The Rungrado May Day Stadium in Pyongyang, North Korea. Image via.

As Fairfax revealed over the weekend, Australian surf label Rip Curl has been busted manufacturing jackets in North Korea. Items from the label's 2015 mountainwear range were inlaid with false "Made in China" labels and shipped to a clothing store.

The issue, of course, is that North Korea is far from a workers' paradise. Factory employees face long hours at minimal or no pay. If they don't obey orders or refuse to work, they can be sent to prison camps. Then on the other end of the supply chain, a women's Rip Curl ski jacket retails at around $400.

For their part Rip Curl responded with an apology on Facebook, using the term "screw up" twice.

To find out how this kind of thing happened, and how common it is, we spoke to Phil Robertson, the deputy director of the Asian division of Human Rights Watch. He oversees the organisation's work in North Korea.

VICE: Hi Phil, how is it possible to "accidentally" outsource labour?
Phil Robertson: It's possible because companies like Rip Curl don't find their own manufacturers. They simply send garment specifications and price demands to a sourcing agent, who knows hundreds of factories all over Asia. Their business is based on delivering orders to factories for quick and cheap production, and ensuring the final product meets the brand's requirements.

So Rip Curl's agent would have outsourced stuff to North Korea?
Well in this case an agent sent Rip Curl's order to a factory in China, and that factory subcontracted some of the order to the factory in North Korea. Unless Rip Curl says something, the sourcing agent doesn't really have an interest in labor rights or conditions under which a garment is made, so it's entirely possible they didn't check. If the garments were produced with a fraudulent "Made in China" label, how would they know?

Given these factors, is Rip Curl to blame?
International rights standards reflected in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights require that companies "avoid causing or contributing to adverse human rights impacts through their own activities." What this means is that Rip Curl is on the hook for whatever rights abuses occur in their supply chain, whether they directly caused them or not.

Quite clearly, Rip Curl did not have the systems in place to prevent the outsourcing of their products to one of the most rights repressing countries in the world, and that's negligence of a significant magnitude. They didn't just "screw up" as they wrote in their apology on Facebook, Rip Curl fundamentally failed in their supply chain management.

Watch our documentary classic, The VICE Guide to North Korea:

What kinds of conditions do North Korean clothing factory workers face?
North Korea's workers are not free to choose their employment, and failure to report to work can result in arrest, incarceration, and can end in being sent to a forced labour camp. Workers would not be permitted to defy management orders to work as long or as hard as needed to complete a particular order. And despite North Korea technically being a communist state, workers are not permitted to form their own unions, and have no right to express their views or collectively bargain for better wages or conditions.

How do these conditions compare to those in countries such as Bangladesh, China, or India?
In those countries, workers can leave their employer if they wish and can seek another job. In India and Bangladesh, they can establish or join a union of their own choosing. And they are not facing complete deprivation of their rights to express their views, associate with other workers, or peacefully assembly in public to demand their rights.

Ideally, how can clothing companies avoid "screw ups" like this again?
Companies need to adopt codes of conduct that comply with international human rights standards and key International Labour Organization conventions, and accept responsibility for what happens in their supply chains. They can also hire their own auditors and inspectors (and not rely on third-party agents) to ensure their workers' rights are respected.

How practical is it for companies to make their supply chains completely transparent?
A number of companies, such as H&M, have made their entire supply chain public and companies like Rip Curl should do the same. Only when the consumers are able to look over a company's shoulder and see where products are made will it be possible to really talk about truly responsible sourcing.

You seem pretty riled about it this. What, to you, is the most damning aspect of this?
This "catch me if you can" attitude of Rip Curl is particularly damning. If they were serious about accountability then they should have made it public when they first found out, rather than trying to keep it quiet until Fairfax Media broke the story. The kind of apology that Rip Curl put up on their website is run of the mill, and inspires no confidence that they have learned any sort of lesson, much less committed themselves to more rights responsible production of their products in the future.

Follow Kat on Twitter.

Read: Three People Gathered in the Rain to Protest Beyoncé

During a sermon in Detroit on Sunday, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan pledged to protect Beyoncé if the country's police won't do it, TMZ reports.

Some context is needed because that sentence is pretty nuts: Just before the Super Bowl, Beyoncé released her racially charged "Formation" video and then showed up for the halftime show with a squadron of dancers dressed in Black Panther–inspired getups. Though the single and the performance were about black pride, not attacking the police (and though they were far less antagonistic than, say, "Fuck Tha Police" or a dozen Public Enemy songs), a lot of law-and-order types took exception to all this. A Miami police union even called for a boycott of the singer.

In a sermon, Farrakhan lashed out at the police, saying that Beyoncé "started talking all that black stuff... and white folks were like, 'We don't know how to deal with that.'"

"Look at how you're treating Beyoncé now," Farrakhan continued, addressing former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. "You're going to picket. You're not going to offer her police protection. But the FOI will."

Bey has yet to publicly take Louis Farrakhan up on his offer.

Thumbnail image via Flickr user Nat Ch Villa

Arthur and France Janov

A woman shouts "Go away, leave me alone!" as she punches a boxing bag. A couple yell at each other. A man rocks back and forth, holding a teddy bear, sobbing. Another man screams and weeps in a therapist's arms.

This is Primal Therapy, and it's quite something to behold. Founder Dr Arthur Janov once described his psychotherapy method as "the most important discovery of the 20th century", and it's controversial to this day for its methods and the behaviour of Janov and his supporters.

Primal Therapy largely rejects the uncertainty of conventional psychotherapy. Say goodbye to years on a shrink's sofa, endlessly self-examining or CBT's charts and homework. With Arthur Janov's tried and tested method, so its adherents say, you'll be free of your neuroses in no time.

At the Primal Centre in Santa Monica, Art – as he's known by friends and family – runs a foundation with his second wife and one-time patient, France, who does most of the talking when I call the centre (Art is now 92 and suffers from a throat condition that makes it hard for him to speak). She explains that clients come from all kinds of backgrounds.

"It's people, quite often, who've done other therapies, and they didn't get anywhere, or they could feel there was more that they had to access," she says. "A lot of people who've done a lot of drugs, or drink too much, or have a sexual life that is overly active or not active enough. All the shit that neurosis makes, basically, it all comes from the pain that had to be repressed, and it all comes from the unfulfilled need to be loved, because being loved means having your needs fulfilled. It's pretty simple."

"We are all creatures of need," writes Janov, and when those needs are not met as children, we create neuroses, obsessions, anxieties and depression.

Freudians traditionally prescribe intensive sessions of therapy – sessions that can go on for years, even decades. Janov has a different answer: the only way to rid yourself of depression and anxiety, he argues, is to return to the state we were in when we first felt rejection: screaming, shouting, rolling around on the floor. Whatever it takes, get it all out.

Janov's peers have never been entirely convinced that his method works. A 1996 poll of practising psychologists asked therapists what they felt were the most effective treatments available and found that Primal was the approach "most in question as to soundness".

"Primal Therapy has been pretty much debunked by all of the legitimate psychological organisations," says Janja Lalich, author of Crazy Therapies. "Very few legitimate therapists still use the treatment at this point."

Lalich argues that Primal Therapy exhibits many of the characteristics of a cult, comparing its emphasis on controlled catharsis to what she describes as the "high arousal" techniques used by sects to brainwash and subdue believers.

"These kinds of techniques essentially make the person more vulnerable," she says. "So whatever the situation is, trying to convince someone that they're getting better, or they're crazy... no matter what your problem is, they've got the same answer."

In response, Janov says, "We have 50 years of published material to the contrary. We have several scientific articles in the journal Activitas Nervosa Superior, plus other journals. We do serious science and leave the nonsense to others."

Art Janov at the original Primal Institute in West Hollywood in the 1970s

Primal may well be included in a number of a legitimate journals, and there's no doubt it has worked for patients in the past. However, it's also hard to deny that the treatment has a tendency to sell itself as the cure for every neurosis, and that its therapists often overstate its effects.

"In psychoanalysis you have to be there for 30, 40 years, or until you die or whatever," says France Janov over the phone. "But in Primal, once we have restored the capacity of feeling for the patient – once they have what we call 'access' – our patients don't need us."

Janov's message has always had something of a messianic tone to it, straying off the path of what's socially acceptable in psychiatric circles. Janov declared in a 1971 interview, for instance, that he could fix everything from alcoholism and menstrual cramps, to "homosexuality".

It's position he does not refute when I ask him about it in an email, claiming that "we have done it" in "restricted circumstances", before writing, oddly, that "I assume you are gay but do not pay attention to the hyperbole".

Primal Therapy originated out of a conversation Janov had with a patient in 1967 in a group therapy session about a strange performance the man had seen. The performer spent much of the show shouting "mama!" at the audience and encouraging them to join in, and before long the crowd was screaming and crying.

"I encouraged this young man to do the same," Janov writes. "He refused but I insisted. Finally he began to scream 'mama!', fell off the chair and was writhing in pain on the floor. It went on for a half hour, something I had never seen before. When he came out of it he touched the carpet and said, 'I can feel!' He felt different."

The front covers of two of Janov's books on Primal Therapy

Janov's 1970 book The Primal Scream was a cultural phenomenon, and soon the treatment was all the rage: John Lennon tried it, channeling the suffering of his childhood into Plastic Ono Band; the future voice of Darth Vader, James Earl Jones, said it helped cure him of smoking and haemorrhoids; and pianist Roger Williams described Janov as one of history's greatest men.

Einar Jenssen, a London-based psychotherapist, worked and trained with Janov at his Paris institute in the 1980s, before becoming disenchanted with what he portrays as a cult-like organisation driven by financial, not medical, objectives. By the time Einar Jenssen joined the Primal movement the optimism of the late 60s and 70s had been replaced by realism, and Janov was one of many psychiatrists pushing the limits of the scientific method.

Jenssen says that money was "always" a prime motivation for Janov, often leading to patients being taken on, he says, who were in no condition to go through such an intense process. He was shocked, for instance, to be given a 19-year-old with paranoid schizophrenia to treat.

"There was no way she could function in Paris on her own," he says. "If it had been an inpatient clinic she might have been able to function in some way, but she couldn't and she just fell apart. I went to Janov and said, 'This is just a mistake from the intake interview and you have to give her the money back,' and he refused."

(In response to the accusation that money is a prime motivation, Art Janov says in an email, "We take no salaries and no profits and have not in years. We have paid several hundred thousand dollars for research to maintain our scientific integrity. We fund therapy for those who cannot afford it." Janov also says they have no record of the paranoid schizophrenic patient Jenssen talks about.)

Jenssen now believes that instead of helping patients recover from traumatising experiences, Primal can in many ways exacerbate mental health problems. The treatment, he argues, has no way of treating "dissociation" – the out of body experiences suffered by those with severe trauma. If anything, he argues, Primal "puts people back into these terrible feelings".

READ ON BROADLY: How Shock Therapy Can Save Depressed Women's Lives

It's hard to find anyone these days who'll treat you with Primal Therapy, and the treatment has largely fallen out of vogue due to its reputation as a pseudoscience.

But there are some practitioners out there. Franklin Wenham, based on the outskirts of Brighton, still offers the treatment to those who qualify. He received treatment at the Primal Institute in LA in 1977 and it changed his life dramatically.

"I started talking about painful events in my childhood and I started crying about them, essentially," he says. "That was the process... about getting in touch with your feelings. It's a very down to earth, practical therapy when it's done right, within safe boundaries."

Wenham now offers Primal as part of a range of treatments. But it's a strict process: patients who want to undertake it have to undergo significant assessment to guarantee they are mentally fit to deal with the intensity of the treatment. Wenham insists that Primal is only appropriate for those who have "enough feet in reality" – those who would instead be spending years on a psychoanalyst's couch, not those who need urgent psychological help.

