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Illustration by Brian Evans/Getty Images

The other day I was sitting in an MA-level class on Gender and Queer Blah Blah and my young professor said, "The penis and the... [cautionary pause] the female genitals." My classmate immediately responded, "There's a name for that," although he didn't dare say it. Later, in a private conversation, my professor, a man with a Ph.D. who's teaching graduate courses on feminism and sexuality, did the thing that most people do. He used the misnomer "vagina" instead of "vulva."

But a vagina does not a vulva make.

The vaginal opening is just one part of the vulva. The vulva makes up everything you see on the outside: the visible part of the clitoris (this is only the tip of the clitoris iceberg, the much larger part of the clitoris is found inside the body), the labia (inner and outer lips), the urethral opening (for urination or ejaculation), and the entry/exit point of the vagina.

"Vagina" is used incorrectly so often that it should come as no surprise that my highly educated professor used the wrong term. Even feminist texts and artworks, like The Vagina Monologues and The Great Wall of Vagina, fall into the same trap. Pretty much every time you see "vagina" in the media, it's misplaced for vulva.

Female sexual anatomy, something considered a natural fact, is actually socially constructed. Studies have shown the way the clitoris has gone in and out of medical anatomies throughout Western history. Danish anatomist Casper Bartholin's illustrations of the female "lust organs" from the 17th century showed the clitoral erectile tissue and the crura similar to the way they're depicted today. In the 1840s, German anatomist Georg Ludwig Kobelt drew an enlargement of the shaft of the clitoris similar to a penis, as it's known today. In the 1901 edition of Gray's Anatomy, the clitoris is labeled and somewhat prominently featured. Then, in the 1948 edition: POOF! The clit disappears in both label and graphic illustration. The primary organ of sexual arousal and orgasm for females was deleted from the staple textbook on human anatomy. Because the clitoris and the female orgasm aren't necessary for reproduction, they've been exceedingly ignored by science, in stark contrast to the penis.

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When we say vagina, we're collectively ignoring the visual aspect of female anatomy, the clitoris and the labia, with language. The vagina is the way that guys who have sex with girls come. Since Kinsey's 1953 landmark book Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, we've known that most women need direct clitoral stimulation (by a hand, a mouth, or some other object) to have an orgasm. And yet, how many times do we still see, in movies or television, the depiction of a woman's orgasm as a result of cock-penetration alone? That we call the female gentials "the vagina" speaks volumes about the politics of sex. "Vagina" keeps the focus on straight male pleasure.

Dr. Mithu Sanyal, author of VULVA, a cultural history of the vulva, believes ideas about the body are marshaled through words. "Language is connected to our perception of the world. What we can't name, we can't talk about, and ultimately, can't think about," she writes. Clinical psychologist Dr. Harriet Lerner calls this phenomenon of disregarding the clitoris and the labia "psychic genital mutilation." According to her, "Language can be as powerful and swift as the surgeon's knife. What is not named does not exist."

Today, many women, and even girls as young as 16, are taking this idea a step further and making their genitals invisible for real. Labiaplasty (slicing off part of the labia minora to make them smaller) is one of the fastest growing cosmetic surgeries in the UK and the US. Female genital mutilation is the ritual act of removing part or all of the external female genitals. It's performed in many African countries and is usually framed as incomparable to Western cosmetic genital surgery. Interestingly, the World Health Organization defines FGM as "all procedures that involve partial or total removal of the external female genitalia, or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons." Both vaginal rejuvenation and labiaplasty fall under the definitions provided by the United Nations for mutilation.

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Photo via Flickr user Philippa Willitts

In Berlin, a city famous for its progressive sexual values and history of gay rights campaigning, people are trying to counter this trend. Dr. Laura Méritt, owner of Sexclusivitäten, the German capital's longest running feminist sex shop, is currently collecting "pussy profiles" to demonstrate the diversity of vulvas and show that there is no general norm. You can contribute by filling out her survey online or in person. "Any university would be jealous! We have over 2,000 participants and what we found is incredible," Méritt said.

The results will be published in March as part of Mösenmonat ("Cunt Month"), an annual celebration where the vulva is honored in art exhibitions, performances, films, and workshops at Sexclusivitäten. This year's theme is "The Clitoral Truth." Méritt also edited the German version of the classic feminist anatomy text, A New View of a Woman's Body. The photographs in this book make clear that vulvas vary dramatically in shape, color, texture, and size.

Maybe, at the end of the day, the word "vulva" is too clinical for you. No problem. How about "pussy," "yoni," or a list of other words? Personally, I've always gone the reclaiming route. I say "cunt." The word "cunt" shares an etymological root with queen, kin, and country. Cunt shouldn't be the most offensive word in the English language. Cunts are great! They should be celebrated, not denigrated. Don't use the word "vagina" unless you're talking about a vagina. Using the word "vagina" incorrectly obscures women's sexual pleasure and continues the myth of The Mystery of Female Sexuality. Mysticism should not be confused with ignorance or censorship. Viva la vulva!

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Photo via Flickr user Dave Rutt

Board games are making a comeback. With cafes catering to analog gamers popping up around New York and titles like Settlers of Catan gaining a certain amount of trendy cache, it's safe to say that people are returning to the great American pastime of staring at pieces of cardboard and trading fake money. The greatest of all pieces of cardboard, of course, is Monopoly: the classic board game that takes six hours to finish and teaches children the pleasures of ruthless capitalism. Mary Pilon, a former sports reporter for the New York Times and business reporter for the Wall Street Journal, spent five years looking into the weird history behind Monopolyand found that, contrary to popular belief, it wasn't invented during the Great Depression. Also, it was created by an anti-capitalist feminist poet.

Out now from Bloomsbury, Pilon's The Monopolists is a deep-dive into the past century: from controversies surrounding the game's creation to recent Hasboro lawsuits. I spoke with Pilon to learn more about Monopoly's anti-capitalist roots, the weird world of patents, and the rightful inventor of America's favorite game.

VICE: How did you end up writing about Monopoly? Are you a big fan?
Mary Pilon: I'm a big games nerd. I grew up playing a lot of video games and board games. But this whole project came about by accident. In 2009, I was writing about the economy at the Wall Street Journal, which was—as you can remember—really depressing. In one piece, I thought I'd just have a throwaway line about Monopoly being invented during the Great Depression. Then I started to do research and came across Ralph [Anspach]'s lawsuit. I reached out to him and said I was a reporter at the Journal, trying to learn about Monopoly. I wrote about his legal battle, and kept researching. So much business coverage is so technical—you're writing about derivatives and investment banks—so to get involved in the board game world was great.

Wait, what was the Monopoly lawsuit about?
In the early 1970s, this guy Ralph was living in the Bay Area. He was very left wing, politically. He made a game called Anti-Monopoly, trying to teach people about the evils of Monopoly. It's not long before he hears from Monopoly's attorneys, saying that he couldn't make Anti-Monopoly. Ralph, like me—like everybody—thought this man Charles Darrow had invented the game, but [over the course of his lawsuit] he unearthed this whole scandal, that this woman had invented Monopoly in 1904.

Hs legal battle hinged on proving this, what he called the " Monopoly lie." I originally started researching his lawsuit because any time you have a source you want to make sure their story checks out. But this was the first time where I finished a story and I had way more questions. I was spending my weekends at the the New York Public Library, and I used my vacation days to fly out to San Francisco and meet with Ralph in person. He had boxes of documents and photographs that I began to report off of; his case hatched open all these historical records. I shipped all of those to New York and just started with that.

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Photo via Flickr user MTSOfan

What was the most surprising thing you came across in your research?
I was surprised that the game wasn't just invented so long before the Great Depression, but by a woman. Female inventors a century ago were often overlooked and the fact that one was so pivotal in creating an economic game was highly unusual for her time. The more I learned about Lizzie Magie, the more strange and unusual the story of Monopoly became. Its creation came from what many historians would deem an unlikely source.

Who was Lizzie Magie?
I actually thought I might write a Lizzie Magie biography! She was a feminist. She had these really outspoken views about how women were being treated at the time, how they were being paid. She wrote short stories and poetry, and over and over again in her writing these themes of justice and inequality kept coming up. The idea that she would make this board game to teach the evils of monopoly and spread her political views made a lot of sense.

I didn't set out to write a feminist book, I set out to write a book about the game. But the fact that that's the direction it took is fascinating. Since [ The Monopolists] has come out, I've heard a lot from women in tech. More and more of these stories are coming out; whether you're a woman or a persecuted ethnic minority, there are all sorts of inventions and things that were created by a more dynamic group of people than we realize, because often they just got erased by history. Lizzie Magie, if you think about her time period and women then, it makes sense that she would have been mostly forgotten. One of the last traces we have from [Magie] is on the 1940 US Census, where she listed her occupation as "Maker of Games"—even though she had so many other occupations—and her income is zero.

