On Tuesday December 1, World AIDS Day, HBO premiered VICE's new hour-long special report, Countdown to Zero, about the breakthroughs in treatment and prevention of HIV and AIDS. In it, VICE co-founders Shane Smith and Suroosh Alvi talk to the patients, policymakers, activists, clinicians, and researchers leading the international charge for an AIDS-free world.

Smith also sat down with former president George W. Bush to talk about the PEPFAR (President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) initiative, one of the lasting legacies of the Bush administration. Alvi and Bono—U2's singer and co-founder of (RED) and One—then headed to Rwanda, where PEPFAR's efforts have almost fully eliminated mother-to-child HIV transmission and cut infection rates in half.

While progress looks good in Rwanda, South Africa still struggles to stem the disease, but the country's clinics are about to launch the largest vaccine trial in history.

"We're on the brink of scientific developments that will end the disease for good—but it isn't gone yet," says Shane Smith. "Millions are still being infected every year. This documentary is a comprehensive look at the state of HIV/AIDS today, how far we've come in fighting it, and how far we still have to go."

The full special report is now available to view online for those of you who missed it on HBO. Give it a watch above to find out how close we really are to finding a cure for this disease and erradicating this global epidemic.

Since last Saturday's violent clashes between desperate refugees and police, the scene at the camp outside Idomeni—the last Greek village before the border with Macedonia—has changed radically.

The refugees, who had been camped there while trying to enter Western Europe, have now been removed from the railway lines by border police. Barbed wire now blocks entry to the railway crossings and Macedonian soldiers have completed work on a three-meter-high metal fence erected along the border with Greece in an attempt to keep out any more refugees trying to get into Macedonia.

Protests began last Saturday, after one refugee was electrocuted when attempting to climb on a train wagon by accidentally holding onto the electric wires. He was one of about 1,500 people from the Middle East and North and Central Africa stranded between Greece and Macedonia after countries on the Balkan migrant route started turning away "economic migrants," letting in only Syrians, Iraqis, and Afghans—or "war migrants"—after the Paris terror attacks.

Refugees stood in front of special security forces and the Macedonia Army guarding the passage, holding placards saying "Open the borders" and "We are not terrorists." At least ten Iranian demonstrators called a hunger strike, sewed their lips shut, and sat down in front of lines of Macedonian riot police.

But protests finally peaked in Idomeni on Saturday morning with the completion of the fence, and the electrocution of the 32-year-old Moroccan man, who was taken to a Red Cross hospital with severe burns. Riots broke out, with frustrated refugees throwing stones at Macedonian police forces, demanding they open the border. The police responded with stun grenades and tear gas, pushing the crowd back into Greek territory, injuring 18 police officers and an unknown number of refugees.

But the question still remains about what to do with the thousands stuck in Idomeni. As "war refugees" from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan continue to arrive from the islands of the eastern Aegean, tensions are mounting. The weather is worsening and clashes between campers of different nationalities—Morocans, Iranians, Pakistanis are still breaking out. Yet still, there seems to be no realistic plan for dealing with the problem.

We spoke to some of the refugees stranded at the Greek-Macedonian border:

Hamid Baba Ali, 18, Morocco

I was born in Casablanca, in western Morocco. I finished school there, but my parents died and I could not live alone. I have one sister, who is happily married—she stayed back with her husband. But I had no money and no work, so I decided to come to Europe for a better life. I arrived in Turkey and then went to Lesvos. I want to go to Munich, where I have friends and family, or to Utrecht. I want to study electromechanical engineering. But I have been trapped here at the Greece-Macedonia border for five days and do not know what should I do now.

Mohamed Biplob, 33, Bangladesh

I am from the capital, Dhaka. I am a member of the opposition party, the BNP, which denounced the 2014 elections. Two leading members of the party were killed recently. I had to leave the country, because the situation is very bad. I left behind my parents, my wife, and two daughters. I traveled through Turkey and I arrived in Greece via Kos. I want to go to Italy, to Rome because my cousin lives there and will be able to help me. I've been stuck at the border for ten days but no one is telling us what will happen.