"It works very well with 'functioning neurotics' – that's another Janov phrase, I think," he says. "People who are able to cope with what life throws at them, but are pretty unhappy and keep making the same old mistakes... and basically have a life script that is self-defeating. Those kinds of people often do very well in Primal Therapy."

This is the thing to understand about Primal Therapy. If you're plagued by depression and anxiety, a general displeasure with life, the treatment could possibly help you: talking about your feelings and expressing emotions openly and honestly in a safe space is always a liberating experience. However, there is a single-mindedness to how the Janovs speak about their theory, brushing off any criticism.

Despite his insistence that he would not treat a patient with, say, paranoid schizophrenia (as Jenssen alleges Janov has attempted), Wenham is reluctant to criticise Primal's great guru, the man whose theories he credits with pulling him from the brink of a nervous breakdown.

"It's not the done thing to criticise another practitioner, you know," he says. "Because nobody's practice is perfect, and we all make mistakes to some degree."

Janov at Primal Scream: The Musical

As for Janov, he's still more convinced than ever in the truth of his theory, constantly making references to scientific theories that he believes vindicate his method. On the verge of releasing a new paper, Art now argues that epigenetics – the study of the impact that external and environmental factors can have on our genes – could prove Primal Therapy right.

"We're developing all sorts of neurological proofs, or confirmations of what we're doing," he says. "I think there are sure signs of something."

Regardless of whether or not the wider scientific community accepts Janov's hypothesis, it's hard to imagine rejection putting him off: after almost 50 years and countless patients, there's no turning back now. We live in times where old taboos about mental health and pursuing therapy are being lifted. So you can't help but think: could there be a place, albeit a narrow one, for Primal in this brave new world of socially-acceptable self-care?

Janov seems to think so, but I find it hard to share his optimism.

(Thumbnail screen shot via)

@OliverHotham

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NASA satellite view of Greater Metropolitan Sydney. Image via.

Save for a few photo ops at a suburban supermarket, Australian politics mostly plays out in the halls of Canberra. It's where backroom deals are made, prime ministers are axed, and—at the moment—rumours are swirling about the possibility of an early election. Soon Malcolm, Bill, Richard, Clive and all those other MPs may have to set off from Canberra and sell their parties' policies to some real Australians.

VICE decided to find these people and ask them about the issues that will influence their vote, or whether they care about the election at all. We headed to two very different electorates in Sydney: Wentworth, which is the very wealthiest and home to our Prime Minister, and the young, diverse Blaxland, which a lower income electorate to the city's west.

Two big election issues emerged: asylum seeker policy, and marriage equality. There was a range of views about how each should be handled but there was another point everyone agreed on—people felt politicians don't care as much about poor electorates as they do wealthy ones.

Blaxland is an electorate in Western Sydney, home to suburbs such as Bankstown, Cabramatta, and Villawood. It's a diverse community, with 74 percent of people reporting that one or both of their parents were born overseas.The seat has been held by Labor since 1949. It's current MP is Jason Clare, shadow minister for communications.

Sam, 34

Do you pay much attention to politics?
Yeah, as I get older I follow it more. I normally vote for the Greens but this time around I want to make sure they support reforming our drug laws.

What do you think about the decision to replace Tony Abbott with Malcolm Turnbull?
Well in the beginning I thought "Great!", I just wanted Abbott out. But I didn't realise we were getting the exact same thing. The policies are exactly the same.

What do you think about Bill Shorten?
I don't know how to feel about Bill Shorten. I don't know anything about him.

Are there any political issues you feel strongly about?
I don't think politicians are as moral or principled as they used to be. I think even if we put someone moral in power, they'd get corrupted by the process.

The way we treat refugees is horrendous. We absolutely need to be more compassionate to refugees. I speak to people about it and get a mixed response, but I really think we need to do something about the situation.

Do you think we should legalise same-sex marriage?
Yes. My sister's gay, and I think she should be free to do whatever she likes, as long as it doesn't harm anyone.

Do you think people around here care about different issues to people in Western Sydney?
I don't think we should generalise. It's more about people's experiences and their personality than their upbringing. It's not about being wealthy. I think we'd be much the same.

Image via Verona

Have Democrats and Republicans ever seemed as far apart as they do now? With the possibility of a socialist Jew from Brooklyn facing off against Donald Trump in a general election, there is an end of days quality to the latest election, and one that seems to have the country more polarized than ever.

Enter Verona, an app seeking to bridge the gap between Fox News and MSNBC, Nascar lovers and pot smoking yogis. Named for the city where the fighting Montagues and Capulets caused the deaths of Romeo and Juliet, Verona is a Tinder-esque app originally conceived of to pair Palestinians with Israelis, which it has been doing for a year now, to great success. Recently, creator Matthew Nolan decided to expand the app to connect other populations at war, and Verona is now available to Republicans or Democrats seeking friendships across the aisle, as well Trump supporters and Latinos who might want to chat.

Nolan is banking on the idea that exposure breeds good vibes, and that hanging out with a person who comes from the opposite side of a political divide can create enough connective tissue to bridge that divide. VICE caught up with Nolan to chat about Verona's latest foray into domestic politics.

VICE: Last time we spoke, you had just launched an app matching Israelis and Palestinians. How's that working out for you?
Matthew Nolan: It was an unexpected success. Since we last talked, it just kept growing. We're at tens of thousands of users.

It got me thinking—the world is so polarized right now by the media and politicians. I think we're at a time when people need to come together, need to collaborate, instead of taking sides. So that's the motivation behind opening these new groups.

When Trump made his election speech and said those terrible things about the Mexican community, I thought, well, I might be able to do something to help bring people together, when there are loud people in the media trying to separate us.

By the media you mean...
I mean media figureheads like Trump, like Bill O'Reilly—these very polarizing people. When people are experiencing economic trouble, to point out a group, to vilify them and say, "That's the reason why everything is going wrong"—whether that's the right vilifying the left or the left vilifying the right politically, or whether it's Trump vilifying the Latino community—Adolf Hitler did the same thing to the Jews; that's how he rose to power.

Given the state of communication technology and given the challenges we all have to face right now, it's more important for people to come together and empathize with one another than at any other time. That's why I'm building this thing.

So how does it work?
When you sign on, you have three different options. You can join Israeli/Palestinian, and pick one or the other; Republicans and Democrats, and you pick one or the other, or Trump supporters and Latino Americans, and you pick one or the other. And whichever you pick, we show you the other; if you pick Democrat, we show you Republican, and vise-versa.

And people are signing up?
They are. And it looks like it's going to be growing pretty fast.

So there are actual Trump supporters who are signing up to meet Latinos?
Yes.

Wow.
With the Israeli/Palestinian group, when it first came out, people said, "That could never work—there would be nothing but arguing, nothing but negativity." There have been zero reports of any nastiness. It's been nothing but positivity. I think the fact that all the chats are private allows you to really empathize with the person. If you're in an elevator with somebody, it's a far better experience to just get along, you know what I mean?

Are people using it for friendship or for romance?
That's a great question. When it first came out, we said it was a dating thing, and then all of these people from the Middle East reached out and said, "Hey, that's great, but what we really need out here is a friendship app," so I sort of rebranded it as a friendship app, and people use it primarily for building friendships on either side of the divide.

That said, there have been some dates. Users have reached out to us and thanked us for what we've done. They'll basically say, "Thank you for building this thing, I met someone very special on it," and I'm like, "Wait! Rewind! Who did you meet? Tell me the story." There have been reports of people entering the border into Israel from the West Bank and relationships forming that way. I know about a dozen of those, but there could be more. And we're talking about a guarded border there. But Verona is primarily a friendship platform.

Are you on Verona? But I guess you're not Israeli or Palestinian...
I tell people that even if you're only a fraction Jewish or a fraction Palestinian, or if you're neither, but maybe you have an ideology that resonates with one, choose that. I've made friends on Verona. Two weeks ago, I had a chat with someone in Jerusalem about Arab house music.

So you signed in as Israeli?
I sign in as Israeli. Well, I'm on as both. I kind of switch back and forth.

For dating or friendship?
I'm the barkeep. But I've made friends on there.

I know you've just launched the new groups, but are there more Trump supporters signed up to meet Latinos? Or more Latinos signed up to meet Trump supporters?
There's slightly more Latinos, but the numbers are changing a lot.

Are there more Democrats or Republicans?
More Democrats—about three quarters are Democrats.

Does that mean that liberals really are more open minded?
A lot of the work we're doing is based off studies by Arthur Aaron, who has done a lot of psychological research about reducing prejudice and how relationships form. The whole theory behind Verona is that if you make friends with someone who is in an out-group, and then you tell your friends you've made friends with someone from the other side, and they're really not that bad—studies have shown that reduces prejudice not just in you but also in your friends. There's a network effect.

So people on either side of the Israeli/Palestinian thing will tell their friends, "Hey, I met someone on the other side, and they talked for half an hour about their passion, which is tennis—so how bad can they be, you know?" That's how we're building global empathy on either side.

So is that the goal of Verona?
Yes. We're trying to increase global empathy. A third of humanity is on the internet right now. It's crazy to me that there's not massive singing and dancing in the streets.

Do you sympathize with Trump's positions?
I can understand where his supporters are coming from ideologically. Or I think I understand. Or I'm trying to understand—and maybe Verona can help me understand—why they would gravitate towards the kind of message he broadcasts, and I think the important thing is that Trump supporters can communicate with Latinos, and vice-versa.

What would you say to someone who says, "Trump supporters are racists. Why should they get a platform to explain themselves?"
Not 100 percent of Trump's supporters are racists. And I think the cure for racism is empathy. As soon as you see life through someone's eyes, he or she is no different from you.

Ninety-nine percent of our human wants and desires are all the same. Trump supporters and Latinos want the same thing—they want to take care of their family, they want a good job, they want security, they want to feel safe. They want a great America. We're giving them the opportunity to communicate.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Follow Batya Ungar-Sargon on Twitter.

Matt Mellen feared for his life as he rode an Uber to a friend's house on Saturday.

The driver swerved through oncoming traffic lanes in Kalamazoo, Michigan, at 80 miles per hour and ignored at least one stop sign, according to a Facebook post Mellen's fiancée Mackenzie Waite wrote around 5:30 PM. But as she called 9-1-1 and complained to the company, the driver, Jason B. Dalton, was gearing up to do far worse than drive recklessly, according to police.

Dalton, 45, was charged with six counts of murder on Monday after prosecutors say he went on a shooting spree in three different locations, wounding two more people. The victims include 53-year-old Richard Smith and his teenaged son Tyler, who were killed at about 10 PM at a car dealership, as well as four women—Mary Lou Nye, 62; Mary Jo Nye, 60; Dorothy Brown, 74; and Barbara Hawthorn, 68—who were sitting in their cars outside a Cracker Barrel when Dalton allegedly opened fire there about 15 minutes later.

A 14-year-old girl in the car with the women was critically wounded.

Dalton's initial act of violence is said to have come some four hours earlier, when he allegedly opened fire outside a rental townhouse and wounded an unidentified woman. Neighbors found her laying in a parking lot, the house festooned with bullet holes. Dalton—who according to the New York Times worked for Progressive Insurance until mid-2011—was eventually taken into custody without incident when cops spotted his car at a downtown bar around 12:45 AM.

The tragedy came during a weekend that saw at least five other mass shootings in the United States. But what's especially troubling about the Kalamazoo deaths is that there doesn't seem to be any motive or even a whiff of logic connecting the shootings, a degree of randomness that left the western Michigan city desperate for answers.

"How do you go and tell the families of these victims that they weren't targeted for any reason than they were there to be a target?" Kalamazoo County prosecutor Jeffrey Getting asked in a Sunday news conference.