Why do we think that Monopoly was invented by Charles Darrow, then?
For years, the Darrow story was the commonly told one. Even if it isn't accurate, it's a really romantic tale. It's a classic Cinderella, Horatio Alger, rags to riches narrative. I think we're all intoxicated by that because on some level, we want to relate to it ourselves. Who doesn't want to dream that they can have a "eureka!" moment and become a millionaire instantly?

What was the message behind Magie's version of the game?
The Landlord's Game, ironically, was devised to teach people about the evils of the monopolists of her time. In a 1902 issue of the Single Tax Review, [Magie wrote], "It might well have been called the Game of Life, as it contains all the elements of success and failure in the real world, and the object is the same as the human race in general seems to have, i.e., the accumulation of wealth."

So is your next book on Settlers of Catan?
I love Settlers but I'm still in recovery from my first book. Maybe Clue. I have no idea. This took five years. I don't regret it for a second, but this book took longer than any game of Monopoly I've ever played.

Buy The Monopolists, out now from Bloomsbury.

Follow Jennifer Schaffer on Twitter.

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For more Berliac, check out his website and blog, and follow Berliac on Twitter.

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In June of 2011, the Wall Street Journal published a pearl-clutching jeremiad against the new darkness oozing from the genre of young adult fiction. "A careless young reader—or one who seeks out depravity—will find himself surrounded by images not of joy or beauty," warned the author, Megan Cox Gurdon, "but of damage, brutality and losses of the most horrendous kinds." God forbid the children of 9/11, endless war, and the worst economic depression since the last one should read about damage, brutality or loss, eh?

In high dudgeon, the first author Gurdon examines is Andrew Smith, whose 2011 novel, The Marbury Lens, told the story of a teenage boy who escapes a brutal kidnapper and finds a pair of glasses that allow him to see an alternate world of constant warfare: a symbolic exploration of the duality that many American children were experiencing at the time, growing up relatively safe in a world that was said to be falling apart / at war / on fire. If the volume on the violence in The Marbury Lens is turned up, that's because everything in adolescence is set to eleven.

And eleven is where Smith's books begin. In Grasshopper Jungle, an Iowa teenager's joyful sexual confusion plays out against an apocalyptic backdrop of man-made super insects that hatch from the bodies of the boys who beat him up. In Smith's new novel, The Alex Crow, a young Syrian refugee finds himself the newly adopted son of a deranged (though well-intentioned) scientist who works on reanimating dead species for the US government to use as living spies. Then the kid goes to summer camp. Smith's books are like that: zany without being whimsical, of-this-world without being limited by its conventions.

At times, Smith's books can be uneven. One of the less developed bits in The Alex Crow follows a "melting man" driving cross country in a U-Haul truck packed with a homemade dirty bomb; the payload of the bomb far outweighs the pay off of the plot line. But female characters are Smith's real Achilles heel: he doesn't have many of them and they tend toward the stereotypical.

Yet despite these real issues, Smith's work shines. In a market oversaturated by trends (Vampires! Zombies! Cancer!), his novels are fresh and exciting. His male characters are allowed to explore sexuality in all of its positive and negative implications, a breadth of experience that goes beyond gay or straight and into something like Freud's idea of the polymorphously perverse. And for all its adolescent humor, his prose is excellent. The Alex Crow features some of the best euphemisms for masturbation I've ever read. (See: "upload some streaming data.")

With The Alex Crow coming out next month, VICE sat down with Smith to talk about the book, his inspiration, and the state of the world today.

VICE: Where did the idea for The Alex Crow come from?
Andrew Smith: I teach a group of high school students, who are non-English speaking, from all over the world. A few years ago I started getting kids coming in from Syria, during probably the worst of the Syrian civil war. The first boy was 15. His family had left everything they owned in Syria, went across the border into Lebanon, into refugee camps, and then to the United States. And within days he was taking high school classes with thousands of Californians.

I wanted to tell a story like that, about somebody who found himself here, and then was confronted with all of the strangeness that is so pervasive here.

Your villains are often big corporations with military ties. Coincidence or anti-capitalist conspiracy?
Definitely not a coincidence. I think we're getting to the point—we're maybe even past the tipping point—where as a species, human beings have chosen to do things with little concern for their long-run effects. I think there are plenty of people out there who sit back passively, shake their heads and say, as is so often said in Grasshopper Jungle, "That's probably not a good idea." And yet we just keep doing those things over and over. So it's a really important element in the things that I write.

You also don't seem afraid to explore the sex lives of teen boys—everything from the confusion of being attracted to your gay best friend to the trauma of sexual assault during war.
There are an awful lot of things that people are, for whatever reason, timid to talk about, and sexuality in adolescence is one. Kids ask me about that all the time. Especially boys. They'll quietly say things like "Wow, you wrote about this. How do you feel about that? How do your kids feel about this stuff?" They're trying to feel out some kind of an answer, because they're curious. I think these are natural experiences during adolescence. So I tell them I'm not afraid of words, of talking about anything that I think is real or pertinent.

On the flip side, it sometimes seems like there isn't much of a way into your books for female readers. Where are all the women in your work?
I was raised in a family with four boys, and I absolutely did not know anything about girls at all. I have a daughter now; she's 17. When she was born, that was the first girl I ever had in my life. I consider myself completely ignorant to all things woman and female. I'm trying to be better though.

A lot of The Alex Crow is really about the failure of male societies. In all of the story threads, there are examples of male-dominated societies that make critical errors, whether it's the army that Ariel falls in with at the beginning, or the refugee camp, or Camp Merrie-Seymour for boys, or the doomed arctic expedition, they're all examples of male societies that think that they're doing some kind of noble mission, and they're failing miserably.

Follow Hugh Ryan on Twitter.

On VICE we went to Antarctica to explore climate change in the premier episode of VICE on HBO Season 3. In the latest edition of THUMP's explorative SUB.Culture series, we delve into Montreal's thriving dance music scene. On NOISEY, legendary filmmaker and music documentarian Lance Bangs went on tour with New Brunswick trio Screaming Females to record the band's life on the road. This is the latest on VICE.

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Photo by Ali Mohammed/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

In the fight against ISIS, the front lines are etched by blood-stained sand and the calculations of strange bedfellows. The same Shiite militiamen who partner with the United States to battle ISIS in Syria and Iraq might also wish us harm, when we're not converging on the same target.

Not all of these militia groups pledge allegiance to Iran, the Shiite stronghold trying to position itself as a champion for Muslims and minorities against Sunni jihadists like ISIS. But the influx of Shiite fighters reveals the tendrils of Iran's influence. Shiite militias that aid us in a pragmatic, Machiavellian way also help sustain the Assad regime in Syria and, through retribution against Sunnis, feed the entrenched, sectarian animus that defines Iraqi society. As more forces are activated to combat ISIS, many scholars have argued that Iran stands to gain, on the ground in Damascus and Baghdad and in the zoomed-out power game.

Among them is Phillip Smyth, a researcher at the University of Maryland and adjunct fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. In an in-depth study on Shiite militarism, Smyth argues that the militias represent a mobile army of Iran's bidding. VICE spoke to Smyth about the future of Iraq, Iran's foreign policy, and the consequences of sectarian war.

VICE: You believe that the US should reaffirm its commitment to a unified Iraq. Can you elaborate?
Phillip Smyth: The United States has pushed that we wanted a more inclusive government in Baghdad, one that would be accepting of Sunni, Shiite, and the multitude of minority groups. Frankly, the Iraqi government has become a Shiite-dominated institution. Don't get me wrong; many of these Shiites were democratically elected. However, there is a project going on where certain ministries, in almost a feudalistic form, have taken control through very sectarian Shiite parties, and Sunnis feel very, very left out. This allows for the growth of ISIS. I think a lot of people tend to ignore that factor.

Think about this: Iraqi Sunni tribes normally would not have gone over to what was then AQI, Al Qaeda in Iraq. They fought alongside them, but then they got sick of them and joined the Sahwa Movement (the "Sunni Awakening"). Then, all of a sudden, ISIS is gaining lots and lots of popularity because there are these grievances in the Sunni community with the Shiite government. And those were never really addressed.

The US needs to firmly keep coming out and saying we support an inclusive government that doesn't make Sunnis feel isolated. As a state, we have generally supported the rights of many different groups living under the national banner.

You argue that what appears as an organic flow of Shiite fighters into Syria is really an orchestrated effort by Iran.
There is no way anyone can deny that Iran has not only guided but controlled the flow of fighters for the most part, and it doesn't mean they weren't working with Assad. They altered the narrative of the war. I mean, how do you get Shiite jihadist foreign fighters to go to Syria? First, they manufactured a need for this holy war, where Iran was very big on promoting a defensive jihad, of defending Shiite holy sites in Syria against Sunni extremists, in particular the golden-domed Sayyeda Zainab shrine. And it resonated with a lot of people. They understood the romantic pull it would have on many.