Aladino Sfaxzer, 20, Tunisia

I have been trapped in Idomeni for 12 days now, in the buffer zone of the border. I've so far paid traffickers 2,500 euros to arrive at this point. I do not know where I will go or where I can live well. I used to work at a local radio station back home and because I wanted to express my opinion freely, I was arrested and beaten. Those of us who speak against the system receive the same treatment. There is no freedom there and I could not stay another moment. I can't predict what will happen to me now.

Amin Najafi, 26, Iran

I've been trapped at the border for ten days now. It's hard here—it gets so cold when it rains and we have no dry clothes. We live in small tents that let the air in. In Tehran, I had work and I dreamed about the future. I worked as a welder in a factory and was about to progress my life. But then I lost my job, so I decided to follow a group of my friends to Europe. I want to go to Germany or Sweden. I don't have someone waiting for me there, I hear different things from people who have gone ahead of me, but for now the only thing that matters is to get myself away from here.

Faysal Hassan, 16, Somalia

I was born in Mogadishu and from the first day of my life until now, the civil war and the fighting has been ongoing. My parents had a little money and sent me to a private school, which was destroyed by terrorist groups operating in the area. I left the country together with my sisters—I am now the man of the family and I want to get to Germany to start our lives from scratch. I came from Turkey to Greece, I do not remember which island we arrived on with the boat. We have been trapped in Idomeni for 12 days we have no other hope apart from this.

Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion programs in cities like Seattle primarily help low-level offenders, especially the poor and homeless, avoid jail. Photos by the author

A man is stopped by the police. He has seven grams of crack, and is selling it on the street. He's black. The cop asks him a series of questions, ending with, "Would you like some assistance with the problems that led you to selling drugs on the street today?" In this case, "assistance" doesn't mean a jail sentence, but a case manager that can offer help finding the man housing, a job, health care, and substance abuse treatment.

It sounds like some kind of Scandinavian dream, but in some American cities, this is actually happening. Take Seattle, where former public defender Lisa Daugaard wanted to take on racial inequality in the justice system. "But you can't be serious about that if you don't take on drug enforcement," she says. For years, she filed motions accusing the Seattle police of racial profiling, before meeting with cops to work out a way to avoid locking up so many people of color for minor offenses.

The population of King County, where Seattle is located, is only about 8 percent black, but black inmates represent roughly 36 percent of county jail inmates. Nationally, the war on drugs has had a similarly disparate effect on people of color: While America is 13 percent black, black inmates make up 40 percent of the over two million people incarcerated in this country. A black man between the ages of 20 and 34 is nine times more likely to be jailed than his white counterpart. Together, blacks and Hispanics make up just over a quarter of the country's population but nearly 60 percent of those incarcerated.

In July this year, more than 30 jurisdictions were represented at a White House event where Daugaard and others presented on the success of Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion, or LEAD, since it began in Seattle's Belltown neighborhood in 2011. The program is designed to replace some policing practices and divert some low-level drug and sex work offenders from local jails. In Seattle, as in many cities in the US, these offenders are often chronically homeless and struggle with either mental health or substance abuse issues, or both.

Santa Fe, New Mexico, implemented LEAD in April 2014 , targeting heroin and opiate users and subsistence dealers. Albany, New York, has signed a memorandum of understanding between local government entities to get their own program off the ground. City officials in Atlanta are expected to vote this month on the creation of a design committee for their own LEAD pilot, which would be supported by an Open Society Foundation grant also awarded to Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and four others jurisdictions devising their own LEAD program. Baltimore, Chicago, Houston, New Orleans, San Francisco, and others are considering LEAD, too, suggesting a genuine alternative to some of the worst policies of the war on drugs is closer than you might think.