Meanwhile, Mellen may not have even been the last person to ride in Dalton's car that night. A Twitter user who goes by Black Mamba tweeted a screenshot suggesting Dalton gave him a ride around 8 PM, apparently in the midst of the carnage. Another woman named Megan Knight told the New York Daily News that a co-worker requested Dalton's Uber shortly after 11 PM but canceled it at the last minute. Carmen Morren told the Times that she, too, canceled: Dalton was set to pick them up at a local pub at 11 PM when she and her husband decided to ride with a different Uber driver just minutes before his arrival.

A man named Derek, who gave only his first name, wasn't as lucky, telling a local NBC affiliate that he ordered the Dalton's Uber as a safety measure after hearing about the spree. Derek said Walton pulled up and that he and his family climbed aboard.

"I kind of jokingly said to the driver, 'You're not the shooter, are you?'" Derek recalled. "He gave me some sort of a 'no' response... shook his head... "I said, 'Are you sure?' And he said, 'No, I'm not, I'm just tired.' And we proceeded to have a pretty normal conversation after that."

Less than 20 minutes later, police caught up with the suspect.

Dalton has no criminal record, with an Uber spokesperson indicating he passed a company background check. But neighbors suggested that even if they never suspected he was capable of such wanton brutality, Walton wasn't exactly a low-key presence.

"He periodically shot his gun out the back door," neighbor Sally Pardo told the Times. "He would shoot randomly into the air."

Dalton has been married since 1995 and has two children who are aged 15 and ten. In addition to the six murder charges, he was slapped with eight gun charges and two counts of assault with intent to commit murder. He faces up to life in prison.

Follow Brian Josephs on Twitter.

The author circa middle school

Shortly after my family relocated from Taipei, Taiwan, to Modesto, California, an older boy groped me on the middle school bus. I ignored him until I felt his sticky fingers touching my legs, bare in denim shorts. I tried to blink the reality away, but his hands were still there, creeping further up. I squeezed my knees together, and with my arms, I pushed down my backpack on my thighs as hard as I could, creating a physical shield between him and me. Internally, I was searching for the words I could use to stop him—stop touching me, get off—but all I had in my English repertoire were things like, "The restaurant is on the left side of this street. I like to bike and swim. How about you?"

By the time we reached campus, I was exhausted from maintaining the tense posture. I didn't report what happened to the teachers, both because I lacked the language to describe the incident and because I was so terrified that I never dared to look at the boy's face.

I can't prove I was singled out as an easy target due to my poor English, but statistics show it's not uncommon among immigrants in school. A 2007 survey from schools in Massachusetts showed that 49 percent of middle school English-learning students were verbally bullied. Twenty-eight percent were physically bullied, compared to 21 percent of native English-speaking students. Based on a 2012 report from the National Education Association, one-fourth of all Asian American students are English learners, and 54 percent of the overall Asian American population are harassed in school—a rate much higher than other ethnic groups. "Racial tensions, resentment of immigrants and language barriers, the stereotype of API students as unassertive overachievers, and the spike in attacks against students perceived as Muslim" were listed as the likely causes.

By 2050, estimates suggest more than one third of America's schoolchildren under the age of 17 will be either immigrants or second-generation Americans. But research conducted by Harvard University shows that "many schools are ill-equipped to meet their needs"—including giving them the language skills to speak for themselves.

Before I moved to America, I wasn't one to hold my tongue. My mom likes to tell the story of how, as a toddler, I stopped a much taller girl from chasing my older brother—I was bold, mouthy even. At home, I had to be told to be quiet; at school, although I was a star student, I was sometimes chastised for talking during class or even talking back to the teachers.

Before we got our green cards, I watched Disney Channel shows in our fourth-floor walk-up apartment in Taipei, imagining what my new life in the United States would be like. Then in 2000, when I was 12 years old, my family moved to California. I often think back about that initial adjustment period and how it shaped me as an individual. Puberty is tough enough without having to adapt to a completely different language, culture, or environment. I realized what I truly missed the most during those first few years actually wasn't my family, and it wasn't my friends—it was the ability to use my voice.

I was a top-of-class student in my motherland, but in English-speaking California, my comprehension of the foreign language was at a level at least five years below my age. I'd taken some English classes back home, but no matter how many textbook English phrases I memorized and recited, none of them provided the proper tools to help me navigate the life of a middle schooler on the West Coast.

Since the classes for ESL (English-as-a-second-language) students were taught in English, which we were still struggling to understand, my school basically dumbed down the entire curriculum. I remember constantly fuming, Just because I'm stupid in English doesn't mean that I'm stupid in everything else! In math class, I strained my ears to understand what the teacher was saying, only reaching clarity when she wrote down numbers and signs on the blackboard. I both hated and relished those moments, when I registered that I understood the mathematical concepts perfectly well, yet could not comprehend the words coming out of her mouth.

Puberty is tough enough without having to adapt to a completely different language, culture, or environment.

The diluted coursework for ESL students can have disastrous academic repercussions. In 2013, 20,000 students sued the state of California after they were held back in school for low proficiency due to language barriers. Similarly, Haley Jordan, a former eighth-grade science teacher at a school in Phoenix, Arizona, told me her school often assumed that English learners wouldn't excel in other subjects, even though her "immigrant students were the ones most interested in science. They responded really well to visuals and hands-on activities, but all the district looks at was standardized test scores."

Other schools have handled immigrant students more gracefully: Abbey Davis, a fourth-grade social studies teacher in Marin County, California, told me her school encouraged her to attend a two-day workshop solely dedicated to educating English learners. "It was paid for by the school district since this is a privileged area with plenty of funding," she told me. "We talked about ways teachers could make the English learner students feel comfortable and safe within the community."

Making English-learning students feel safe and comfortable isn't just important for their academic performance but for their social survival. When each conversation means yet another potential failure, kids go to great lengths to avoid human interaction. Once, shortly after I moved to California, I was playing paddleball in gym class when a girl on the opposing team accused me of cheating and called me a chink. Even with my limited English, I recognized it as a racial slur. I struggled to retaliate by calling the girl a bitch—one of the few insults I knew—but the girl only laughed at my poor pronunciation of the word and mocked me even more. For the rest of that quarter, I took refuge from others in the school library whenever possible.

Things do seem to be improving, and most American schools now take a hard stance on harassment and bullying. Jen Pinkham Gutierrez, a sixth-grade teacher in Lodi, California, told me her students have made an effort to welcome immigrant students. "They want to help and teach the new students," she said. "They ask, 'How do you say this where you come from?' and we talk about everyone's different culture."

During my first few years in America, none of my ESL teachers asked about my background—how smart and confident I'd been back in Taiwan, and how much I struggled to bring that confidence to classrooms where I could barely grasp the language. I felt powerless without my voice. I couldn't prove my worth, stand up for myself, or make friends. It was well into high school when I could adequately express my thoughts and emotions in English, when I stopped dreading being called on in class. And if that moment can come sooner for the thousands of other immigrants who will enroll in American schools this year, we'll all be better off.

Follow Chin Lu on Twitter.

A theme park: not just somewhere you pay to gain access to, before spending the majority of your time standing in a queue. These tourist attractions – these paved, fenced-in arenas of looping, colourful steel – are also churches, places of worship to hordes of so-called "coaster geeks".

Rollercoaster aficionados tour the world in search of new rides, spending thousands on trips and merchandise, and swearing allegiance – kind of like football fans – to their favourites. They obsess over the nuts and bolts of the rollercoasters they ride; for a true coaster geek, it's not enough to just stand in line and spend two to three minutes upside down – they have to forensically understand each coil and curve.

Serena Cherry, a 27-year-old from Bristol who has Thorpe Park's Saw ride tattooed on her arm, says a true coaster fan should know who has built a ride from over a hundred paces.

"Those built by BNN have very thick, chunky looking tracks – a cross-section of their track typically looks like a W shape – whereas Swiss manufacturer Intamin always use quad rails, so their rails are cube shaped," she explains. "Years ago, you'd have to peer over a fence to know who was building what, but now coaster geek sites will have already done that for you."

In some cases, it seems, enthusiasts will go to extreme lengths to get their hands on exclusive information. Merlin Entertainment – the company that owns basically every theme park in the UK – reported that their social media had been hacked by fans looking to get news of Thorpe Park's rumoured (and now confirmed) collaboration with Derren Brown.

Serena's Saw ride tattoo

For Serena, a guitarist in the post-hardcore band Svalbard, committing her love for her favourite theme park to song was enough. "I composed a song called 'Thorpe Park (On a Week Day)' – it's a bit of a parody," she says. "On a weekday at Thorpe Park there are no queues. It's like winning life – a completely blissful day where there are no obstacles to your enjoyment, your relationship to the rollercoasters."

Like many coaster geeks she can chart her adoration of adrenaline right down to the first coaster she fell in love with. "When I first saw Nemesis in 1994, when it just opened, it was like nothing on Earth – the structure, ambition and scale of it was like something from another planet," she says. "It was inverted, pulling off in all directions, yet mixed with all these alien themes. It looked mythological. I watched my dad ride it and begged him for every detail. I then had to wait four years until I was exactly 1.4 m tall to ride on it."

A POV ride-through of Nemesis (POV ride-throughs are pretty popular in the coaster geek community)

Remembering her first Nemesis experience, Serena compares it almost to an early romantic encounter: "I was nervous, I was excited, and then it was over all too quickly. That day I went on it twice and queued for two-and-a-half hours each time."

Most of us have been to theme parks – perhaps on a school trip where you all had to wear matching rucksacks the wrong way round, or a deathly silent first date over a burrito in Alton Towers' Mexican Cantina – and have enjoyed the day out. But for coaster geeks, there's a lot more to it than that.

"They are art installations that you can experience," says Serena. "It's not about just stepping on the train – the moment begins when you see the structure, how otherworldly it is. You study each fragment of the theming; it's like enveloping yourself in a story."

Jordan outside Thorpe Park

Jordan Middleton, 25, from Essex, has ridden 772 rollercoasters at over 100 theme parks, burning as much as £1,000 on trips to her favourite rides in Japan, America and Europe. She insists she doesn't dress like a typical coaster geek, but says you can spot one a mile off.

"They look like they're going hiking," she says. "Trousers with loads of pockets so you don't have to check a bag in and out. Sensible shoes... I'm actually mocked a lot because I'm a bit more fashion conscious and don't wear hiking boots. Detachable hoods, boots with zips so you can get them on and off easily for rides. People bring flip-flops so they can wear them off after they've been on a water ride."

Jordan – whose obsession with rides began as a teenager playing Rollercoaster Tycoon, a game where you can build your own theme parks – describes how online coaster geek forums are full of oneupmanship.

"My fiancé thinks he's a coaster geek, but he really isn't. He has some knowledge, but it's not at geek level yet. Other geeks would judge him," she says. "It's not just about knowing the rides; it's about knowing manufacturers, plans, build spends. Everything. There are geeks who know how many bolts are in any Disneyland ride. Others have spreadsheets charting their top ten rides and what dates that order changed. It's very, very serious."

Online arguments rage about favourite restraints – the bars that hold you in your seat – and what body type is best for rollercoasters: tall, short, thin or fat. The obsessiveness isn't just consigned to the tracks, says Jordan: "There are specific bits inside theme parks that only coaster geeks would know about. Inside the ride Colossus at Thorpe Park, the developers, Intamin, when building the ride, accidentally created a seat-shaped alcove in the structure which is now known among geeks as the 'Intamin Throne'. A lot of coaster enthusiasts pose for pictures on it and many propose or get engaged there."