Then there is the Hezbollah influence. And you have Iraqi Shiite forces that have direct ties to other Iranian proxies: Ketaib Hezbollah; the Badr Organization; Asaib Ahl al-Haqq. All of these fighters were showing up and it's most certainly not an organic move. I think there is some level of genuine volunteering. But we are talking about a recruitment program that is huge. Iran is in the background leading this, filtering in fighters not just from Iraq, but from Afghanistan and other "exotic" locales.

The real way to kind of tell the sectarian war was getting hotter was to look at the funerals. In Iraq they would send the bodies to Iran first. It's a highly organized effort by Iran and they manage it so fluidly and so well and we are seeing the effects today.

We've seen the threat of ISIS. What threat do Shiite militias pose?
It depends on the Shiite militia. But if we are talking about these Iranian direct proxy groups, it's a monumental threat. And I say that because they demonstrated a very sophisticated manner of being able to attack American and coalition forces when they were still occupying Iraq. They have advanced weaponry, advanced tactics; they have a state backer. Beyond that, they have their own radical extremist ideology, which is highly anti-American. But then there is another long-term goal. If American policy is to build a more inclusive Baghdad and pull Sunnis out of the clutches of ISIS, what happens when the main forces on the ground executing attacks against ISIS, and by extension the Sunni community, are these radical and sectarian and extremist Shiite groups? That doesn't really build much consensus. It hurts the long-term policy.

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Photo by Ali Mukarrem Garip/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

What is the alternative to relying on Shiite militias if Iraqi security forces are inadequate?
This is a huge problem. And I think it goes beyond Iraq just having a functional security force. Because you have to remember, when we are talking about Shiite militia groups, many of them have not only infiltrated but now control large sections of the security forces.

I would argue that there has been an active move by the militias to keep the Iraqi military weak. Why is that? One: it allows them to project power more effectively. Two: It means that the country is reliant upon them for their own security. And three: there are elements of the Iraqi military who don't like the Shiite militias, who may be Shiite themselves or are Iraqi nationalists—and this is a good way to keep them in check.

I don't believe that one of these solutions is to ally yourself with the lesser of two evils. Iran plays 3D chess and we are still learning how to get the checkers board out of the box. I don't think anybody wants ISIS to exist or to fester, but then again, do you want the replacement for that to be a hyper-radicalized sectarian militia-apparatus with revenge on its mind?

Many Shiite militias are believed to have committed human rights violations.
I have a number of social media profiles where I follow Shiite militias. In the past month and a half I don't think there's been a single day where I've not seen a video or a photograph showing some kind of abuse, what we'd call a human rights violation, or possibly a war crime going on on camera. And most would respond: Who cares. It's happening to an ISIS guy and he deserves it. But we don't even know who that is. We don't know if it's an ISIS guy. It could be some Sunni villager.

How do the West's Sunni Arab allies view the rise of the Shiite militias in Syria and Iraq?
They view this as a long-term regional power struggle. And it's eroding our alliances with them. They are scared about what's going to happen when the militia guns eventually turn on them.

Follow Hamza Shaban on Twitter.

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Photo via Flickr user Nick Harris

There have been soldiers stationed outside my front door for the past eight weeks. It started with two, and now there are sometimes four.

Immediately following the Charlie Hébdo shootings on January 7, 10,412 soldiers were stationed at "vulnerable locations" across the city. I live in an ordinary building in a residential and populaire (meaning working-class and ethnically mixed) neighborhood in northeast Paris. My backyard is the Parc de Belleville, not the Champs Elysées. Before this, I had no idea my neighborhood was considered "vulnerable."

France's national security alert system is called Vigipirate. I can't be totally sure of how this term sounds to a native French-speaker from France, but as a nearly-native French-speaker from Canada, to me it sounds like a kid's cartoon on YTV. Since the shootings, the Vigipirate rating has been at the highest level—"attack alert"—across the Ile-de-France region that encompasses Paris and its suburbs.

On January 12, the French Defense Minister, Jean Yves le Drian, said, "This is the first time that our troops have been mobilized to such an extent on our own soil." He admitted that the deployment involves "almost as many men as we have in our overseas operations."

Enter the Vigipirates. I can't remember them arriving, but all of a sudden, they were here.

At first, I came home from the grocery store making sure my hands were visible, not concealed in my pockets, and tried to make eye contact with one or both of the soldiers before sharply diverting my gaze. Sometimes we'd exchange a quick bonjour or bonsoir, but that depended more on proximity than disposition.

I felt confused as to why they had been stationed outside my front door. I felt afraid of why, too. There was even some defensiveness: We don't need you, I thought. We get along fine without you.

But as the weeks passed, and it became clear that these 20-year-olds with guns were my new neighbors, my defensiveness abated. The confusion and fear were still present, but I had questions, and I wanted answers. I ventured a conversation. I realize now that it was the sort of conversation that parents have with stubborn toddlers asking why the sky is blue.

- Why are you here?
- Because it's a vulnerable zone.
- But why?
- Because there's a nursery school.
- Is it a special nursery school?
- There could be some Jewish kids.
- So it's a Jewish nursery school?
- No. There could also be some Muslim kids.
- So it's a normal one.
- [Nod.]
- How long will you be here for?
- We don't know.
- When will you know?
- We don't know.

And I believe that's the truth: they don't know the answers any more than I do.

During the first Iraq War, an anthropologist named Emily Martin conducted a study of how we think about immunity. Her research showed that "popular publications depict the body as the scene of total war between ruthless invaders and determined defenders."

As Eula Biss points out in her recent book, On Immunity, many scientists even deny that this military imagery is a metaphor. It is, they insist, simply "how it is." Biss continues: "The body employs some cells as 'infantry' and others as the 'armored unit,' and these troops deploy 'mines' to explode bacteria, while the immune response itself 'detonates like a bomb.'"

If we imagine the immune system as a war zone, how do we imagine a war? It seems clear that the soldiers have been stationed across the city largely for show. The French government understandably wants to display that it's doing everything it can to protect its people, though it is a risk to make it seem as though the people need protecting.

Maybe not everyone feels protected, though. I'm a 27-year-old white woman, and while the soldiers' presence made me feel uneasy at first, I am part of the demographic that is likely to feel safeguarded. But I wonder how my neighbors feel—the teenagers, many of whom come from North Africa, who attend the high school across the street; the Senegalese family who run a local print shop; the man from Algeria who runs the community theater. Do they feel the soldiers are watching out for them? Or do they worry that they're being unfairly observed as targets?

The fact that the three terrorists—the Kouachi brothers, who gunned down 12 people in the Charlie Hébdo editorial meeting, and Amedy Coulibaly, who murdered the police officer and hostages in the Kosher supermarket—were all born and raised in France was particularly difficult to come to terms with. The press tracked their childhood and upbringing, mapping it out for the public: born in the 10th arrondissement, radicalized in the 19th; met in the beautiful Buttes Chaumont park to perform military-style training exercises. It's as if the geography offered a way of both understanding their outlooks, and isolating the place where their vision mutated. If it happened to them, we wanted to know, could it happen to anyone?

[body_image width='1024' height='688' path='images/content-images/2015/03/05/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/05/' filename='the-new-occupation-of-paris-body-image-1425594497.jpg' id='33474']

The Parc de Buttes Chaumont in northeast Paris. Photo via Flickr user Jean-Francois Paris

The definition of "homegrown terrorism" reminds me of how malignancy is described: these men were considered a cancer that had grown in the country; our own body had turned against us.

The comparison to the immune system goes further. One idea that Biss develops throughout On Immunity is that "we owe each other our bodies." She's speaking of vaccination, but I'm thinking of the monumental Marche Républicaine, where it seemed as though all of France took to the streets—giving our bodies to the body politic, even though many of us were afraid—to prove that we outnumbered those who threatened us. That seems more like an immune system to me. We marched nearly four million strong, united against something that was both inside and outside of ourselves.

For weeks, it seemed as though the soldiers just transformed from one pair to another. I never saw how the handover happened. Then, in the early hours of pre-dawn when my partner was getting a taxi to the airport, I saw it go down. The whole thing was so swift, so sudden, that by the time R had taken the elevator from the sixth floor to the first, the camo-print truck had come and gone. The soldiers finishing their shift had climbed in the back of the covered pick-up and the new ones had taken their place.

"Did you see that?" I called down to R.

"See what?"

The next time I saw the truck was several weeks later, in the middle of a weekday afternoon. The truck stayed for several minutes this time, and the group of soldiers talked for a while. A few were sitting in the back of the truck, two were leaning against the side of it, and the pair stationed on the stoop had adopted a casual attitude. An elderly man with a cane and a white flat-cap walked by slowly, not even looking, as if this was the sort of thing he saw every day.

Now I sometimes see the soldiers at the grocery store, or taking out their iPhones to give people directions. I no longer worry about making it clear to them that I come unarmed. How quickly we adapt.

