So you got milk on you? All for the driest banter this side of the Sahara? Milk all on your suede work shoes? Was it worth it? Terry? Was it? Terry? With your special padded chair that is supposed to be for your RSI, Terry? We know you don't have RSI, Terry. You just wanted a slightly larger, more ominous-looking medically-prescribed chair. Is this how empty a husk your life is, Terrence? That the only remaining power move you have to play is a desk chair and a special wadded pad to go along the edge of your keyboard to slightly lift your wrists. Is it. Terry.

Well, it's 2016 and there's an entire day of it. "What are you going to do with your extra day?" people ask. Well: It is a Monday, so probably just go to work as usual. Meal Deal lunch. Try to get the quick bus home. Something microwavable for dinner. Watch some prestige cable programming you're not sure if you "get." Laundry. Wash up. Wank myself to sleep. Try not to sob at the sheer dreadful forward march of life, life stomping and moving ever forward, each day one creak on the wheel closer to the abyss. Life, the huge and terrible machine. A monstrous, diesel-breathing beetle with metal pincers the size of skyscrapers, picking its way through the idyllic countryside, leaving a grievous black furrow where its ghastly abdomen kissed the mud. Something like that.

LieBot, what is the saddest thing? Photo via Flickr user Michael Coghlan

IT IS SOMEONE'S BIRTHDAY AND THAT IS INTERMINABLE

Ah, yes, the Leap Day birthdayers are here, and this is their year. "Ooh, look at me, I'm seven today!" they say. They have a "SEVEN TODAY!" badge and they are making a big fuss about their Thomas the Tank Engine cake in the office. Blowing out candles and everything. Little pointed birthday hats and genuine thumbs up. On the scale of "people who are inordinately proud about having the most minor and inconsequential of oddities about them," Leap Day birthday people are right up there with the left handers and people who can juggle. Oh, look, he's explaining how normally he celebrates on March 1 while playing with a yoyo. You're 28, mate. Grow up.

A MOMENT WHEN YOU GENUINELY DOUBT YOUR SPELLING ABILITY AND, IN TURN, SAY THE WORD "FEBRUARY" OUT LOUD

What is that "r" doing in there?

VALENTINE'S DAY LOOMS LIKE A HEART-SHAPED SPECTer OF DEATH

There are two kinds of people: those who are extremely cynical about Valentine's Day, and those who think Hallmark cards are actually good. Sadly, all good relationships are built on that sort of chalk-and-cheese natural conflict, and so it all comes to a head on Valentine's Day, where romance likers and non-romance likers are forced to have a $150 meal with each other in a low-lit restaurant, and you have to do flowers, and cards, and little chocolates wrapped in red foil, and you have to pretend that sappiness is OK.

I suppose in small, once-yearly doses romance is actually fine, and that treating the person who loves you and puts up with you for the other 364 days of a year is about the least you can do, and that there is nothing undermining about buying and carrying around a heart-shaped cushion that says "I WUB WOO." There is nothing worse, after all, than stoic, romance-less dickheads who say things like, "It's just a corporate holiday invented to sell them little boxes of chocolate." But does that make it any more bearable to walk into a supermarket that's decked out with shiny heart-shaped bunting? To watch people get massive, unwieldy bouquets of flowers delivered to them at work? No, it does not. It absolutely does not.

MAKING DESPERATE LAST MINUTE VALENTINE'S PLANS

Just a quick warning: If you haven't made Valentine's Day plans and you are planning something any fancier than Chipotle, be warned that that isn't going to happen for you, and that you have fucked it. Everything is booked and it has been booked forever. I don't know how it works in other places, but if you're in a city and you haven't figured Valentine's out yet, then I guess I will see you in the line at Chipotle, me in a suit, furious girlfriend, clenching a bottle of garlic peri-peri while madness erupts around us, romantic tables interrupted occasionally by massive groups of post-workout bros, guacamole drought on the horizon. That will be you and that will be me. And, honestly, we deserve it.

"The mrs found out all them dick pics I sent so I'm selling these now. What do you reckon, eight quid?" Photo via Flickr user Timothy Krause

PEOPLE GETTING ENGAGED AND GOING ON ABOUT IT ON FACEBOOK

I think you can get a pretty decent measure of whether people are good people or not based on the following metric: If they were to get proposed to, would they say the words "popped the question"? Like: "He finally popped the question," or: "I can't believe he popped the question!" or: "Feeling like a princess! Question = popped! xxxxx"?

If yes, this is not a good person. This is not a person you need in your life. This person is going to create a new "life event" on Facebook on February 14 at 9 PM sharp, and literally the next day you are going to get invited to a "Save the Date!" 100+ notification Facebook group. It is best to just quietly unfriend them now.