Jordan didn't get engaged on the Intamin Throne – that honour was reserved for the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland, Paris. Not that that's her favourite ride. "There's a rollercoaster in Pennsylvania called Sky Rush. Imagine you're riding a rollercoaster that's like a bucking bronco, constantly trying to throw you off, but with a comfortable restraint that holds you on. It's really smooth and fast," she says, describing her holy grail of coaster. "Also, Six Flags Splash Mountain – that's rollercoaster mecca. You pull up and all you can see is rollercoasters as far as the eye can see."

Phill in Thorpe Park

Phill Pritchard, 30, works in a pharmaceutical company, but – perhaps unsurprisingly – pharmaceuticals are not his primary passion. His primary passion is theme parks. And one theme park in particular.

"There wasn't enough about Thorpe Park on the internet already, so I created Memories of Thorpe Park. It now has around 30,000 to 50,000 photos from around Thorpe Park," he says. "I just reached out to people who blogged and asked if I could share usage. I have everything from old logos, pics of disused rides, even the old 'Thorpe Park Rangers' – the site mascots."

Phill points to a pivotal time in the theme park's history as a game changer for his website. "The fire in 2000 was a very worrying time," he says. "It's still sad to think about it now. The two rides that were lost were important to me growing up – the Phantom Fantasia, a slow moving ghost train, was my favourite ride as a child. That was a big shock to me, especially the way it went. Nothing officially has ever been announced, but it's supposed to have been a cigarette fire."

Phill, who does still visit other parks besides Thorpe Park, says his fixation with rollercoasters comes from the otherworldly set up. "There's nothing like a theme park. It's like walking into a film set," he says. "Nowhere on the planet can you go from being in outer space to a pirate ship to a horror theme without thinking it's ridiculous. I love to suspend my disbelief like that."

A POV ride-through of Thorpe Park's Saw ride

There's a community aspect to coaster geek culture, and of course the basic appeal of these rides is obvious: they kind of make you feel like you're flying. I get that. I get why people become interested in rollercoasters and how a passing interest can snowball into a full-blown passion. But surely these coaster geeks get bored of riding the same two-minute experience again and again?

Serena, who has now ridden the Saw ride going on a thousand times, says it never gets dull – and, in her explanation of why, sums up why many coaster geeks become so enthralled with queuing up for hours for that brief rush of adrenaline.

"For me, a truly brilliant rollercoaster tells a story. As a coaster, Saw is beautifully paced. It has an indoor section, plenty of interactive points as you go past on the carriage, and you notice different elements every time. From the moment you see it, to queuing up, to riding it, a story should unravel. I like it best in the pouring rain. Did you know that, when the track is wet, it makes the wheels slippier and a tiny bit faster? Saw in the rain, in the dark, that's my absolute favourite."

@andyjoneswrites / @Jake_Photo

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Hello yeah end of the world news now and here's Mark Zuckerberg, Marky Mark Zuckerberg, The Zuck, The Berg, O Great And Glorious Leader Mark Zucky-Zuck, The Zucker, The Z, Zed, and here he is walking among his many charges at the Samsung Galaxy 7 smartphone launch in Barcelona last night, padding around in fresh Nikes and a grey T-shirt, a don't-bother-daddy-on-his-day-off-Luka-you-know-he-doesn't-like-eating-grapes-and-watching-cartoons-with-you spectre of the end, Mark Zuckerberg plugging us all into VR, finally, Mark Zuckerberg one decade and a bout of alopecia away from going full Bond villain, Mark Zuckerberg months away from developing a bland and miserable chew-free food formula now, a food we will eat through a tube while flying through space in glorious VR, humans existing in mucus-bath VR pods by the year 2026, We All Saw The Matrix:

(via Facebook)

I think we can all put our personal politics and thoughts about VR away to one side for a minute – all our thoughts about VR being 'mm, quite cool technology but I wouldn't want it to take over my life!', which is exactly what we said about iPhones, what they said about TVs – and just enjoy this photograph for exactly what it is, which is an aesthetically glorious representation of the end of the actual world, the last flicker of deep navy and whites and blues we will all see before death encases us:

Computer, zoom in on Mark Zuckerberg's haircut, because we need to have a chat. We need to have a chat about that. We need to talk.

Now if I were a billionaire – and, believe me, be happy I am not, because no doubt I would be an evil one, there is absolutely no way I would be a good-doing or philanthropic rich man, I would start out as a fun billionaire on a yacht with a money cannon and a pet dolphin and then would get slowly weirder and more maniacal until I'd gone full Trump, so seriously, be glad there's no money in writing – now though if I were a billionaire, and even as a man who is not currently a billionaire, I care more about my hair than this man. Zuckerberg is a man who goes to a barber – or, more likely, gets a barber to come to him, at great cost – and says "I don't mind what you do." Can you imagine how little this man cares about anything. 'Yeah, Mark Zuckerberg's alright,' you say, don't you. 'He cares about things. He cares about the future of the internet. Our data is safe wi—'

This is the hairline of a dangerously reckless man. This is a man who doesn't care about anything, at all.

'Heh,' Mark Zuckerberg says, to the barber who is almost certainly being paid $500 a throw to do this to him. 'Don't just fuck me up: fuck me up so I look like I'm still retaking Year 4. Fuck me up like my mum made me get a haircut for my first day at a job pushing trollies at B&Q. I am the 16th richest human alive. Fuck me up.'

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But no we must zoom out again and then look back at the drones Mark Zucky has plugged into the mainframe, and speculate as to how they are enjoying it, based only upon a static image, a single microsecond in time, a heartbeat frozen forever. Anyway this dude is probably looking at porno:

Well, he's not, but how would you know? Such is the beauty of VR. Everyone else: everyone else is just watching the same ol' VR demo preloaded into all the locked devices, watching essentially a jazzy PowerPoint demo, nothing VR about it. But this dude has the sincere vibe of having somehow figured out how to get some porno up in here. Hand on the laptop, brogues flat on the floor, sturgeon mouth: classic pornography-in-a-room-full-of-people pose. His face says: he cracked the device in the eight seconds after he was told it was under his chair. It says: he has had it porned up since Zuckerberg started talking. That this is how technology truly progresses: it's not about how affordable it is, or accessible, but how easy it is to see hi-definition tits on. And he is indifferent to it.

This guy's VR console is not working and he is too embarrassed to put his hand up and say. He's whispering to his mate like, "Is yours working?" His mate nods and he can't see it. He is alone in the infinite blackness. A Samsung logo glows menacingly in front of him. He's stuck like this for 45, 50 minutes now. He can't take his headset off in case Zuckerberg hits him with a stick. Just close your eyes, John, he's thinking. It'll be over soon. It'll be over.

This dude is wondering why he bothered bringing an SLR if he was just going to be plugged into this thing for an hour and, sidenote, is really paranoid someone is going to take his laptop while he's blacked out so has it clamped between his legs ready.

This dude does not how VR works so he's looking behind him to see how far it goes. "Ahah!" he's saying, audibly. "Yeah, it goes all the way round!"

So I guess in essence we are looking at a real moment in time: in the grand canon, this photo is up there with the moon landing footage, the Zapruder film, Bernie Boston's Flower Power, the sailor kiss in Times Square. The exact moment a fledging future technology was revealed, properly, to an awaiting world: a future being reshaped and formed in front of our very eyes. And it really looks like Mark Zuckerberg is about to break into an evil cackle and then get into a rooftop gun fight with a spy. Proper 'and while all these tech journalists were distracted with a simple VR device, I launched a nuclear weapon to explode the moon!' vibes.

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And recall that we don't even know what demo the VR device is displaying. Based on the enthusiasm of the assembled masses: a screaming, 360-degree vision of hell. Fire and brimstone and terrible gremlins untold. Hell in its rawest form: lava and fire and heat and the endless infinity of agony. Nerves on fire and shrieks so high and piercing that they become a constant terror, a terror that never leaves you even when it's gone. Skins flayed and singed and yanked. Hairs twisted and destroyed. Eyes popped and throats clamped. Hell, hell, hell.

Is this the future? I don't know. I feel like we'll all enjoy VR until some wholesome YouTuber does a viral video called '#TakeYourGogglesOff', with proper GCSE-level rhyming couplets about how 'You need to take time to see your family / run in park, look at bee, look at tree' that tells us how in the good old days people used to talk each other instead of having endless four-dimensional VR-assisted hyperwanks, and that actually, VR is bad. But this does seem like a watershed moment we will all look back on with latent terror: a, 'Ah, that's when Skynet took a hold' sort of thing. We'll all be behind a chainlink fence watching a playground explode and thinking: we should never have trusted Mark Zuckerberg, with his grey T-shirt and jeans. We should never have trusted that man at all. And we will look back at this photograph, and his haircut, and go: ah, we were such fools. And go: the signs were there all along.

@joelgolby

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Newtown High School of the Performing Arts is behind St George's Hall. Image via.

Newtown High School of the Performing Arts has updated its policy on uniforms to make life easier to trans, genderqueer, and non-binary pupils, following a push from the school's students.

From now on, students will be free to use whichever uniform or bathroom matches their gender identity. They could already do both those things before the policy was officially changed, but now they're saved the trouble of seeking formal permission from administration, which Newtown student Jo Dwyer called a "long and difficult process."

Speaking to VICE, the NSW Department of Education explained that the uniform itself hasn't changed, it's simply been made genderless. "Students can wear any part of the available uniform options," a spokesperson told us. Similarly, Newton's bathroom policy hasn't formally changed from that already in place across NSW, it's just more explicit. "Usually, students should not be required to use the toilets and change rooms used by persons of the sex they were assigned at birth if they identify as a different gender. Newtown's just taken the grey area out of the state's policy, by making it clear students are completely free to use the bathroom of their choice." The spokesperson further qualified that this will occur on a "case by case basis by the school."

The move makes sense coming from Newtown, given it's one of the most progressive schools in the country. You might remember when its students were sent to meet then-Prime Minister Tony Abbott, and completely shredded him in a Q and A session—"Not saying that I don't trust you, just wondering why a man is the Minister for Women?"

It's not the first school to change its uniform policy to accommodate trans and non-binary students—British Schools began doing so last year—but it's the first in Australia, and as such has become the target for ire from Christian lobbyists. "People are wondering if this is where rainbow ideology and rainbow politics is taking us," Australian Christian Lobby spokesperson Wendy Francis told VICE. "These gender theory ideas go way beyond anti-bullying to almost proselytising."

Earlier this year, the lobby came out in opposition to the Safe School programme, which aims to aide young LGTBIQ students and educate their peers. Wendy Francis even claimed the program promotes "queer sex and cross-dressing."

Not that the NSW Department of Education is particularly bothered by these sorts of opinions. When VICE asked the Department to comment, a spokesperson said that as a matter of course they "don't respond to third parties" and stressed "we do not comment on that organisation."

It's also quite unlikely that Newtown will be the only school bringing in genderless uniforms. Last year, the Victorian Youth Parliament created a bill to present to the Victorian government demanding school uniforms be made gender neutral across the state. The Safe School programme, which 495 institutions currently participate in, advocates for the same policy. Although given Newtown's change came from pupils pushing for something they cared about, it might not take legislation to implement; just students who give a shit.

Follow Isabelle on Twitter.

Jon Hamm and January Jones in Mad Men

Warning: This contains spoilers for season two of Fargo, season one of Mr. Robot, and the movie Gone Girl.

In the history of TV and film, there is a short list of stereotypes to which female characters conform. Even in modern, critically acclaimed productions, women often end up playing supporting roles: either as a wife holding the family together while the flawed, nuanced, and overwritten male lead sucks up all the juicy stories, or as a love interest adding sex appeal and sensitivity as we once again witness the eternal struggle of being young, white, and male in this world.