It's been a cold winter, and I often think of the soldiers standing outside of the blue gates to the nursery school next to my apartment on the long, rainy February nights. They never seem to talk to one another; I wonder what they think about to pass the time.

(A confession: I've not quite lost that childhood fear of people breaking into my room in the night, and lately, when I've woken up with that mild, vague anxiety, I've felt relief in remembering that the soldiers are outside my front door.)

One night, when I was coming home in the early hours of the morning from a party, I climbed the bridge that crosses the disused train line behind my apartment—the petite ceinture, where kids from the social housing block play in the day, and homeless people sleep at night—and was surprised to notice that I felt grateful knowing the soldiers would be waiting there for me. But when I came down the other side, they were not there at all. I almost felt abandoned.

When I went out the following morning, though, they were back. As if nothing had changed. Over the past couple of weeks, while they sometimes disappear again for a day or a night, they always come back.

But when will it be OK to stop, for real? When will it be the right time to let the guard down? I'm speaking of both the government and the individuals it governs. If you made your profile picture JE SUIS CHARLIE, when did you, or when will you, feel it's appropriate to switch back to you smiling on a beach?

Oddly, the soldiers' presence makes that brief period of terror more distant in my mind. I rarely think of them as a consequence to the Charlie Hébdo attacks; at this point, they seem like their own thing. A new reality. And one that, against all evidence, no longer scares me.

In Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag says that the clearest and most truthful way of thinking about diseases is without recourse to metaphor. Maybe this is the way we have to think about war, too, and of the soldiers that are still standing on thousands of front doorsteps across Paris. But I don't think I know how to do that.

Follow Harriet Alida Lye on Twitter.

I first met Martin Slepcik and his family while taking photos in Cliftonville, England. I would see them out and about almost every time I visited the coastal town, and they became one of the focal points of the project I was working on. Then one day, without any warning, they disappeared.

Neighbors told me the family had returned to Slovakia. Hoping to visit them and continue the photo series, I asked around town for an address or phone number. All I learned was that they'd gone to a place called Lunik IX, and that I shouldn't take my dog there, as he'd be eaten. Some people I spoke to said the area was straight out of District 9.

Lunik IX is built into the hills and woods outside Kosice, a small, picturesque European city. It has everything you could ask for in the way of shopping, entertainment, and infrastructure, which makes Lunik IX even harder to wrap your head around once you arrive.

I'd done some basic online research about Lunik IX, though a lot of articles were a couple of years old and claimed it had been demolished. But it's very much still there. The project was originally built in the late 1970s to house Roma alongside soldiers and policemen, a grand social experiment typical of Communist-era Czechoslovakia. Eventually all but the Roma moved away, and today much of the neighborhood lacks running water, electricity, and heating. Roma experience extreme prejudice in Europe, and opportunities in the ghetto are nil.

Even from a distance you can tell this place shouldn't be standing, let alone occupied—or over-occupied, as it's been for decades. Lunik IX looks bombed out. Burns and smoke stains mark its walls, and household rubbish is stacked well over a story high. Most streetlights and windows are broken, and at night people roam with flashlights and phones to see where they're walking. There's a direct line of sight to Optima, a shiny modern shopping mall that taunts Lunik IX from across a highway intersection.

Over two visits to Martin and his family, I took photos of the project and gave Martin disposable cameras to capture his own experience of this strange, dystopian ghetto. Here's what we saw.

BEST ALBUM OF THE MONTH

COURTNEY BARNETT: Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit (Mom + Pop)

Aussie Courtney Barnett has a super-secret pocketknife that cuts cleanly through the bullshit of social norms. It neatly slices up the gnarled mass of convoluted dating games and traditions that need to be lifted to the light. The rest of us might be self-important, chests all puffed out, but Barnett's chest is concave. She uses that same knife to pop holes in our own chests, deflating us to proper size. Take, for example, "Nobody Really Cares if You Go to the Party." The title says it all, and, well, when a song tells me it's OK to stay in bed, away from people, I will take that shit as gospel.
B. GRIMM

WORST ALBUM OF THE MONTH

CLARENCE CLARITY: No Now (Bella Union)

Clarence Clarity is a creepy indie-funk guy who's on one of those "let's-make-things-weird-and-disruptive" kicks that aim to throw a seditious wrench into the works of boring old popular culture. And it's working, because Apple's latest big-name signing, Zane Lowe, has already declared him, with forthright vagueness, "part of the future—he's pushing the boundaries on every level, sonically and lyrically." Shit! What he didn't mention is that this is one of the top-ten most irritating albums this century. No Now? No thanks.
JENNIFER JUPITER

BEST COVER OF THE MONTH

ATA KAK: Obaa Sima (Awesome Tapes from Africa)

This is magnificent. Ata Kak is like the Ghanaian Sugar Man, except much better than that makes him sound. He recorded this mix of highlife, beatboxing, hip-house, electro-funk, and Francis Bebey–style minimal Afropop in 1994, but the tape—which was limited to 50 copies—vanished without a trace. When Brian Shimkovitz started the Awesome Tapes from Africa blog in 2006, this was the first find he shared, and it sparked a minor internet conniption, leading to Ata Kak becoming a word-of-mouth sensation. Any hype generated by this hectic, accidentally pitched-up, and slightly wonky slice of pop brilliance, though, is thoroughly deserved.
SPATULA FLANGE SKYWALKER

WORST COVER OF THE MONTH

TWO-9: B4FVR (Ear Drummer/Interscope)

Weed and skateboards are cool, but who ever learned something about human nature from weed or a skateboard? It's a good thing one of the Rae Sremmurd duo comes over to remind us what life is like by yelling he's a functioning member of society, or this could become one of those parties that you think is going to be lit but ends up being a few dudes in cool clothes sitting around and checking their phones.
DOUBLE EFF

BIG SEAN
Dark Sky Paradise
GOOD Music/Def Jam

You know when a meme has been shared so many times that even though you know it's dumb you have to admit you kind of enjoy it? That's Big Sean's career: He kept popping up, and for every two songs where he was cheesy or offbeat or vulgar, he had a third where there was a redeeming punch line or verse. And then it got to the point where he made the perfect DJ Mustard song with DJ Mustard and his album was actually weird and funny and cool enough that suddenly Big Sean was a rapper you looked forward to hearing on a song. It is 2015, and now Big Sean is good.
FAMTHONY FAMTANO

YOUNG FATHERS
White Men Are Black Men Too
Big Dada

Young Fathers are kinda like Scotch. Like, I feel as a semi-intelligent adult human I should like it. It's complex and smart, and a lot of complex, smart people like it. It takes a while to get. But guys. Scotch tastes like fucking garbage bacon. Young Fathers aren't exactly garbage bacon, but they certainly aren't... regular bacon. At times they seem genuinely on to something—channeling the more accessible TOTR discography, splashing around with playful pop. Sometimes interesting drumbeats happen. But in general, it seems all over the place and hell-bent on its complexity. Just be real and order bourbon.
B. GRIMM

TECH N9NE
Special Effects
Strange Music

Maybe it's my roots in the jaw-grindingly rural South, but I really, really like meth rap. What's meth rap, you ask? Anything by dudes who rap so fast and aggressively that it would be really funny if they ever made a love song. This is the kind of rap that dudes who do meth listen to, since the only way to take in all of the words at once is to be on meth. Tech N9ne is the boss don of meth rap, because he's from Kansas City, Missouri, which I'm pretty sure is one gigantic meth lab. Anyways, next time you blow a rail of crystal, slap on some Tecca Nina, you'll thank me later.
ERIC PUNDERMANN

BRODINSKI
Brava
Bromance

Who knew that you could take hard trap rappers from Atlanta and throw them in the studio with a French techno producer and end up with something that sounds like all the fun parts of the last Kanye album but on space meth? Brodinski, that's who. This record reminds me of all the movies in which a robot plays the hero.
JOHNNY BRUHVO

DRAKE
If You're Reading This It's Too Late
OVO Sound/Cash Money/Republic

I dunno, I'm kind of over Drake. Like, Take Care is some Marvin Gaye–level sad-egomaniac brilliance, but ever since then he's mainly just rapped about how dope it is to be Drake. Which I sort of get—every rapper raps about how dope it is to be himself, but when Drake does it, it's like he's emphasizing how dope it is to not be you. Which is kind of this shitty psychological warfare waged against everyone who isn't Drake. I already can't afford to get my car washed; I don't need Drake telling me every 30 seconds that he's going to steal my girlfriend. He used to be the greatest rapper in the world because he was relatable, but now he's just sort of a dick.
ROBESMAN

JAM CITY
Dream a Garden
Night Slugs

It's a noble aim, trying to rewire electronic dance music to address 21st-century anxiety and the corrosive effects of capitalism on the human spirit. Guess the problem comes when you get the finished record and it feels a bit like an 80s Prince album with a swirling black hole of depression where the thorny little penis should be.
LUIGI PATAZONI