ALTERNATELY, THE FRENZIED HORNINESS OF KILL-OR-BE-KILLED FEBRUARY 13 TINDER

... or any dating and/or fucking service. OKCupid users, frothing at the mouth, furiously scrolling back through four years' worth of un-responded messages. Plenty of Fish users screaming "THERE ARE NO MORE REMAINING FISH" out of an open window in the direction of a road. Everyone on Happn doing laps of Leicester Square in the hope that, by the law of averages, somebody half-fuckable will pass them by. Tinder users swiping so hard they break their phone screens. That post-apocalyptic, pre-Valentine's blood-in-the-water frenzy. "Drink?" you ask a hundred people in a row. "Drink? Drink? Drink?" You arrange to meet 25 people the next day. They are all white-eyed and tight-knuckled.

Isn't it all meaningless, though? Isn't it all so trite? The hollow loneliness that can only be inspired by other people's joy. The Valentine's Panic. Should we really let the settled, coupled-up numb happiness of others impact upon our own? Should we really care? Yes. The only true chance of happiness we have in this world is clinging to the thin tree branch of someone else's love while our parachute fails and we plummet towards the abyss. The only lasting impression we ever make is on other people. Valentine's Day is a grim reminder of that. Everything is meaningless and love is the only chance at redemption we get. If you don't have any on February 14, hustle until you do. The doomsday clock is ticking and we haven't got long on this Earth. Cling to someone desperately before it's too late. Buy them flowers and tell them they mean something. Tick-tick. Tick-tick. Tick-tick.

Anyway: Happy February!

Follow Joel Golby on Twitter.

Fiona and Rhys in 'Tales from the Borderlands'

There's a reason why so many of us cheered at the end of Pacific Rim, when Raleigh Becket and Mako Mori didn't kiss, despite the obvious sexual tension that was prescribed between the two during their combat training scene (a.k.a. the sexiest non-sex scene in video game history). And it's because the bond between Raleigh and Mako made more sense—and stood to be stronger—with the two being friends, rather than lovers.

I celebrated again when playing Telltale Games' Tales from the Borderlands, when Rhys and Fiona—the two playable characters and protagonists of the game—didn't develop a romantic relationship. It's not that I don't want to see every female gaming character at some point reduced to merely a love interest—although, yes, there is also that. Tales showed the gaming medium that using friendship as a focus for conflict, drama, and happiness in a story is just as worthy, bold, and important as exploring any romance that may (stereotypically) blossom from the connection between characters.

What struck me the most about Tales—and believe me when I say there was a lot that struck me profoundly about the game—was the way it so heavily prioritized friendships and platonic love, and all that comes with it, as the driving force behind almost every major conflict resolution. The game deftly allows you to develop and explore important friendships with almost every character: between men, between women, between women and men, between humans and robots, between robots, between major characters and supporting characters, and between supporting characters.

Max and Kate in 'Life Is Strange'

The way in which the flashback-style story is framed—a masked character has kidnapped Fiona and Rhys, and is forcing them to tell their sides of the tale that's led them to this unlikely state—revolves entirely around trying to understand the very nature of friendships, and how trust and respect operate within them. This is all summed up when the masked character is about to reveal his or her identity, telling the pair, "I am your friend." While ostensibly a story about vault hunting on the surface of the savage Pandora, Tales is much more than such a simple sales pitch—it's a beautiful, charming, hilarious, and endearing game that has touched the hearts of even those who previously disliked the Borderlands series, mainly because it positions friendship as the very backbone of its narrative structure.

This focus on friendship is also part of what made Dontnod's (similarly episodic) Life Is Strange so powerful, and impossible to turn away from. Life Is Strange takes the various friendships surrounding a not-quite-ordinary adolescent girl, and has the confidence to turn the friction these connections produce into the lifeblood of a major video game. While Max's ability to rewind time is cool, it's at its most meaningful when she's either helping or hindering friends and schoolmates by messing with their timelines. Ultimately, her power means next to nothing without the heavy focus on her evolving friendships and rivalries. This is what makes every interaction with the supporting character Kate so poignant: Max is burdened with a whole new level of responsibility when it's evident that her power can be used to potentially save somebody's life—and it might not always be there right when you need it.

Jonas and Alex in 'Oxenfree'

In these games, friendships are king. It doesn't matter whether you build them or destroy them—they are the axis on which everything else in the game turns. And it's great that the precedent set by these 2015 releases is continuing into 2016 and beyond.