In the last few years, we've seen that start to change. Shows like Orange Is the New Black and Broad City have women acting mean, failing, and pooping. Women who have issues but issues that don't mean they show up at their ex's house in the rain, sobbing uncontrollably while holding out a photo of what their baby would look like, snottily singing Adele. These new TV women are messy and chaotic, and they only seem manic and pixie-like when they're really, really high.

The thirst for these kinds of characters is growing with each TV season, and comedy actresses, in particular, have broken down the door to allow darker and more morally ambiguous characters in drama. In particular, a new type of female character has emerged, made up of glamour, instability, and eye shadow. These are women who are unmerciful in their actions and unbalanced in their temperament but always look like they just stepped out of the salon.

Kirsten Dunst as Peggy Blomquist in 'Fargo'

The TV embodiment of these coiffured Ophelias is Peggy Blomquist, Kirsten Dunst's magazine-hoarding beauty queen from season two of Fargo. Peggy feels like a glimpse of what Amber Atkins, the midwestern pageant obsessive Dunst played in 1999's Drop Dead Gorgeous, would be if we revisited her in her early 30s. Peggy is cold-blooded and merciless, but she never has a hair out of place. After killing a man with her Chevrolet Corvair, she calmly drives home and dishes up Hamburger Helper ready meals for dinner, ducking questions from her husband over whether or not they should have a kid.

A few weeks later, she is too engrossed in a black-and-white romance on TV to notice that the man bound and gagged next to her has escaped. That same man later pleads with the sheriff to rescue him from Peggy because she calmly and coldly slid her knife into him while preparing lunch.

None of Peggy's transgressions affect her demeanor. Her sociopathic tendencies aren't just glib characterization. Fargo is less about these rare violent outbursts and more about the importance she places on winning over others. As Dunst herself says, "She can't let anything stop her from her search for a better life."

Peggy was cheek-bitingly frustrating to watch: Through her complete refusal to admit that she'd fucked up, she inched herself and her bumbling but devoted husband closer and closer to danger. She was one of the most engaging and exhilarating female characters on TV in the last 12 months.

Amy Elliot Dunne in 'Gone Girl'

If Peggy had a cinematic sister, it would be Rosamund Pike's Amy Elliot Dunne in Gone Girl, the 2014 adaptation of Gillian Flynn's bestselling thriller. Amy is cold and callous, a woman who exacts the cruelest revenge on her cheating husband—by faking her own death. Then she sits in grotty motel rooms, stuffing her increasingly pale and puffy face with chips, as he's implicated in her murder by the press. Her revenge is perfectly planned, and watching her binging on the rolling newsfeed day after day is intrusive and disturbing. She's living only to see him suffer, but there's a twisted intimacy to it as you grow to know a character who's invisible.

When she decides to go back to her husband, the first thing she does is get fit and elegant again. She's a woman who knows what she wants and how to get it. So as she staggers back to her own house, covered in the blood of an ex-boyfriend whose throat she managed to slit in the process, she falls into her husband's arms, once again in complete control.

Some might say these women promote a helpful version of various different kinds of mental illness, somehow managing to stay undeniably glamorous while losing their minds. They're "bad role models," a concern that never seems to apply to men. No one seems to be bothered about that when Don Draper is somehow a deathly alcoholic who smells amazing, never farts, and is irresistible to women. It's all right when Elliot Alderson from Mr. Robot manages to hack the world's most difficult security encryptions while extremely high and suffering from so many forms of psychoses he regularly has conversations with hallucinations. Why should women be the only ones who can't be unhinged and fabulous?

In more light-hearted fare, these kinds of characters have become well-established. Lena Dunham's narcissistic Hannah in Girls or Krysten Ritter's self-centered party girl in the underrated sitcom Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23 are able to play lead roles despite being resolutely unlikeable. The more of these manic manipulative characters there are, the more we get used to seeing complex women in lead roles. It may sound counterintuitive, but perhaps progress is seeing women on TV fuck up and get away with it.

Follow Elizabeth on Twitter.

A US aircraft on the flightline at Incirlik Air Base, Turkey, in November. Photo via the US Air Force Flickr

On Monday, news outlets including the Associated Press reported that Russian and US officials had agreed on a ceasefire in Syria, slated to go into effect on Saturday. This is being framed as a big deal, with Russian President Vladimir Putin saying in a statement that "We are finally seeing a real chance to bring an end to the long-standing bloodshed and violence." Casual observers, though, might be confused by the headlines: The US and Russia certainly aren't friendly, but they weren't shooting at each other in Syria, so why do they have to sign this kind of document?

In reality, "ceasefire" is a bit of a misnomer here. The agreement doesn't mean that outside powers will stop bombing ISIS or other groups designated by the UN as terrorist organisations. There are a lot of details that need to be hammered out, as well—this is just the beginning of a long potential process that could eventually lead to the Syrian government and some rebel groups reaching some sort of peace agreement.

To find out more, VICE reached out to Omar Lamrani, a Middle-East analyst for the Texas-based conflict forecasting organisation Stratfor, and asked how this is all going to shake out. Unsurprisingly, Lamrani was less than optimistic about this being the end of all fighting in Syria. What follows is our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

VICE: Let's clarify one thing first: Is the Islamic State involved in this ceasefire?
Omar Lamrani: The Islamic State is not within the parameters of the ceasefire. The US, and Russia, and rebels, and the loyalist forces will continue to be able to attack the Islamic State.

Is this a good deal from the perspective of someone who would like to see less fighting in Syria?
It's a way to tamp down the fighting, and I think that's the best that can be hoped for as some of the rebel groups get sidelined and the focus becomes more on the extremist groups. This is initially looking positive – meaning we're finally going to have some traction on the ground – but there are still very significant hurdles that have to be overcome for us to actually talk about a meaningful ceasefire.

What are the hurdles?
The ceasefire itself is already limited because obviously the Islamic State is excluded and so is Jabhat al-Nusra. And if Jabhat al-Nusra is excluded, then it's going to be very very difficult to have a ceasefire implemented on the ground because al-Nusra is very widespread amongst the rebellion. So given the fact that with the agreements that we already have so far, the US and Russia are already saying that allies of Russia can strike Jabhat al-Nusra, that means that an actual, meaningful ceasefire across the country is very unlikely to happen in the way that some people might imagine.

What still has to happen before there's an actual reduction in fighting?
Essentially, the next steps are for Russia to go to the loyalist camp – meaning the Assad government, Iran, and other supporters of the Assad regime. We have the Russian defense minister, who is actually in Tehran right now and very likely talking to them about this proposal and some other issues. And then from the US side they'll take it to allies in the region, the GCC, Turkey, and then obviously in the southwest, to the opposition itself.

So the US and Russia have to sort of sell this ceasefire to their Syrian allies?
That is the hope. Russia goes to Iran and says, "Listen, we agreed to this deal with the United States. We think it's a good deal. We think we should take it." And the United States is doing the same with the opposition. Whether that actually happens on Friday has not been determined. I wouldn't say it's clear-cut that the loyalists or the opposition will accept the conditions, because remember: The ceasefire was supposed to happen last week and it didn't.

And just to recap – why is the US now pushing for a ceasefire instead of trying to topple Assad?
The United States perspective is, Things are going really badly on the ground. Let's get the ceasefire. Let's get this conversation moving towards a political transition. And the sooner as we do that, the sooner we can focus on ending this conflict. That's the US perspective, and not necessarily a perspective that's shared by others.

And what might be keeping the rebels from getting on board?
The rebels will be extremely concerned about the fact that Russian aircraft will continue to be able to bomb. That has consistently been one of the prerequisites to any ceasefire – that the Russians stop the airstrikes. Because they look at and say, "Well, the Russians can always go up there, bomb a target, claim it's al-Nusra when in fact it isn't al-Nusra." Potentially, rebels in very close proximity to al-Nusra also get damaged by the strikes. So the US perspective might not be the same perspective as the opposition.

Meanwhile, is this deal like Christmas for Assad and Russia? Are they getting everything they wanted?
They have been pushing for other rebel groups like Jaysh al Islam and Ahrar al-Sham to be considered as terrorist factions. That doesn't seem to have happened here. The biggest issue is that they have the military advantage on the ground, and by agreeing to a ceasefire they essentially give the rebels breathing room.

Are the Kurds involved in this?
The Kurdish viewpoint has always been that they should be included in all these negotiations. So far at Geneva II they've largely been excluded with the promises that later on they will be brought into the conversation, but that hasn't really happened thus far. In terms of Turkey, they just want to be given assurances that Turkey will cease strikes against them. This conversation thus far – with the details that have come out – have not really pointed to anything like that being included. Turkey, as we speak, is currently shelling the YPG.

Should we be hopeful about this deal leading to eventual peace?
To be perfectly frank, the devil is in the details. There are two things that are really going to show us whether this is going to stick. The first thing is: How much buy-in there is into this deal by the opposition and the loyalists on the ground? And the second thing is: What kinds of methods are there by which both sides can integrate their definition of which groups are terrorists or not, and how do they think that will work out on the actual battlefield?

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Don't know if you saw, but the "Work" double-video came out yesterday. It's great: Rihanna, an angel we don't deserve, winding around in a clammy dancehall while a track-suited Drake flouts every dress code convention in living history and does that "frowning and waving his hand like he just smelled the work microwave" dance move he does. Then another one, where Drake just sits on a sofa and admires the art going on in front of him, and Rihanna just walks backwards a bit and sings.

Great, great stuff. There are no two humans alive I would rather watch have sex with each other than these two people. Well done to the two directors, Director X and Tim Erem. You really did well. You really gave it a go.

That said, I'm happy to announce that the "Work" double-video released yesterday is now null and void, and this Vine of a man popping his dick and bollocks out the front of his suit is now the official video to Rihanna's comeback single:

Play it on a loop 70, maybe 80 times. Wallow in it. Really get up inside the crevices of this Vine. There are raw human emotions on display, here. It is a six-second, three-act play. There is humility and redemption. There is joy and there is pain. This Vine of a man popping his dick and bollocks out the front of his suit has everything.

We've all been embarrassed in our lifetimes, haven't we? I'll start: the time I was most embarrassed was at school, on a break-time. Knowledge you will need to be aware of: I was an extremely fat boy and looked sort of like one of those 40-year-old mums you see on couponing shows. Our school let the sixth formers out at breaks and lunchtime to go to the nearby shops, or smoke on a low wall next to the main road out by our school. So consider: an entire wall cluttered with cool kids, smoking away, and me, waddling to the zebra crossing looking, for all the world, like I had two rough sons called Jaysen and a special room in my house for all the discounted toilet paper I had accumulated.

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So I get about halfway across this zebra crossing, and I see there is a lorry coming, at quite some pace, from the opposite direction. Something inside my brain snapped at this point: my left striding leg went forward, to get to the other side of the road before the lorry killed me; my rear right leg turned to go backwards, toward the safety of the smoking cool kids. Panic in my eyes. Nervous sweating. A moment of sheer madness. Something went wrong and I malfunctioned. I did the splits.

Consider the lorry driver, who stopped in very good time, and what he saw: he saw an extremely fat, scared-looking boy do the splits in the middle of the road in front of him for absolutely no reason at all.

The man was laughing so much he couldn't drive. There was a traffic tailback behind him for many minutes afterwards. Every single cool kid at the school saw me try to ease myself back up to my feet using only my arms, exerting myself so hard my trousers slipped down and exposed my butt crack.

So we've all been embarrassed. But have we been as embarrassed as the man who accidentally popped his dick and bollocks out of the front of his suit? I don't know:

The thing is: "Work" is a banger. It is very hard, especially after a couple of drinks, not to get a little carried away with "Work". You think: 'Yes, I think I am capable of twerking.' You go: maybe it's time I dropped it to the flo'. "Work" gives you a kind of gilded confidence that only the biggest pop songs can imbue: it makes you feel bulletproof, it makes you feel free. It makes you think that maybe you should do a medically-inadvisable dance move while not wearing pants. It makes you do something that pops your trousers apart so hard it sounds like someone quickly opening a crisp packet.