DJ SOTOFETT
Drippin' for a Tripp
Honest Jon's

If you've ever wanted to know what mysterious Norwegian DJ Sotofett is all about but were too afraid to ask, then the bumper Drippin' for a Tripp lays things out pretty sweetly. Between his fruity disco cuts and hectic junglist workouts, Sotofett hooks up with kindred spirits Jaakko Eino Kalevi, Phillip Lauer, and Gilb'r for several tracks of soft Balearic noodling and sunny calypso riddims. Listen closer and you'll realize it's the sound of bumming around a beach in Goa with some funny-looking Eurotrash who by the end of the trip are your best buddies.
THANIDE NEUTRON

ERRORS
Lease of Life
Rock Action

The wee Scottish island of Jura is where George Orwell lived when he wrote 1984 and where art pranksters the KLF claim to have burned $3 million in cash. Just in case its place in popular culture looked a bit shaky, we can now add that Glasgow's Errors recorded Lease of Life there, presumably in the hope that some of the island's radical allure would rub off on them. And it did, or they at least worked out how to use a synth properly and combined this with some meaningful life experiences and a choir, because this album is soulful and uplifting and satisfyingly weird. It might even be moving. Never thought I'd say this, but Errors are actually quite good.
GINGER ROGERS

JLIN
Dark Energy
Planet Mu

As exciting and weird as a lot of footwork is, let's have it straight: It usually sounds like it was made by accident because a dog pissed on a badly wired sampler attached to a sound system in a crack den. By harsh comparison, the luxurious debut by Jlin feels like a limo ride through all the frightening bits of Blade Runner on codeine and diazepam.
YOU'RE THE ONE FOR ME, ROY BATTY

PALE BLUE
The Past We Leave Behind
2MR

Grumpy New Jersey disco don Mike Simonetti cut ties with Italians Do It Better, the label he founded with Johnny Jewel. Now he's hooked up with another Mike—Mike Sniper of Captured Tracks—to found label 2MR, and he has this new band in the bargain. It's a collaboration with Elizabeth Wight of Silver Hands, and if I tell you their woozy dance-floor raptures aren't exactly light-years away from Glass Candy, that's certainly not to rain on anyone's parade.
EL PEE

RO MARON
Collected #1
Musique Pour la Danse

In the space of about 36 months at the end of the 80s and the start of the 90s, Ro Maron (real name: Rembert De Smet) holed up in a dark studio in Belgium and bashed out track after track of oozy, slo-mo proto-techno under names like Zsa Zsa La Boum, Sleepwalker, and Miss Nude. They called it new beat, it sounds like acid house after several large flagons of Trappist ale, and this 30-track compilation suggests that the little-known De Smet was one of its most skillful practitioners.
SHANTY MEDDLER

EAST INDIA YOUTH
Culture of Volume
XL

With his tweed jacket and side part, William Doyle looks like a chemistry teacher from a 1950s English boarding school, yet this has in no way hampered his progress as the bright young thing of bookish British synthpop. After last year's Total Strife Forever, East India Youth's second album is a glorious genre-smashing success that marries Scott Walker and John Foxx sci-fi balladry with Pet Shop Boys romance and Underworld-style techno transportation.
STRIFE SUPPORT

FÖLLAKZOID
III
Sacred Bones

Tossing around some pretty wild and unfounded assumptions here, but I'm going to state quite openly that I doubt Chile has a space program of any real stature. I'm fairly sure they do, however, have access to a shit-ton of pharmaceuticals that, when you think about it, are probably useful in the crafting of minimalistic space-rock jams that go on for more than ten minutes. Apparently German electronica dude AtomTM is on here playing one of Kraftwerk's synths, a nugget of info I can't wait to regale friends with while they desperately try to think of ways to change the subject.
WAKA FLOCKA SEAGULLS

HALSHUG
Blodets Bånd
Southern Lord

More vicious, nihilistic crust hardcore apparently out to reinforce the notion that Scandinavia is not in fact the liberal, egalitarian paradise with good knitwear of left-wing broadsheet fantasy, but a bleak and oppressive hellhole populated by depressed alcoholics. Halshug's name means "to decapitate," which completes the list of everything you need to know about this record.
PETE POLONEZ

UFO MAMMUT
Ecate
Supernatural Cat

The trouble with space is that if you go out far enough it eventually becomes featureless and boring, as UFOmammut inadvertently proved on their last song, "Oro," a 90-minute track spread over two separate albums in 2012. Luckily, the Italian trio of hairy astronauts have reined it in for an album packed with blink-and-you'll-miss-'em ten-minute apocalyptic doom dirges that sound like Christopher Nolan's colossal ego getting sucked out of his anus and straight into a black hole.
JAY DEE

LIGHTNING BOLT
Fantasy Empire
Thrill Jockey

There's no doubt that purists will hate this album. It doesn't re-create what it feels like to be confused and tightly packed into a throng of aggravating and sweaty bellends, trying to catch a glimpse of Lightning Bolt while some twat with dreadlocks named Jasper punches you in the back of the neck. It also pisses all over the Providence duo's two-decade legacy by providing something that doesn't sound like you've had a can of partially congealed malt liquor poured in your ears and been hit in the face with a shovel, instead revealing the fiendish complexity of what the two Brians are capable of for the first time ever.
BRI BRI BABY

POMBAGIRA
Flesh Throne Press
Svart

Obviously hippies are terrible, but funnily enough I don't mind a whiff of patchouli when it comes floating in on a tide of otherwise fetid doom metal. English duo Pombagira have named their new double album of cryptic dirge and shoegaze-tinged sludge after a post-burial process in which grave dirt intermingles with cadaverous flesh. On the bright side, in the photo Pete Giles appears to be wearing a paisley shirt. See what I mean? It's a nice balance.
LIL LOUIS

RYLEY WALKER
Primrose Green
Dead Oceans

He's an old soul in a young man's body—that's what they say about Ryley Walker. They're not talking, like, your dad, wearing slippers 24/7 and not really caring how loudly he farts. No, they're implying that this young Chicagoan fingerstyle dude is tapping the same cosmic folk vein as Tim Buckley or John Martyn, and that the swirling, orchestral folk rock of Primrose Green sounds like it's tanked up on cider and stamping its foot at God's own Sunday-afternoon get-together. In particular, "Summer Dress" is just about the bittersweetest thing since Nick Drake decided he was going upstairs for a nap.
FLORENCE RIDA

LOWER DENS
Escape from Evil
Ribbon Music

Perhaps you recall Jana Hunter as one of those crone-like twentysomething folk ladies in the vague orbit of Devendra Banhart, one with a voice that sounded like a crackly shellac record possessed by the spirit of an old washerwoman who fell over and died in a ditch in 1903. Well, forget all that, because now she's back with an alarmingly close haircut and a band that plays cinematic and serious rock music destined to be deemed "quite good" by couples who squeeze each other's hands while listening to the National.
DEAN FUNK

CHASTITY BELT
Time to Go Home
Hardly Art

The world is a mountain of shit. People are fuckwits. But hey, there are still a couple of things worth engaging with, and this record is one of them. Chastity Belt are the coolest sluts (relax—it's one of their song titles) in Seattle. They went through the old-fashioned indie grind—made good sounds, toured 'em, made better ones, put out a record, toured it—before getting to make this mighty-fine LP via Sub Pop's Hardly Art imprint. It's a smart, jangling riot from beginning to drunk, giggly end.
SALLY SEMIRAMIS

MARCHING CHURCH
This World Is Not Enough
Sacred Bones/Posh Isolation

Sorry, guys! Elias Bender Rønnenfelt is done with being your punk-rock jailbait. The Iceage singer is the hot mess at the center of this new Danish supergroup—also featuring members of Lower, Hand of Dust, and Puce Mary—and the mood is set to sweet, sweet soul. Along the way, there's Tindersticksy balladeering ("Dark End of the Street"), some ridiculously popping bass lines ("King of Song"), and, on "Hungry For Love," the best front-man-gets-himself-into-a-sexy-lather interlude since Nick Cave last loosened his collar.
CHARLES HANSON

CHILLY GONZALES
Chambers
Gentle Threat

Seeing Chilly Gonzales live is an intense experience, like watching the spirits of Erik Satie and Rowlf the Dog from the Muppets battle to control the soul of a big, hairy Jewish guy who's seated at a piano even though it looks like he just got out the shower. Chambers is effectively the third in his Solo Piano series, although, as the title suggests, this time there's some nice chamber-music strings. This does mean there's a notable lack of high-perspiration rapping about having three testicles and being the greatest, but y'know, next time.
HUEY MATESON

$HIT & $HINE
54 Synth-Brass, 38 Metal Guitar, 65 Cathedral
Rocket

The disconnect between $hit & $hine live and on record used to be stark. On paper they were simply one of the best live bands out there, while their records often fell under "easy to admire." Things changed after a series of releases on Diagonal, and now that they're with the hub of Brit psych, Rocket Recordings, things have gotten even better. This is the album Craig Clouse always threatened to give us, smashing together Brain Ticket–style Krautrock, Basic Channel techno, Rembrant Pussyhorse–era Butthole Surfers malevolence, Godflesh-strong industrial metal, and Black Ark dub. Don't get me wrong, it's fucking horrible—but that's what you were holding out for, right?
NO $HIT $HERLOCK

FAIRHORNS
Fuckup Rush
Kinda Rad!