The recently released Oxenfree offers the same experience as Tales from the Borderlands: an exciting world teeming with possibility, stories, and the promise of something more just at the edge of the map. Developed and published by Night School, Oxenfree is a game about being teenagers on an empty island (Edward's Island, namely), trying to have fun and getting into more paranormal trouble than they expected. Edward's Island works like Pandora in Tales: It is its own world, and it feels like it continues to exist even when the game is turned off. (Unsurprisingly, one of the creators of Oxenfree was also a writer on the first episode of Tales from the Borderlands.) And just like Tales, what makes Oxenfree more than just an aesthetically attractive game with a high creep factor, is that friendships are positioned as the ultimate narrative driving force.

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Oxenfree is a charming game—well, as charming a game about terrifying ghosts and possessed teenagers can be—where the main challenge lies in how you develop, or fail to develop, friendships with the people around you. While there's a lot of exploring to do on the island, the crux of the gameplay is conversation based. Playing as a girl called Alex, your choices in various calm discussions, crucial debates, and heated arguments can influence how the other four kids (including your soon-to-be step-brother, Jonas) stuck on the island feel about you—and also how they feel about each other. This elevates the way the game talks about friendship; it realizes and respects the fact that two people talking about a third person, who's not present at the time, can lead to a different perception of said third party when next encountered. Peer pressure is a powerful force, and Oxenfree takes the responsibility of conversation between friends seriously in a way few, if any, other games do.

The way the conversations work in Oxenfree are with simple mechanic dialogue options, each assigned to a single button press. It feels right at home in the game's gorgeous and scary setting. While the plot unfurls naturally, somewhat inevitably towards shit being increasingly lost as the night passes, there's emotional weight to the game that's a direct product of how it presents its group of friends. There are tensions between them, and glimpses of potential; every friendship in the game is somehow tested across its course, and the player gets to see this without haunted cabin hook-ups getting in the way of, and ultimately derailing, meaningful character development.

Read on Broadly: Love Spells, Ranked

Trico and its human companion, in 'The Last Guardian'

Similarly, this is a theme and focus that I am looking forward to seeing in Fumito Ueda's next game, the long awaited The Last Guardian. The Last Guardian explores the relationship between its boy protagonist and Trico, a griffin-like creature that can assist its human companion in many ways, but must also be cared for. From what we've seen of it so far, The Last Guardian looks like it's going to be all about friendship, and how the best of these relationships can weather any trouble—a theme not unfamiliar to Ueda, the mastermind behind Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. Ueda admits to designing Trico to feel and act like a pet, even up to the petulance that pets can have when learning new tricks. What I'm really excited to see in The Last Guardian is the way the game will (hopefully) build the cooperative element of this relationship, how the two characters develop their individual strengths while also becoming stronger through their shared exploits and intimacy. Much like the exchanges we witness between Loader Bot and Rhys in Tales, the friendships we build with non-human counterparts are sometimes just as important to our growth, understanding, and self-acceptance as those we have with our own species.

These important games don't simply show us that friendship is a fine narrative device to employ, above the clichéd route of connecting male character with female character and dimming the lights, but also that friendships between a diverse selection of characters, between very different friends, can relate the stories games tell to entirely new audiences, and progress the medium for the better. We see friendships between women of color, between people of different socioeconomic backgrounds and life circumstances, as well as friendships between humans and non-humans. All are valid. They're all different, but they're all real. And I for one can't wait to see more examples of gaming leads remaining "just good friends" in the future.

Follow Kaitlin on Twitter.

By the end of a long night of caucusing and vote counting, it seemed like the Democratic race in Iowa was a coin toss—literally. With more than 90 percent of precincts reporting, and Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders still locked in a dead heat, reports began circulating around 11 PM here that at least six tied precincts had picked a winner based on the flip of coin. Bizarrely, Clinton had won all six.

As it turns out, the coin flips probably didn't have any affect on the final vote tallies. But it was nevertheless a sign of just how close the Democratic race had become in Iowa. On Tuesday morning, the Associated Press officially declared Clinton the winner, barely edging out Sanders by about four state delegate equivalents, according to the latest count. (If this result holds, Clinton will have earned 22 of Iowa's delegates to the Democratic National Convention; Sanders will wind up with 21.)

Sanders has indicated he won't contest the results, but suggested Tuesday that his campaign might ask the Iowa Democratic Party to release the raw vote totals, something the state party has never done. (Ostensibly to show that Sanders could have won the popular vote, even if he's behind in delegates.) The Clinton campaign, meanwhile, claimed victory early Tuesday morning, arguing in a statement that "statistically, there is no outstanding information that could change the results and no way that Senator Sanders can overcome Secretary Clinton's advantage."