One evaluation of LEAD in Seattle found that participants were 87 percent less likely to be incarcerated after their initial diversion than members of the non-LEAD control group. (Another study found a 58 percent reduction.) The annual cost associated with people in the LEAD group dropped by an average of $2,000, while control group costs rose nearly $6,000. Daugaard argues that a better measure of cost savings could be done after LEAD is implemented to scale—since right now it's limited to Belltown, a notoriously crime-ridden part of downtown—when perhaps a courtroom or wing of a jail could be shut down. But even now, she argues, LEAD "achieves significantly better outcomes and is somewhat less expensive... so there's not much of a case to keep doing the system as usual".

The program is addressing longstanding racial inequality in the city's justice system, one that offers hope for the rest of the country.

"When LEAD came I feel like we managed to identify a whole community of people that we had not been serving, that were mostly African-American," says Chloe Gale, co-director of a program within Evergreen Treatment Services, a local social services nonprofit that houses LEAD. The new clientele had similarly severe mental health and substance abuse issues and medical conditions, but had lacked the same level of access to services as others. "Their constant movement through the criminal justice system was so disruptive to them making any progress in any other service system," Gale argues.

Daugaard and the Defender Association's Racial Disparity Project brought together the American Civil Liberties Union, law enforcement officials, the elected prosecutor, the city attorney, a local social services organization, and the neighborhood business association back in 2011 to spearhead the first known US pre-arrest diversion program for narcotics and sex work charges. Years of litigation during which the ACLU challenged Seattle's alleged "selective enforcement of drug laws against African Americans" did little to resolve the dispute between prosecutors and public defenders, but both sides acknowledged that policing and prosecuting tactics at the time weren't effective, regardless of whether that was a result of racial bias. Ultimately, Steve Brown, the Seattle Police Department's narcotics captain at the time, posed a question that led to LEAD's creation: What do you propose we do instead?

"We were coming at this possibly for different reasons but with the same degree of commitment to ending a stupid—a really stupid—era in American history," Daugaard says.

"In most cities there is a population of very high-rate, low-level repeat offenders," explains David Kennedy, a professor at the John Jay School of Criminal Justice in New York. "There's a heavy overlap between these folks, and drug and alcohol problems, mental illness."

While enforcement-based approaches, such as incarceration and probation, are appropriate for some, Kennedy says, when people seem to become "immune" to punishment, continuing to punish them is ineffective and inefficient. For evidence of this we need look no further than the regularity with which they commit low-level crimes: "If what we were doing was working, they would not be high-rate repeat offenders," he says.

LEAD's success using case management that does not require abstinence to reduce arrests came as no surprise to a Seattle man named Ron Jackson who has been receiving social services for 30 years. "I mean if you look around see a homeless, single adult, that typically means that either they're addicted and/or mentally ill, and in many cases it's both of those," he says. "Expecting them to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps is just ludicrous."

Another local man named James, who was sober for 76 days when we met—the longest he'd gone without using in years—could be in a very different place in his life had LEAD existed a decade ago. The black 31-year-old has been homeless in Seattle for over eight years, and addicted to methamphetamine. He was arrested for trespassing years ago, he said, just the kind of homelessness-related offense that can connect individuals to case management today.

Regardless of whether a crime has been committed, LEAD police officers—those in the department who are trained in and implement the program—can refer low-level offenders to case managers before any arrest is made, allowing the individual to evade the barriers that come with an arrest or conviction on their criminal record.

Discretion as to which low-level offenders are offered participation in the diversion program is left to law enforcement officials. There are roughly 320 participants in Seattle's program so far, many of whom are referred not as an alternative to arrest but through "social contact referral," an avenue designed to allow law enforcement officials to refer individuals they think would benefit from the program.

These people are given 30 days from the referral to enroll in the program, after which a warrant is issued for their arrest. (According to Daugaard, over 90 percent of those referred to LEAD in Seattle enroll.) If they do choose to participate, individuals are asked to create a list of goals, which the case manager generally supports, financially and otherwise. Participants' goals range from reconnecting with estranged family members to receiving job training. But unlike many pre-trial diversion programs that take place within drug courts, LEAD participation is not contingent on being—or even aspiring to—abstinence from drugs. Examples of support include housing, meals, clothing, job training, help with civil legal matters such as Medicaid or disability benefits enrollment, rehab and methadone treatment, and a range of recreational activities, like a gym membership or art supplies, that case managers say help quell drug dependency.