Because my major concern when I first saw that Vine of a dude popping his dick and balls out of the front of his suit was: did this dude just bust through his pants and his trousers with one crotch-pop? How much power can this man's groin generate? Fucking hell. But then I watched again, again, another time, once more: unless they are obliterated to atoms at the exact second the man drops it to "Work", there are no underwears present in this moment. It is just suit material being strained to the point of destruction.

Which, I guess, is the bittersweet core at the centre of this embarrassment pudding. The man approaches the booty pop with a very pure innocence – that this sweet, brief second of his life will not ruin it irreparably, that this moment will not define him as a man, will not be a highpoint of his life's embarrassment, a single splayed hand in front of his torso and a look to camera – and leaves it changed. Over the course of six seconds, we see one man's life as he knows it end, and another one begin in its place. At the exact moment his dick and balls flop out, he is reborn.

Before:

After:

And then there is the reaction. Embarrassment is a curious feeling – it makes us flush, makes us sear, for some reason it is the most lasting emotion. Sadness and despair we can move past; happiness we can cling onto for as long as we can. But embarrassment cuts deep. Embarrassment we can recall some 10, 20 years later, and feel it just as strongly as we did the day we first held it. No other feeling endures or amplifies quite like it. It is the bolognese sauce of emotions. It tastes better the second time you heat it up.

Kudos, then, to the man with his dick and balls out, in the two to three seconds after his dick and balls pop out. This is when the shock happens: the initial "my dick and balls have popped out" amazement. As he reverses out of the squat, he isn't thinking, 'How in the fuck am I meant to get home without everyone seeing my dicky and ballsack?', but instead instinctively goes to cover his newly-ruined crotch, mouth a silent scream. It's a very pure moment – like a baby being born and screaming for the first time, or a pig being shot.

And, finally, he looks down back at his crotch, for confirmation: yes, he just did his trousers so hard his dick and balls are hanging out. Yes, that was captured on camera. No: no blood. Yes: this night has just gone irreparably sour.

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We have to learn from other people: the mistakes they make, the adversities they overcome, the triumphs they achieve. When someone pops their dick and balls out the front of their suit while dancing to "Work", we need to ask ourselves what we can learn from this, how we can use this to grow.

Lesson one: do not attempt to drop it low unless you have an ironclad crotch seam in place. Lesson two: underwear isn't that bad, you know. Lesson three: visible embarrassment is an instinct that saves us from the abyss. Moments like this – when your dick and balls spill out your trousers on Vine – can define a person. But when we process that shock we start to become someone else: stronger, hardened, bulletproof in a way that can't be synthesised.

We've all, one way or another, popped our dick and bollocks out of our trousers. We've all overcome it. You can be stronger now, "Work" suit trouser dick and bollock man. We all can.

@joelgolby

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Aïda Ruilova's latest show, The Pink Palace, opened at Marlborough Chelsea and I went to it and took photos and talked to her about it. I first met Aïda Ruilova in 2009 in California while on a 12-hour double-date and interview with her then-boyfriend, now-husband, Raymond Pettibon. Aïda is talkative and outgoing while Raymond is friendly but quiet. They're both pretty active on Twitter, and it's fun to witness their online back and forth.

Aida's opening was a star-studded affair. Keith Mayerson, my former SVA cartooning professor who is now a painter represented by Marlborough Chelsea, was there. We discussed David Bowie and the changing landscape of comics. He Instagrams photos he takes of the Empire State Building. I still use the lessons I learned in his class when critiquing people's work or thinking about my own.

Raymond's friend, Mark "The Gonz" Gonzalez, stood by the entrance while youngsters did floppy ollies in the gallery. I asked him what he thought about it, and he said that as long as they're having fun, that's the most important thing.

I don't know if the kids were trying to show off for the Gonz or if they had no concept that their bad skating was being benignly observed by one of the great skate deities.

I also saw this man drinking wine wearing purple gloves. Purple is the common colour of the urban attention-seeker art goer. Purple ponchos and shawls, purple berets. Some people associate purple with lesbianism. Some other people associate with sexual repression. I wonder if the Joker wearing a purple suit is why Tim Burton's Batman movie made the Joker into an artist.

The majority of the pieces in The Pink Palace are collages of old exploitation movie posters combined with black velvet in the shape of flowers. There's also a giant black heart-shaped balloon, and a projection of a video in which Aïda is repeatedly jabbing her finger into her mouth.

The opening was a swell time, and a few days later I interviewed Aïda about the show. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

VICE: It's been a little while since your last show. I know that you had a child. You also mentioned that your father died. I would assume that both of those momentous life events are major themes of what's happening in the work in The Pink Palace.
Aïda Ruilova: I think this show is sort of an extension of my show I'm So Wild About Your Strawberry Mouth from a couple years ago. That show also focused on the body and its representation via images/advertisements but more as an escape from the body or as an altered state as location. The works in this show are focusing on the body and death. The materials are sort of a stand-in for the body—they're all extremely delicate and could easily fall apart. The collages are literally just hanging barely fastened to the black velvet, and I had those works purposely framed without glass so you could get a sense of the three-dimensional quality and their delicacy. My father was a surgeon. I think growing up around him and his work at the hospital, I had a different relationship to the body than most people. The interior of the body is dark, but if you light it up its pink. So there is this sort of mystery when it comes to our insides. The skin becomes the surface that binds us together.

You mentioned that the title of the show is referential to Jayne Mansfield's home, and the photo in your press release was a picture of her bedroom.
In the late 50s Jayne Mansfield bought a home that she painted pink on the inside and outside. The house was filled with kitschy pink shag rugs, pinks furs in the bathroom, a pink heart-shaped bathtub, a fountain spurting pink champagne, and a heart-shaped pool. I see the space she created as a place that represented all things feminine to her, and a sort of exaggeration of the 50s idea of femininity. The pictures of her in her home are funny and pretty amazing. But just looking at those pictures of her home makes me claustrophobic. I thought of her home as a metaphor for the body and I used the image of her bedroom for my exhibition image because of how strange it was that the bed had been covered with a black velvet cover.

When did the fascination with Mansfield start? She was a truly remarkable person who spoke five languages and had an IQ of 168.
It's funny, I remember first being obsessed with Marilyn Monroe when I was a young girl and getting both Marilyn and Mansfield mixed up. They were interchangeable for me. Different versions of the same thing... You could add Anna Nicole to that list also, I guess. Marilyn Monroe became the legitimate, Hollywood blond bombshell icon, though, in posterity, and Mansfield never really reached that legitimate stature. Shen ended up have a lot of kids and then died young in a tragic car accident. Her daughter Mariska Haritgay is on Law and Order, which is one of my favourite shows ever. She was in the backseat of the car along with her siblings when her mother was killed in the accident. My obsession with Mansfield was heightened because of Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon. Anger brilliantly conflated fictional tabloid-like stories about celebrities, including Mansfield, but then would include a very real image of Mansfield's car crash scene.

Your show takes up the first three chambers of the downstairs gallery at Marlborough Chelsea. Did having three rooms to work with influence the work? Is there a three-act structure or narrative to the rooms?
I wanted the sound of my film in the back space to guide the feeling of the show. I like that idea of hearing a sound and not knowing exactly what it is, so that it leads you somewhere else. Also, the film becomes a sort of soundtrack for the entire show along with the sound of the air constantly inflating the heart.

It made me think about Disneyland, or a haunted house. The curiosity of the source of the sound leads you forward through a space. Walt Disney called this thing that lures you onward as "the weenie," like a hot dog on a stick that's used to lure a dog onward.
Wow, I never heard of the "weenie" – sounds kind of dirty. I guess you could liken that to Hitchcock's use of the term MacGuffin for the same type of thing.

It's a similar concept. In addition to three rooms, your show incorporates three mediums: the collages, the inflatable sculpture, and the large video projection. Did you plan the show knowing you wanted to incorporate this variety, or did it expand during the process of putting it together?
I shot the film first in 2014 and then worked on the collages and the last work I made was the inflatable sculpture. Once I knew the scale of the space I would be working in at the gallery, I scaled the sculpture to the space. I wanted the heart to look as if it is pushing against the walls so you could see its skin giving in to fit in the corner of the space. So it kind of mimicked the way our own skin shifts when we press against another body or surface.

The majority of your pieces are old movie posters for B-movies covered in carefully cut-out black velvet shapes resembling flowers. How did you arrive at this process? Did you have the posters already, or were you already cutting shapes out of black velvet?
I have been collecting posters and lobby cards and other film-related ephemera for years. But I didn't start actually using it to work on until a couple years ago, when I started painting on the film posters. For this show I cut into the actual posters and the process kind of gave me anxiety because the paper was so delicate since most of them are from the 60s or 70s. The cut works sort of drape over the black velvet in the frames and the florals turn into these deep voids.

For some reason I thought the velvet was on top of the posters.
The velvet is behind the cut posters – so it creates an illusion from a distance. Once you see the cut collages close up, then you notice the details and how it's put together... lots of hand work.

The giant inflatable sculpture is named Rocky. Do you feel like Rocky?
I found a Rocky poster made in Poland that had a graphic of a pair of conjoined boxing gloves to make a heart. The gloves were a gorgeous red, and I hope I can make it in red one day, but for this show I felt the black version made sense. The black version abstracts the shape of the gloves so you're not exactly sure what you're looking at until you see the sculpture dead on. Also I think the black version makes the heart have more a physiological look and makes the surface of the heart more seductive.

I watched Raymond amend the silkscreened title of your show with a pink pen, adding Ys so it appeared as he might write it out on Twitter. I heard it made the galley interns panic. How did you feel about it?
I'm so used to Ray drawing on the walls or any surface around us that it doesn't really faze me. I sort of expect it and I guess he felt he wanted to add something to the show? I wish I could have seen the gallery interns panicking – that would be funny. I feel bad though if they had to clean it up. Sorry, guys and gals, that my husband tagged the walls at my show. Thank god, my son wasn't there. He would have done the same thing.

The Pink Palace is up at Marlborough Chelsea until March 12, 2016.

Follow Nick on Instagram.

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Craig Broadley is standing in the pissing rain on the Kingston Bridge, an ugly motorway flyover that cuts Glasgow in two, his cell phone pressed to his ear like it's the only thing that can save his life.

In just over a year, he's spent £20,000 on cocaine. He's lost his roofing business, and he's on the verge of losing his girlfriend and his baby daughter. He is crying his heart out, spewing great big sobs.

On the other end of the phone, John Ferns of the Calton Athletic Recovery Group—who's been there and done things with drugs you can't even imagine—is telling him he is going to fucking die. It's time to make a choice.

Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electric can openers... But why would I want to do a thing like that?

Those opening lines of Trainspotting, Danny Boyle's 1996 film of Irvine Welsh's classic novel, are so iconic they're almost a cliché. The film—starring Ewan McGregor, Robert Carlyle, Johnny Lee Miller, and Kelly McDonald—defined a generation. This was drug-taking like we'd never seen on screen before—injecting, snorting, cooking-up, all done with gusto by junkies in Edinburgh's underbelly. There were the clubs, the parties, and the sex. Then there were the comedowns, overdoses, and terrifyingly trippy withdrawals.

And the reason it felt so real? "They got it from the horse's mouth," Willie Burns, one of the founding members of Glasgow's Calton Athletic Recovery Group, tells me.

"The Trainspotting team came here and got clued-up. These were also our stories that they were depicting," says the ex-addict turned mentor.