While every other Johnny-come-lately is using his synth to make pastiches of John Carpenter soundtracks, maverick Brit Matt Loveridge runs in the opposite direction, with flaming pants on his head, gibbering wildly. This odd but ace, cheap-as-chips synth-punk album draws on Suicide, the Units, and ancient English folk and is more like the soundtrack to an ultra-violent gay porn film based on Judge Dredd's terrifying sub/dom relationship with Walter the Wobot.
BRIZZLE KICKS

GNOD
Infinity Machines
Rocket

After the heaviness of the Chaudelande anthology and a whole bunch of EPs, the world's finest psychedelic exploratory unit is back with a new studio album, and naturally it's a triple. The first third crawls past in a haze of Throbbing Gristle improv electronics, portentous spoken word, mid-90s post-acid ambience, and dubbed-out free skronk. The pulsating jewel in the crown that acts as a prism to be placed directly in front of your third eye as you stare directly at the sun is undoubtedly the colossal "White Privileged Wank," a juddering, overdriven acid dictator of a track that eventually collapses under the weight of its own awesomeness.
JOHN DORAN

PILE
You're Better Than This
Exploding in Sound

Sometimes I go to a rock show and wonder why an 85-pound androgynous vegan with pearly-white teeth and an expensive leather belt is standing feebly on a stage and whining over power chords about his romantic insecurities. Some bands shouldn't be allowed to exist, and I would be perfectly fine with a rock 'n' roll authoritarian coup if the guys from Pile were its Bolsheviks. This band fucking slays—Rich Maguire's voice sounds like he ate raw venison and then washed it down with two and a half liters of Wild Turkey, but he could still sing you a lullaby.
ARLIE CHAMBLER

YUNG GUTTED
Towers II
Earnest Endeavors

I don't even really know what this is—if it's hip-hop, R&B, or what—but it reminds me of a dream I once had in which I was a kid who grew up in NYC. I had a Really Cool Older Brother who got me into black metal, and my parents would smoke weed and listen to King Tubby on my dad's $10,000 stereo, which he bought with the royalties from the one Wes Anderson movie he co-wrote. If that were actually my background, I might be cool enough to make music like Yung Gutted.
BRUMPLE TUNGUS

[body_image width='640' height='480' path='images/content-images/2015/03/06/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/06/' filename='stop-blaming-social-media-for-feeling-like-shit-body-image-1425617776.jpg' id='33515']Image via Ben Thomson

Last month researchers at the University of Missouri-Columbia released a study linking Facebook use to increased envy and depression. The work was quickly picked up in the media as many echoed the familiar message of too much time online turning our young people into melancholy, anxiety-riddled, FOMO-plagued train wrecks. But despite our fondness for blaming the internet for everything bad that's happened after 1998, many in the mental health field feel that this correlation is overstated.

Bridianne O'Dea is a postdoctoral research fellow at Australia's Black Dog Institute. She notes that while many of us are sensitive to likes, retweets, and shares, we shouldn't underestimate human resilience. "Sure, receiving negative feedback on social media can affect your self-esteem," she says. "But remember, self-esteem is something that starts developing from when you're a child. It takes a long time to develop, and a long time to change."

Rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide are at a ten-year high in Australia, and those rates have also been rising in America, so perhaps it's not surprising that social media has been blamed for people feeling meh. Who hasn't looked at someone else's Instagram and felt like a soggy box of four-day-old pizza? But while statistics may reflect an anecdotal correlation between our social media use and our mood, it's largely circumstantial.

In reality, your biological chemistry likely has far has more to do with your age than your Facebook usage. Almost 50 percent of social media users are between the age of 18 and 29, the same demographic that contains the highest rates of mental illness. O'Dea explains that the trends of mental illness spiking in adolescence and young adulthood were established decades ago, with 75 percent of mental illnesses emerging before the age of 25. Depression's tendency to manifest around the same time social media use spikes is largely coincidental.

The figures are also skewed by our increased ability to talk about mental health. "You're going to see rises in these rates, which doesn't necessarily mean the number of [mentally ill] people are changing," O'Dea says. "It's just the number of people reporting is changing."

Professor Nick Titov, project director at MindSpot Clinic, agrees with O'Dea. He says that concern over new technology has been around as long as technology itself, and it's dangerous to assume the medium is the problem. "I'm sure previous generations were concerned about our parents watching television," he says. "I don't think it's necessarily about the medium, it's about how people are communicating."

Health-care professionals have always been vocal about the internet and social media's role in allowing people to access more information to be positive. Surprisingly they also see our tendency to misrepresent ourselves online as less of an issue that you'd think, noting that for younger generations, the online world is increasingly similar to their IRL one.

Psychologists call our glossy online avatars our "hoped for possible selves," and have found the trend encourages personal aspiration. Our social media personas are us at our best, but they're still us. By curating this shiny world they suggest we're not fooling ourselves, but forming a picture of who we could be.

And although trolls and online bullying is obviously a very visual problem that undoubtedly needs continual attention, there are less obvious benefits social media use gives the mental-health community. It provides individuals with access to support and information, but it's also a tool for researchers. Discussions that evolve through social media are increasingly developing research questions, and anecdotal reports of Facebook trends help calculate and formulate future studies.

You might feel bad when you're using Facebook, but your mood is likely more dependent on hormones, circumstance, and other people's actions—not by Mark Zuckerberg. That means that unplugging probably won't make you feel better. But on the bright side, at least your awesome Instagram feed isn't adding to someone else's problems.

Follow Wendy on Twitter.

[body_image width='1205' height='802' path='images/content-images/2015/03/09/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/09/' filename='my-mate-the-opium-lord-036-body-image-1425897096.jpg' id='34108']

Edward Follis (left) and Hajji Juma Khan. Photo courtesy of Edward Follis

Before balloons of smack reach the pockets of users in Liverpool or Berlin or Oslo, 80 percent of the world's heroin passes through the hands of a very rich group of Afghan opium traders. By financing the Taliban—which still has a lot of influence over much of the country, especially in the south—these men operate with near impunity, preserving the opium poppy as the lifeblood of Afghanistan's economy.

Naturally, these enigmatic opium traders are targeted by the DEA, intelligence agencies, and the military. Between 2006 and 2008, undercover DEA man Edward Follis spent two years hanging out with Hajji Juma Khan, then one of the world's biggest opium merchants and a billionaire Taliban financier. Follis was briefed to gain Juma Khan's trust, tap him for info, and then take him out of action.

The Dark Art: My Undercover Life in Global Narco-Terrorism is a memoir of Follis's experiences chasing down opium traders and infiltrating drug gangs across the world. Amid all the action in his book, however, the time Follis spent targeting Juma Khan stands out the most, mostly because his target eventually became a close friend.

I called Follis, who describes himself as "an Irish boy from St. Louis," to tell me more about the brotherly relationship he developed with the powerful opium king, a man he would ultimately have to screw over.

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A counter narcotics team burning a heroin stash house in Afghanistan

VICE: Juma Khan was a powerful opium trader and clearly not stupid. How did you cajole yourself into his world?
Edward Follis: We were introduced through a mutual confidant as people who could help each other. I was upfront about who I was—the head of the DEA in Kabul—but I suggested to him that I was a pliable man with whom he could work, a relationship he could benefit from. I told him I was very aware of his competitors, and they were of great interest to me. He saw me as a value-added figure in his empire. He could feed me information about his rivals. In turn, I implied the US would focus on targeting his competition. Although, all the time, it was Juma Khan who was the real target.

We first met in his favorite Persian restaurant, an upmarket place called Shiraz. He dwarfed me. He was in his fifties, six-foot-five tall, and weighed about 26 stone [350 pounds]. I remember he had trouble fitting through doors. Apart from his size, he looked like any other Afghan businessman. He was dressed in simple clothes: a battered pinstriped jacket over a salwar kameez. He constantly played with a string of prayer beads. He was a huge eater, and as I found out, he would often devour about 20 kebabs at each sitting, while I'd nibble on one or two. He was extremely personable and charming.