Still, it's hard to see Monday's results as anything other than a victory for Sanders, one that was pretty unimaginable when the self-described Democratic socialist announced his campaign in a Washington press conference last spring. As recently as December, Sanders was trailing Clinton by double digits in most Iowa polls. Even as his numbers rose in the weeks leading up to the caucus, conventional wisdom held that any enthusiasm his campaign was generating among the young and liberal wouldn't be enough to beat Clinton's superior field organization.

Sanders has made a habit of defying conventional wisdom, and reveling in it. In front of a crowd of delirious supporters Monday night, he seemed determined not to let his opponent, or the media, spin away his campaign's accomplishment. "Nine months ago, we came to this beautiful state. We had no political organization; we had no money; no name recognition. And we were taking on the most powerful political organization in the United States of America," Sanders began, barking over the noise of the ballroom at the airport Holiday Inn. "And tonight while the results are still not known, it looks like we are in a virtual tie." The crowd erupted, and kept going for almost a full minute before Sanders had to wave the group down.

The room was feverish, pulsating with the Bern. More than an hour before Sanders took the stage, the party was already packed, the risers bouncing in unison to a Motown medley. Dudes with man-buns clustered in groups of twos and threes near the stage, hopping around invisible hackey-sacks and spontaneously breaking into high fives. A troupe of what I assume were children—or potentially very tiny adults—in matching fluorescent orange fleeces milled around in a pack, occasionally jumping up and down together at random intervals.

"He's fighting—fighting for us," said Mark Harrick, a 23-year-old volunteer who'd flown in from Panama to campaign for Sanders. Joining hands with another volunteer to dance around me in a ring as I asked questions, Harrick explained: "We're a big arrow. Bernie is just the point of the arrow. A huge fat arrow."

Just outside, volunteers milled around, drinking beers and discussing where the revolution would go from here. "I've been talking about Bernie since June, when no one knew who he was," said Nathan Emerson, a 29-year-old volunteer from Des Moines, told me. "'We were going into basements, meeting with two or three people, trying to get them to support an independent running on the Democratic ticket." Now, he added, sipping from a bottle of rum, "the media is finally going to be forced to pay attention."

Across town, at her own caucus night party, Clinton was, somewhat mystifyingly, upbeat about her campaign's performance. Saying that she was "breathing a big sigh of relief," at the results, Clinton added that she looked forward to having a "real contest of ideas" with Sanders.

The Clinton camp enthusiastically echoed these ideas throughout the night, claiming that the campaign had always assumed the Iowa caucus would be a close race, and suggesting that perhaps Democrats were playing into the GOP's strategy by supporting Sanders, a candidate who, unlike Clinton, has never been seriously attacked or vetted by the opposition.

"The polls right now are based on the GOP fully attacking Hillary non-stop for years, and they haven't attacked Bernie at all—they've spent zero dollars attacking him. They don't mention him on Fox, they don't mention him in the debates, they don't mention him in any of the conservative news media," said Wesley Earley, a Los Angeles real estate agent and Clinton supporter."That's the scare with the DNC."

"Unfortunately," he added, "you can't tell any of that to a Bernie supporter."

The broader tendency among Clinton supporters, though, was simply to dismiss Sanders's success, chalking his Iowa numbers up to youthful exuberance that they assume will fade as Democrats start looking for a serious presidential contender.

"Bill Bradley had this ," said Minnesota Democratic Party leader Corey Day, who attended Clinton's Monday night party as a special guest. "Ralph Nader had it. Howard Dean had it. Do you know what they all had in common? None of them won the nomination. So I'm not losing sleep over it per se—we've seen this before. The reality is that Hillary is the best candidate for the job. She's the most qualified candidate for the job, and she's shown it time and time again."

This is the argument Clinton supporters have been making ever since she entered the race: The former first lady, New York senator, and secretary of state has the strongest résumé in the Democratic field, and a history of shrugging off attacks made by the right-wing media. But even after she put enormous resources into Iowa, she couldn't manage a convincing win over Sanders, who represents the kind of grassroots progressivism that she herself has never been inclined, or able, to inspire.

In that sense, Monday's vote was a referendum on the way that politics is conducted in this country, by Clinton and other politicians like her.

"I have a lot of respect for Hillary, but for me, Bernie Sanders is walking the walk," said Erika McCroskey, a 37-year-old Sanders supporter who attended Monday night's victory party. "Clinton takes it everywhere she can get it, between Super PACs and speaking fees."

"For me, Bernie represents democracy, how it's supposed to be," she added. "I believe him."

Grace Wyler is on Twitter. Photographer Ryan Donnell is on Twitter, too, and also on Instagram.