The 'Trainspotting' cast on the left, Calton Athletic on the right, from the opening five-a-side scene. Screen shots via YouTube

The Calton Athletic crew appeared in the Trainspotting credits as "special advisors," keeping the script writer, director, producer, and actors right on everything from how to shoot up authentically to what withdrawal really felt like.

"Danny Boyle, Ewan McGregor, and Johnny Lee Miller used to come to our meetings and sit in the back as part of their research," says Colin Nelson, whose claim to fame is that he booted a football into McGregor's face in the opening five-a-side scene. "They'd listen to what the life of a drug addict was like, the places it would take you."

Set up by former alcoholic and drug addict David Bryce in 1985, Calton Athletic Recovery Group is in Glasgow's East End. It's a working class area, once known for its violence—the territory of the infamous gang the Tongs. Even now, the life expectancy of a man in these parts hovers just under 70. Then, it was even lower. Drug addicts were dying in the hundreds. Those in impoverished schemes and once-industrial areas decimated by Thatcher suffered most.

Before Calton Athletic, if you wanted off heroin, you signed up to a script for a sickly-sweet, bright green dose of methadone.

Calton Athletic founders, Davie Main and Willie Burns

But these guys are not about half measures. This was about abstinence—getting fit and getting clean the hard way with other former hard men who had learned how to open up and cry about what had gone wrong. This was about creating a new sort of peer pressure.

"I was 20 when I came," says Davie Main, who met David Bryce at a treatment center. "There was no drink, no drugs, no going out. I thought my life had ended. But though I didn't like what I was hearing, I liked what I was seeing. They were healthy; they were smiling."

By 22, he was David Bryce's right-hand man, and they went on to run a seven-day-a-week service for men and women, as well as a hugely successful football team and a schools outreach program. But they clashed with authorities over their outspoken opposition to methadone: "It doesn't work. People are being sold down the river," he says.

Funding dwindled. In 2011, David Bryce died, and now, more than 25 years later, Main runs the show on a much reduced, voluntary basis.

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The "premises," as they all call their white-washed office, has seen better days; there are old cardboard boxes piled in corners, and it's so cold you can see your breath.

But the cuttings from Trainspotting days are still on the walls. And it's packed out when I go to meet them. It's warm with noisy chatter and bravado.

There's Bill Lynch, a recovering alcoholic, who's done 40 months (and 11 days and 23 minutes) of attending meetings with Calton Athletic and no longer wakes up in a pool of his own piss. Now, he's super fit and part of the Calton Athletic team going to Everest base camp this November.

And there's Brian Watt, who came here after he nearly died jumping off a building. He broke his back and both his arms and realized he couldn't return to a life of addiction.

Craig Broadley

But as everyone tells me, the most important person in the room is Broadley—the newest member. "I look at him, and I can feel his pain," says Burns. "Oh, I remember that."

"This is really fresh, very hard-hitting, and very emotional," Broadley admits. This is just his fourth meeting. "My daughter turned one in January, and I thought: I can't do this any longer. Cocaine just made me feel low, but I couldn't stop. I was taking it first thing in the morning, in my roofing van, off the back of the drill box, last thing at night. A friend used to be part of Calton, and he said to me: 'Here's the number. If you want to sort your life out, this is how you do it.' I made that call, and John Ferns answered it."

If you want to talk to someone about drugs without any judgement, Ferns—who has been in recovery for 13 years—is a pretty safe bet.

"My wee mammy was an abusive alcoholic," he says. "She committed suicide when I was ten—threw herself in the River Clyde."

John Ferns

His 17-year-old sister brought him up to be clean-cut until he "went out into the world" at 16, and it all changed. He started with joints and beer but soon found amphetamines and heroin.

"I've got to be honest. My first hit of heroin was fantastic," he admits. "My scheme was one where the windows and stairwells were boarded up. But heroin made it look like Barbados. But within weeks, I was craving it. Within months, I was selling my clothes, vinyl, anything I had. Within a year, I was robbing."

The party scene exploded in Glasgow, and Ferns added ecstasy to the mix. When he stopped being able to get cocaine up his nose, he turned to the crack pipe. He crushed whatever he could get his hands on, added water, and injected.

Colin Nelson, one of the originals from the 'Trainspotting' era, with two-year-old son Charlie

So what brought him to Calton? "I died," he says. "Choked to death in my own vomit in a stairwell and two paramedics managed to bring me back to life."

He woke up in hospital, and his sister took him home and locked him in her house for three weeks, where he rested in the fetal position, "a bag of bones wrapped up in skin."

"I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat. I had DTs. I was rattling, sweating, vomiting into a bucket at the side of the bed," he remembers. "One of my mates came up and said: 'I think Calton Athletic could help you.' I would have said yes to anything to get out of that house. But I came down here, and Calton Athletic taught me something: I had physically, mentally, and spiritually battered myself to the ground."

At Calton, he learned how to rebuild himself—mentally through the meetings and physically by working out. The spiritual came by putting the two together. One day, he realized he liked himself again. "I owe everything of substance in my life to Calton Athletic," he says.

As it turns out, with the help of Carlon Athletic, choosing life is not so bad.

Donate to Calton Athletic's Everest trip here.

Follow Karin Goodwin and Angela Catlin on Twitter.

Some dude's butt, great advice. Image via

This is not a guide on how to pick up. The internet is already jam-packed with those things. Here's what my editor sent me to find out: How can you make sure living at home during uni doesn't get in the way of finding true love and/or having a good night. The call for hot tips was generally met with the same response, "I'm the worst person to ask, I never picked up when I was at uni." But there was at least a handful of people who got laid during their tertiary years while living at home.

According to science, a lot of Australians under 30 are part of the Boomerang Generation, coming back to live with their parents at some point during their 20s. It's so expensive to live in Sydney, Melbourne (and increasingly Brisbane and Perth) that few people can afford to pay rent while studying. The Australian Bureau of Statistics estimates more than half of people aged 18-24 years have never moved out. So that's the first thing to remember if you're at uni and still living at home: You're not alone.

Not alone, but still at a disadvantage when it comes to picking up. Perhaps no response to the question, "Where do you live?" can kill the mood faster than "With my parents." But this is your life. Don't let a thing like having to sneak a prospective partner past your parents watching Law & Order: SVU get you down.

Forget student nights, try over 28s nights. Image via

Have a Strategy for Not Going to Your Place

Almost everyone I talked to had one big piece of advice: Be strategic with who you are flirting with. Sure attraction is important but also consider things like, where are you going to meet people? Uni bars are just crawling with other students who live at home. Try a backpacker bar instead. If you can deal with the whole dorm room thing, it's possibly less awkward than sneaking past dad. Plus they are some of the few remaining places where it's acceptable to order drinks like "cum shots," which are actually delicious. Otherwise there are always Over 28s nights, where the likelihood you'll find someone who's moved out of home is (hopefully) slightly higher.

"Preparation is key," one graduate advises. "Carry a backpack full of clothes with you everywhere you go. Then it'll just be easier to go to their place."

Uni camps also tend to be open slather. It's just like school camp except everyone is (technically) an adult and there are copious amounts of alcohol. Instead of being supervised by well-meaning teachers, the people in charge are just other bored students who are only interesting in making you do humiliating "bonding activities." (Topless wheelbarrow races anyone?) It's an environment designed to help awkward first years pick up.

Here's the definitive ranking of uni camps by likelihood of having sex with another person: Arts (sheer numbers), Science, Performing Arts, Commerce/Business (excluding economics), Christian Students' Union, Law, Engineering, Music, Fine Arts, Journalism, Economics.

Even though you are a private school boy with a swimming pool. Image via

You've Got to Set the Tone for the Evening

If there's one thing we can all learn from smarmy pick up artists it's this: Confidence is everything. Living at home is fine as long as you're good at making up excuses on the fly. "Put off mentioning you live at home as long as you can," a final-year graphic design student says. "If you make it to the pointy end of the night just tell them you're staying in an Airbnb." Honesty is always an option too: Insist your parents are really chill. "They are basically my roommates."

"Tell them your mum's 4WD is actually yours," advises a first-year medical student. "Pretend you are a crust punk squatter," says another. "Even though you are a private school boy/girl with a swimming pool and a tennis court at your loving parents' home."

The other angle is working your parents' sympathies. As one student who lived at home through all six years of a three-year Arts degree advises: "Make out as if you've got no hope of ever finding someone. Build it up and up, and then your parents will be begging for you to bring someone home."

Who wouldn't want to go back to your college dorm, complete with single bed? Image via

Location is Key, Know Your Emergency Exits

So you've found someone you are happy to get naked with, and they are happy to get naked with you too. Great work. This is a very important step. The next step is being cool with compromise.

A lot of people said passing off outdoor sex as "adventure" worked wonders for them. "Get creative about locations," said one social work student. "Golf courses make for fun night time adventures and turns in the sand trap." Another offers: "Furniture left out in hard rubbish isn't garbage, it's an opportunity."

"Going on exchange was a big one for me. At my uni you could go for up to a year," one graduate said. "I was living in mixed halls with students from all over the world. It doesn't really count for your grades, so most people just spend the whole time partying and hanging out."

Back at home, everyone's main priority was avoiding that late night, or early morning run in with the parents. All those ways you worked out how to sneak out of your house during high school? It's time to reverse engineer them as ways to sneak in without alerting anyone.

"If there's a granny flat at your parent's place, you're golden," says one film graduate. "That or tell your parents you're launching the next Apple and need to move into the garage." Of course if you're living at home, the morning after will always pose the risk of an inevitable family run in. Worst case scenario: "Make sure you know how to cook a good breakfast. It helps with the awkwardness."

So there you go, at least 15 rock solid ways to strike a balance between not paying rent and getting laid like you could. Of course, if you aren't going to move out the most important thing to do is decide that university isn't just going to be a continuation of high school. Be independent, be an adult, but don't be too proud to have sex on a golf course.

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Neal Brennan has, on the low, become like a "sun never sets on him" kind of entertainer. He's the kind of comic who's always on TV somewhere, even though you may not realize it. He's the voice of Samsung's phone ads that run through every big game—and it seems like there's a new ad every week—he's the director of Nike ads, and he's the co-creator of Chappelle's Show, which, thankfully, keeps popping up on Comedy Central all the time.

I know Neal, and the annoying thing about his success is that he's such a nice guy that you can't help but root for him. He was Scottie Pippen to Chappelle's Jordan on a championship team that won two titles—season one and season two—but his comedy in the years since then has shown he's a really funny guy in his own right. His stand-up shows and his podcast The Champs and his work directing Amy Schumer's show all make it clear how funny he is, and sometimes he gives off a glimpse of how smart he is, too. Neal's next big step is bringing his one man play 3 Mics to New York, playing off-Broadway at the Lynn Redgrave Theater from February 23 through March 3. I called him recently and asked him some questions about it.

VICE: So how do you explain the concept?
Neal Brennan: The concept is three mics onstage, spaced equally distant from one another. One is for stand-up, one is for one-liners, like things I couldn't put with anything else, and one is for true emotional confessions or short, emotional stories.

This is not a normal comedy show. It's not what you would do at a Caroline's. It's more emotional and deeper and broader. When I would do podcasts, I would have just as many people say, "Hey, you were really funny," as people who would say, "Hey, that thing you said about depression really helped me." And I've also seen friends go on Howard Stern or any of the shows and get emotional, and it's so much more interesting to me than just watching them be funny. I'm not going to say the market is flooded, but there are a lot of people doing comedy.

So why do this show then?
I had to say to myself, "What do I have to offer that other people may not have to offer?" I can think conceptually, and I have emotional depth that I can explain in a way other people can't. The reason why you see so many comedians at the top of the podcast list is that we can talk about stuff in a way that's compelling, even if it's not funny.