So this wasn't a brief encounter?
It's common courtesy in business in central Asia that you do not pursue your goals immediately. There has to be, for want of a better word, "foreplay" before a business relationship can be formed. It took time to reach an implicit understanding. I had to maintain the courtship for two years, much longer than usual, as he had to trust me and we needed to build evidence for the indictment over his links to the Taliban. Luckily for us, as his business machine worked so well, he had time on his hands. We spent a lot of time together.

I'm intrigued to know what an American DEA agent and an Afghan opium trafficker talk about over dinner.
He didn't want to talk about the opium trade at first. Most of what we discussed was about our families, our lives, and our fates. He had 14 wives and 29 children. We talked a lot about religion. He was a very religious man. He knew the Qur'an off by heart and had been on seven hajjis. He sometimes took me to the mosque to pray, although I prayed to God and he prayed to Allah. We watched The Passion of the Christ together. One thing he could not understand about Christianity was why God had to put his son through so much suffering.

He was certainly not a fundamentalist. He sympathized with the US over 9/11. He told me it was wrong and that Bin Laden—whom he knew—should never have been allowed to carry out the attack. His heart went out to the innocents who died.

What kind of man was he?
He's almost exactly the same age as me: I was enlisting in the Marine Corps when he was in the trenches fighting Russians laying waste to his land. He was a magnificent businessman who grew up in poverty. He survived the Soviet occupation, civil wars, the Taliban, al Qaeda—he survived them all and profited the entire time to build his empire.

He was a leader, but not a dictatorial leader. He had dignity; people had a lot of respect for the way he handled his competitors, enemies, and his friends. I never heard a disparaging word out of his mouth about anybody. He didn't have to commit violence to maintain control over his turf.

He saw himself as the emperor of his tribe. He was a strong, proud man in the community and he valued that. His face beamed when he talked about his people, his family, and his underlings. He loved being praised—he glowed with it—and he was generous. I never paid for a meal, and even though it was haram, he would make sure waiters served me up some Johnnie Walker Black at the end of a meal.

You said in the book that you felt like brothers. You even flew him out to see a cancer specialist in Washington, DC, to get him checked out.
To be honest, the time I spent with HJK was a source of solace for me, away from all the spooks and the embassy staff in Kabul. I was more at ease with HJK compared with with my colleagues at the embassy. Some of the spooks didn't trust me—they accused me of knowing rocket attacks were being planned on the embassy, but failing to alert them.

It was a kind of intimate relationship. One day I noticed he had a growth on his chest. I thought it might be cancerous as I had previously had a melanoma cut out, and showed him my scars. I offered him treatment in DC and we went, although it was a false alarm. I was helping a friend, but also it was a way of building trust. At that time we did not have enough information from him to arrest him, so he was returned to Afghanistan.

How productive was your friendship in terms of your undercover DEA work?
His power base was in the Balochistan region of Afghanistan near the Iranian border, although his network and inordinate wealth spread across central Asia to Dubai and Pakistan, where he had property and businesses.

He had close friends and relatives in the highest ranks of the Karzai government. His was a "total enterprise"—from the poppies at the farm gate, processing in clandestine labs, wholesale dealers at bazaars, importing precursors to process from morphine base, trans shipment across Iran to Turkey. He was a major player in the global heroin trade and our aim was to cut off the supply of money from opium kingpins like him to the Taliban and terrorists such as al Qaeda. He was an unofficial spy in the end. He gave us useful information that we passed onto the military.

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An anti-poppy propaganda poster in Afghanistan. Photo by Todd Huffman via

And then you had to shop him.
In 2008 I offered him the carrot that was needed to get him out of Afghanistan; it was too dangerous to arrest him there. I told him I had been promoted to a counter drug mission in Iran, and we would mutually assist each other over there—he would boost my cred in unchartered waters, and he'd benefit from having people in high places to smooth his path shipping heroin across Iran.

We arranged to meet to discuss this in Jakarta in Indonesia, although in truth we would rendition him and fly him to the US. At the airport, when he arrived off the plane, he picked me up like rag doll and kissed me on the cheek. He was arrested before being flown to the US, where he's been in jail charged with funding terrorism since 2008. He will never see the light of day again. His attorneys decided against a trial because HJK is more concerned for the welfare of his family than the survival of his business empire.

Did you feel guilty at turning in a man you had grown to respect so much?
Well, there was an ulterior motive to getting him out of Afghanistan. I saved his life. He was on what we call the "kinetic list," a list of people to be targeted by a drone attack. His time was coming soon, and I decided to take away his comfortable, contented life in order to save it.

I had many emotions at the airport. I spotted him after his arrest and our eyes met. He had an expression of disbelief, and I felt ashamed. I ran behind a pillar and hid behind it. I didn't want to look back at him—I felt like a little boy. But if I didn't feel this way about a target, I'm not human; and if I'm not human, I'll never be able to carve my way into their soul and convince them to do my will.

What I had to keep remembering was that the Taliban and al Qaeda are developing weapons using money provided by people like HJK. That kept me going. Tackling the financial network behind the terrorists is the bottom line.

Will you ever see him again?
I can't visit him. If I did it would precipitate resentment—I took him from an unbelievable existence where he was the king, and I convinced him to give everything up. My wife knows I've had restless nights about this, and yeah, it messes with me. I've not had a chance to explain to him about the drone attack. One day it will go to trial, and I will see him there.

I still have the Kmart cell phone I used to call him on; it's right here in front of me. He always picked up. Even though he had 20 phones, he always carried it with him and answered it.

The Dark Art: My Undercover Life in Global Narco-Terrorism by Edward Follis is published in the UK by Scribe Publications.

Follow Max Daly on Twitter.

This post originally appeared on VICE Alps

Austrian director Ulrich Seidl loves tradition just as much as he loves the people of Vienna. If you're only vaguely familiar with his work, you might think this means "not much at all," but you'd be dead wrong. His office looks like a university professor's study and comes with a kitchen that has all the porcelain dishware you'd expect at your grandma's house. He also offers the best plum cake and has the smallest coffee cups this side of Alice in Wonderland.

Which makes it even more fascinating that Seidl's work is actually famous for deconstructing traditions. If you have a soft spot for dark documentaries and the quirky side of human-interest stories (and I'm talking about the side that involves animal love), chances are you've already stumbled upon Ulrich Seidl's oeuvre. In his home country of Austria, people were quite skeptical about his art and—as is mostly the case in Austria—only started to accept him once he became famous overseas. Now, with his non-documentaryParadise trilogy still resonating with most of the art-house crowd, Seidl has become sort of a star at home, too.

The director of Dog Days and Animal Love, Seidl is known to be straightforward, but at the same time poetic—he laughs, because the world is ridiculous at times and, most importantly, he has honest compassion for the people around him. Actually, the director is sort of what Austria wants to be—and what it can be when it channels Seidl.

Follow Markus on Twitter.

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Me and 14-time Swedish champion Malin Pettersson, my table-tennis coach. Photos by Ryan Willard

I have hired one of the world's greatest table tennis players to help me defeat Rolling Stone's head of digital operations, Gus Wenner, in a massive table tennis charity grudge match.

The United States doesn't take table tennis very seriously, which is why we don't produce any of the world's best players. The vast majority of the real talent comes from China, where the athletes train from childhood and are treated like superstars. In this country table tennis (or ping-pong, as it's insultingly referred to by children) is generally relegated to teen centers and summer camps. Which is a problem, because by the time our youths discover the sport they are already too old. The grooming of a true table tennis master needs to begin at around four years of age.

That table tennis is infinitely more difficult than regular tennis is a given, based on scale. Everything in table tennis is miniaturized: the racquets, field of play, and balls. With this comes a smaller window of opportunity to turn a point in your favor and bring the match home. Micro-changes in grip and stance are the difference between winning and losing, and the necessary reaction time is a fraction of a fraction of a second. Tiny details have massive implications. A good match is edge-of-your-seat, white-knuckled entertainment, but Americans just don't have a built-in national industry for the serious development of the sport, which is why we need to find other reasons to play.

In my case, I play for hate. I only hate two people on this planet. One of them is Gus Wenner.

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My opponent, Gus Wenner

Gus Wenner, if you're not familiar, is the son of Jann Wenner, founder of Rolling Stone. He is a media celebrity and I hate him more than an ingrown beard hair. My hatred for Gus began two weeks ago, when I was asked to compete against him, in public, in a game of live table tennis.

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Given his lineage, Gus is probably the type of guy who's never faced a truly formidable opponent in the sports-leisure arena. Most people probably throw the game when they realize Gus is about to lose, lest they blow their shot at working at Rolling Stone. Well Gus, I'm not most people—I'm your worst fucking nightmare. I will rain down all 215 pounds of my being onto that table and you will crumple underneath the power of my kill shots like the little bitch that you are.

To be fair, I've never been good at any sport in my entire life. As a pimply, fantasy-obsessed pre-teen, and then a pimply, punk-obsessed high schooler, I learned to wear this inability as a sort of badge of honor. Now I'm almost 31 and it's just embarrassing. I've been told by close friends on several occasions that I'm the worst athlete they've ever met. On top of that, I'm cursed with another, related character flaw: I'm a terrible loser.