One thing you say a lot in your comedy is "If I were black..." How did you get to this place where you seem to have more racial empathy? Where does that come from in you?
I think early exposure to hip-hop and Spike 's movies. I mean, I just find the whole thing so absurdly wrong. Like, the whole thing. Racism and slavery. This is so not right, and it's so obvious and clear that it's not right. And then it's proximity. Most of racism is based on a lack of exposure. Once you're exposed to people, you're like, "Oh, I get it." Like, I've seen white people touch Dave's hair. And I'm like, "Ugh." I'm sure no one's ever touched your gorgeous hair, Touré. But I've just seen the inconvenience of race. Can't get a cab. Guess what that means—you're going to be late. Stuff like that... Dave used to say he would move slower around white people so as not to alarm them. He was almost explaining it to me in a lot of ways.

How did your friendship with Dave start?
The Boston comedy club. I dropped out of NYU, and we were like the only young guys. Me and him and Jay Mohr, who was young, like 18, 19. I gave Dave a tag for a joke, and his initial response was to shudder at someone giving him a tag because it's a little aggravating if you don't know the person. I was like, "Hey, maybe say this part after you're done with the joke..." At first he was like, "Ugh." But then he heard what I said and was like, "Oh, that could work." Then he tried it, and I think it worked.

What was the hardest part of working with him?
How many more of these questions you got? Did he die? Is there something you need to tell me? Is this going to turn into a profile piece on Dave's life?

Uh, yeah. Tardiness. That was the hardest thing with him.

That show gave you a ton of street cred. I bet you can probably go into almost any hood and say, "Hey, I made Chappelle's Show," and they'll be like, "Oh, let him through."
The best version of that ever was about ten years ago. I was with my girlfriend at the time who is mixed, and we were walking on 125th Street , and I could just feel these dudes staring at me and her. Like, Who's this motherfucker with a black girl? And we get close to them, and one of them goes, "Oh, shit. It's Neal!" And I didn't know the guys at all but all was forgiven. It was so goddamn funny to me.

So that show raked in a lot money, and you were a co-creator. Do you have to work now?
That's a tough question to answer. It's hard to say. It depends on how long I live, I guess.

Fair enough, but right now are you in a super comfortable position?
Yes. But I made money last year doing Samsung voiceovers. I directed a Nike commercial. That was a nine-day shoot.

Which one?
It's called "Fast." It was the dopest shit I've ever done in my life. It was Kobe, Serena, Richard Sherman, and they're all talking about how fast they are. I got to write it. I had Fincher's DP as my DP—Jeff Cronenweth. The most accomplished DP I've ever worked with. He did Fight Club. And he is, of course, the easiest and most accommodating DP I've ever worked with. It was a dream come true.

So are you going to become a director?
I can direct. I've directed a ton of spots in the last year, but I would like to be a comedian. The story of 3 Mics is the story of a guy who wants to be something and is sort of figuring out how he gets there.

When you reach that point that you don't have to work for money, does that artistically free you?
So many comedians are filthy rich now that the idea that it affects your work is just a thing that no one talks about. Kevin Hart grossed $100 million last year on the road—more than U2 and the Rolling Stones.

I'm not suggesting there's a lack of grit when you get to that point. I'm wondering, do you get freed and liberated to where you're like, "If they don't laugh, I'm still good, so I'll tell whatever joke I really want to?"
No. It still stings when they don't laugh. It stings. There's nothing worse than trying to be funny and not being funny. I think Conan was on some podcast talking about when he does a wedding toast, he's scared. The fear of public speaking is a primal fear. You can train your body to not be crazy when you're doing it, but it truly is a primal fear. Look, all money does is take a worry off of your list, but what you find is you have a general threshold, a general level of worry, and it gets filled up with other shit. So it's not, "Oh, I can relax." Instead, you just worry about other stuff. It's like you always have a certain amount of worry that you'll spend every day. You worry about the same amount about different stuff.

How did you become Mr. Samsung?
Somebody dropped out, and they needed someone the next day, and I went in and did it. That was for the LeBron one, where they were comparing the iPhone and the Samsung. And I just added this thing where I said LeBron's literally running away from his phone, and they liked my voice, which I didn't expect them to. I think they were like, "Oh, he's decent and can occasionally add something"?

It's a great job.
Oh, dude, trust me. I don't have to shower—it's like a mile from my house. I can bring my dog and shit.

You're on TV all the time with that. How often do they have you going in there and recording stuff?
Not that much. Maybe every other month.

And the sessions last how long?
Two hours.

So how do you create a new stand-up show? The creative process of a comedian is a total mystery to me. I have no idea about how one goes about writing a joke.
It's hand-to-hand. I have a show every Sunday that I do, and I spend Sunday afternoons writing, and it's based on things I've written in my phone. I look at it and try to cobble shit together.

You've been taking notes throughout the week.

Pope Francis waves upon his arrival at the stadium of Morelia, Michoacán State, Mexico on February 16. Photo by Alfredo Estrella/AFP/Getty Images

In May 1993, just outside the airport in the west Mexican city of Guadalajara, Juan Jesus Cardinal Posadas Ocampo was sitting in his parked white Mercury Grand Marquis when three vehicles packed with gunmen pulled up alongside and opened fire. The cardinal's car was riddled with 26 bullets, and a nearby vehicle was apparently hit 20 more times.

Cardinal Posadas, his driver, and five others were found dead.

Ultra conservative Liberal senator Cory Bernardi relaxing at home. Image via.

The Safe Schools Coalition, a taxpayer funded program which offers support services for LGBTI high school students around Australia, is now officially under review by the Federal government. Its material has been criticised by Liberal party MPs and Christian lobby groups as inappropriate for a teenage audience.

The decision to investigate the activities of the program has been met with condemnation from Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews, who took to Facebook to express his concerns that the Federal government wanted not only to investigate Safe Schools Australia, but ultimately shut it down.

The Safe Schools Coalition is a project of the nonprofit Foundation for Young Australians. A Labor initiative, Safe Schools received federal funding in 2013 and was launched officially by the Abbott government in 2014.

Safe Schools says it aims to create safe and inclusive environments for LGBTI high school students, as well as their families and teachers. It offers staff training programs, as well as online resources, and free consultation services.

Some of its online resources include a guide to hosting queer inclusive school formals, and tips for how to support school friends who have recently come out as queer. Over 500 Australian high schools have signed up to the coalition, with over 15,000 teachers accessing the program's resources.

Criticism of the "radical" Safe Schools program has come from the likes of Queensland senator Jo Lindgren, Queensland MP George Christensen, Tasmanian MP Andrew Nikolic, and South Australian Senator Cory Bernardi, who is well known for his particular brand of Christian-themed conservatism. Bernardi recently told the ABC that high school children were "being bullied and intimidated" into complying with the Safe Schools Coalition, and that the program "makes everyone fall into line with a political agenda."

Bernardi's support for investigating the program incurred a rare burst of emotion from federal opposition leader Bill Shorten, whose labelling of the backbencher as a "homophobe" has made him the social media hero of the day. Bernardi had been walking past a press conference given by Shorten when his standard issue heckling was met with the unexpectedly snappy response of "At least I'm not a homophobe either, mate."

The Safe Schools Coalition has come under fire from Christian groups since its inception. Take a look at this fairly hardcore Australian Christian Lobby website dedicated to exposing the "age inappropriateness" of the program's material. The website encourages visitors to "make a stand by emailing your State/Territory Member of Parliament and asking for this radical program to end."

Penning an essay about her experiences as an LGBTI advocate in response to the announcement, the CEO of the Foundation for Young Australians Jan Owen noted the "sad reality that in 2016 attempts to make our schools more inclusive and safe can be considered controversial. The fact is, that doing so is an issue of national importance."

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Olivia Sturgiss is a 19-year-old checkout chick from Bowral, NSW. She has almost 50,000 Instagram followers because—Olivia's own effervescent personality aside—she looks a lot like Taylor Swift. Luckily she's also a huge Swift fan, which makes getting snapped on public transport and dealing with online haters a little more bearable.

The similarities aren't just skin-deep. Olivia is a self-confessed "crazy cat lady," just like Taylor, which is why we took her to a cat-themed cafe in Sydney to talk about online stardom and play with some cats—mainly the latter. As it turned out looking famous is great, until it feels like you're living in a bubble that isn't yours.

VICE: Hi Olivia, so how did the whole Taylor Swift thing start?
Olivia Sturgiss: I'd be working at the checkouts at Target with no makeup on and had long brown hair and people would occasionally say, "You look a bit like Taylor Swift in the face."

Just before Taylor Swift's Red Tour I went to the hairdressers and I was complaining about how pale and sick I looked all the time. The hairdresser suggested I should lighten my hair so I got dark blonde hair with a fringe. When I went to the concert people started asking for photos. It was really surprising.

How did you feel when this started happening?
I was kind of paranoid because I didn't want people to think I was a try-hard. Of course I'm going to wear red lipstick and eyeliner at a Taylor Swift concert, like every other girl, but I also happen to have the haircut and similar features. Now I won't even have my hair done and people tell me all the time so I can't really escape it.

How has life changed for you since?
If Taylor is in the country it goes absolutely crazy. People will actually approach me on the streets. It's worse when I go out and there are lots of drunk people around. It's like getting cat-called but instead I get called Taylor Swift. People would just yell it out—I'm not a dog. They call out at me, "TAYLOR SWIFT!" while pointing directly at me. Then others go, "She doesn't even look like her" as if it's an insult. Grown men like to call out "DON'T WRITE A SONG ABOUT ME!"

Does that get annoying?
Depends on my mood and the day. I don't care what people say but the fact that they're saying it in a mean way—the tone of voice—that bothers me. Sometimes I'll feel really over people taking photos of me on public transport without asking. Someone once posted a photo of me on the train on Facebook with the caption, "Is this Taylor Swift?" Another time on the train, a stranger came up to me and was like, "My friend's on FaceTime can you say hi to them?"

On top of that you have almost 50,000 followers on Instagram.
Yeah, people always ask what it's like having fans. I don't really have fans. Taylor Swift has fans. I don't feel like I've done any significant work or anything to earn fans for myself.

I heard you got to meet the woman herself. What was it like?
So Taylor's people messaged me on Twitter during a concert and asked if I wanted to meet her. So I walked in and it was so surreal. It was like the second coming of Jesus. She was like, "Oh my god, you look like me." She was just ridiculously perfect, like you just wanted to punch her. She was that gorgeous. And she's so petite too, I thought she'd be tall and skinny like me but she's actually a lot smaller.

Now that you've found fame, does it come with any perks?
I'd feel like too much of a douchebag to use it to get things. At the concerts, all the parents who got their kids photos with me say I should charge people for photos. I always say no because I don't do this for profit. I'm a fan first and foremost so if people think that I look like my idol, that's cool. And while I do have attention on me, I can talk about things that I care about. I can raise awareness about uterine endometrial cancer because my mum passed away from it.

What are your plans for the future?
I'd like to travel around a lot. I've found other lookalikes on Instagram and we've been chatting and becoming friends. There's a Harry Styles lookalike who has 80,000 followers. Then there's another dead ringer for Taylor Swift and she lives in the UK. We chat on Facebook all the time and when I go to the UK we plan to go out together.

Would you recommend this experience?
I don't know if I'd recommend this to anyone. Sometimes it feels like the bad outweighs the good. There's the awesome stuff like meeting my idol, appearing on TV, and opportunities to build my own success. But then comes the harder things to deal with like people who stalk and message me constantly, people saying mean things on my posts online, people accusing me of trying to be Taylor Swift.

People have no respect for personal space and privacy. It's not like you have the luxury of having personal security like Taylor herself, and yet you get harassed just for looking like her. Sometimes it feels like I'm living the downside to Taylor Swift's life.

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