But my approach to table tennis, and this game in particular, has been different than that of other sports I've tried. Mainly because I've employed one of the best table tennis players in the world to be my personal coach, to train me up and turn me into a paddle-wielding hellbeast with a thirst for the blood of Gus Wenner.

Meet my coach, Malin Pettersson:

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Malin Pettersson

Malin is a strong offensive backhand player from Norrköping, a small city in Eastern Sweden nestled at the mouth of the Motala ström. She began playing table tennis at three years old, standing on boxes to reach her father's table. At seven, she joined the Norrköpings Ungdoms Pingisklubb (Norrköping Youth Table Tennis Club), and began competing against older kids at age nine. At 12, she was drafted into the highest league in Sweden, where she competed against 20-year-old men, and at 16, she was drafted onto the Spanish national team, and then later, the German national team.

Between 2002 and 2010, Malin won the Swedish National Championships 14 times, and in 2010, she tells me, "I was, all ages, the best in Sweden." She no longer plays professionally, but she recently co-wrote a book on table tennis with Jan-Ove Waldner called Mental Strength, in which she outlines her techniques for mental training in table tennis.

Now, she's my coach. In case you doubt her prowess, here's a video of her absolutely annihilating the German Amelie Solja at the Portugal Cadet U15 Open, back in December 2004:

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Last week I started a three-week intensive-training regimen, which began with Malin ascertaining my technique. According to her, my backhand is natural and strong, and my followthrough is solid. For this reason, I've decided to perfect my backhand before my match with Gus.

In the next few weeks, Malin will be working with me on my footwork and forehand, running a series of training drills three nights per week. I'm adopting an aerobic exercise routine (heavy on jump ropes and sidestep drills), along with a high-protein diet. I'm also in the market for anabolic steroids, if anyone has a hookup.

Next week, Malin is going to help me build my own racquet, which is the sign of a serious player. I've decided to name it "Walter," after Walter White, who destroyed a nemesis, also named Gus, by detonating a homemade bomb in a nursing home.

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Look into these eyes, Wenner, you little bitch.

I know I'm going to have to work for this, but I want to fucking beat this kid. And when I win, it won't just be for me. It will be for everyone who has thrown a game to him in the past, it will be for justice and righteousness, for sportsmanship and the American idea that if you work hard and try your best and maybe do a little steroids you will fucking annihilate the son of a media mogul in table tennis one day.

Gus, come March 27, you're going to be entering a world of pain.

A world. Of pain.

Suck my dick.

Ben is playing Gus at SPiN, at 48 East 23rd Street in Manhattan, on Friday, March 27. The match is free and open to the public. If you want to shit talk him, hit him up on Twitter.

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Florida lawyer Michael Minardi. Photo via MinardiLaw.com

Last week, a Florida pro-pot lawyer named Michael Minardi successfully argued that a man arrested on charges of growing weed needed the drug for medicinal purposes. It's the first such decision in a Florida jury trial—ever.

Following an anonymous tip in 2013, Broward County Sheriff's Deputies found and confiscated 46 plants and arrested Jesse Teplicki, a 50-year-old suffering from chronic anorexia. He passionately testified in court that he needed the weed to be a productive member of society.

A jury agreed.

The case sets a precedent for future trials and also highlights Florida's inch-by-inch slog toward acceptance of weed. Last November, 58 percent of Floridians voted to permit medical marijuana in Florida, narrowly falling short of the required 60 percent threshold. In the Florida legislature, a bill is snaking its way through the Senate that would allow doctors to use cannabis to treat patients with illnesses such as ALS, AIDS, Parkinson's disease, and Crohn's disease.

Minardi, a passionate and battle-tested attorney, is on the front lines of this fight. He's used the medicinal necessity defense successfully before, but never in front of a jury of Floridians.

I caught up with him on the phone as he made his way to court on Friday.

VICE: It looks like you just won the first medical necessity defense ever by a jury. Tell me a little about the case.
Michael Minardi: Mr. Teplicki suffers from severe chronic anorexia, a condition he's had since he was nine years old. He was underweight and malnourished as a child. In four years of high school, he only gained ten pounds. He discovered cannabis at 17. He gained 13 pounds in the first six weeks of use. He had a desire to eat (for the first time) and actually started to enjoy eating. He was able to control his anxiety and his illness—that's how it started for him.

What happens when he doesn't have his medicine?
Over the years, he'd been without cannabis on numerous different occasions and suffered. He even ended up in the hospital, where they were unable to find a diagnosis (for his symptoms), or do anything for him. We had the medical records for one stint—between 2004 and 2005. He had to take a drug test to get clearance to do marine mechanic work, so he stopped using for a month. During that time, he lost 20 pounds. He went in the hospital and lost 15 more pounds. They discharged him with no diagnosis.

Have any doctors figured out what's going on with him?
Well, when he was a child he was told by an endocrinologist that there was a misconnection between the brain and his body. The signal from the brain regarding eating, desire to eat, and things like that was not being transmitted correctly to the rest of his body.

How was that fact used in the case?
What we know today, and what Dr. Denis Petro, who was our doctor, testified to, was that now we know the pharmacology of the endocannabinoid system. That system regulates a lot of the vegetative functions of the body. Research shows that receptors in our brain control appetite, control nausea, and regulate our system. That's why chemo patients [who use marijuana] want to eat, because the cannabis activates that part of the brain.

Did your client ever tried any other medications?
He's tried over 16 medications. Nothing worked for him. One caused loss of motor control in his arms. That won't work. This is a man that wakes up nauseous every morning and won't eat. Cannabis is the only thing that's worked for him.

Tell me about the trial.
It took us two days to get a jury. The state threw around a big bag of cannabis, they had all 46 plants in one bag. The state's doctor, from my experience, was uneducated on the endocannabinoid system. The state said Teplicki hadn't been to enough doctors and he hadn't tried everything before choosing cannabis.

While Mr. Teplicki was testifying, he really hit it home when he explained the effect his illness had on him, and why he felt he had to use to be a productive member of society. And he is: His daughter just graduated from medical school. One of his sons is in college and the other is on the way to law school. He wanted to show that these are the people he lived for each and every day.

Was there a moment where you felt things were turning your way?
I like to think as a confident and competent attorney I always feel like I'm going to win. I'm a competitive person, but I was cautiously optimistic. During his testimony, the way he answered a question about how he felt and why he was fighting, it was so powerful that I just had to stop. There was a part of me that thought, I don't know how any jury could look at this and say, "I'm going to punish a hard working man who isn't a criminal." He's just using this to survive.

The jury recognized it was a disease he's had since he was a young child, and they had compassion for the fact that he's been suffering his whole life. Who are we to say he hasn't?

How did you get into marijuana-based law?
It's something I actually had knowledge of and wrote about in law school. I joined an organization called NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws). Growing up I read High Times and they exposed a lot of the hypocrisy of the government and the lies about cannabis.

I had numerous friends in high school affected by drunk driving. My mom passed away in 2003 from lung cancer. When I was young, I knew I wanted to be an attorney. I'm Italian—I used to argue with everybody. I've always had a distaste for authority, I think. And seeing what this is doing to our society, people being locked up and their lives lost from cannabis, it's just ridiculous to me. It's a plant.

Do you have any advice for people out there?
Everyone should know their rights. Go to Florida Cannabis Action Network. People should be educated and prepared. Knowledge is power and knowing what you can do and being confident is important. Remember, cops can lie and they can tell you anything they want to get into your house, your pockets, or vehicles. Get active. Get vocal. Contact your legislators. Let's get relief for the sick and suffering people of Florida.

Follow Jon Silman on Twitter.

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Photos by Nick Gazin.

Here at VICE we're fans of absurdist artist Paul McCarthy, skateboarding, and introducing new people to both. So when we heard that the man who recently installed an 80-foot-tall inflatable butt plug sculpture in the middle of Paris (and called it Tree, no less) was designing skate decks to raise money for a charity that aims to create a skate school in Johannesburg, it seemed in our best interest to check the goodwill event at MoMA over the weekend.

In collaboration with the Skateroom and Skateistan, McCarthy created a run of 250 skate decks using images from his 1991 project PROPO. The boards on display at MoMA included pictures of gnarly old bottles of ketchup, creepy doll heads, and other cultural detritus that looked as if a Mike Kelley exhibition was uncovered from a landfill near a nuclear waste site. Through sales of this collection, organizers hope to raise $200,000 in order to fund what could be the African continent's first skate school.

Regardless, the boards are cool and buying one could help other kids shred, so head over to the Skateroom's site to donate.

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Follow Zach on Twitter.

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Follow Simon Hanselmann on Twitter and look at his blog. Also buy his books from Fantagraphics and Space Face.