"We like to think of it as the bridge you cannot burn," Gale of Evergreen Treatment Services says, referring to the participant–case manager relationship. Once enrolled in LEAD, the participant is eligible indefinitely as long as they don't end up in drug court and aren't sentenced to prison for a year or more. Participants aren't required to meet goals or reduce drug use, but only to engage with caseworkers in some way.

The program's use of a "harm-reduction model," where abstinence is markedly absent from the conditions required to receive services, is a central component of LEAD. Some elements of the public health approach founded in the 80s may sound familiar thanks to needle exchange programs and the use of designated drivers. Harm reduction is centered around acceptance of licit and illicit drug use —"a part of our world," as advocates say—and aims to minimize harmful or negative effects on the individual and the community. Lately, the approach has gained traction as largely white, suburban communities search for ways to reduce heroin overdosing.

"The goal in drug court is, 'Are you drug-free?'" explains Dan Satterberg, Seattle's prosecuting attorney. Treatment programs in drug courts require abstinence and are offered after the arrest and booking has been recorded. If the individual has a "dirty" urine analysis—random testing is often part of the program—they are sent to jail. But public health and criminal justice reform advocates argue that relapse when reducing or eliminating drug use is likely, and "does not mean that treatment has failed," as noted by the government-funded National Institute on Drug Abuse. Satterberg says the emphasis in LEAD is instead placed on getting people off the street and committing fewer crimes, which he believes is working. "If you try to help people on the margins of society, it turns out you have better luck than if you punish them," he says.

A prominent homeless encampment, or village, in Seattle

King County Metro Police Captain Marcus Williams and his colleagues knew a large majority of the "frequent flyers" in the jail system, now LEAD participants, before the diversion program began. The program gave him a chance to offer help for the drug dependency, psychosocial illness, and homelessness issues he saw long ago. "I think it's really changed the attitude of police as far as how do you best deploy your resources," he says. "Do you spend your time continuing booking people in jail for small offenses, or do you try and engage them in something different than what you've been doing for a long time that isn't working?"

The culture change hasn't gone unnoticed among Seattle's most vulnerable citizens.

"None of our clients—the people sleeping on the street—had much experience with the cops helping them," Daugaard says. The idea that an officer would ask if you wanted help, and would then take you to a case manager and not a jail cell was, for them, unprecedented, she says. "People were very skeptical of that." So skeptical, in fact, that some who witnessed the police diverting a LEAD participant by opting not to make the arrest suspected they were confidential informants for the cops.

In Santa Fe, New Mexico, LEAD has been ongoing since last spring and primarily targets opioid users. New Mexico has seen one of the highest rates in the nation for unintentional overdose deaths for two decades, about a third of which were caused by heroin. But the state has seen a sharp rise in the number of deaths due to opioid pain relievers such as morphine and oxycodone.

Unlike in Seattle, LEAD participants in Santa Fe are largely Hispanic, the majority of them young women, and "marginally housed," which is to say lacking a stable home of their own but finding places to stay with friends or family, according to Emily Kaltenbach with the Drug Policy Alliance in Santa Fe. Social contact referrals are a crucial avenue for many—nearly half of the participants accessed services this way. An evaluation of the program is underway, but Kaltenbach expects it to show reduced recidivism, which would save the city money since it currently has a contract with the county jail to pay per bed.

Still, it's not what Kaltenbach argues would be best from a public health perspective. "Ideally it would look like Portugal, where all drugs have been decriminalized and problematic drug use is treated as a health issue and not a criminal one," she says, pointing to the policy the country adopted in 2001 when it decided that, after decades of waging a war on drugs, individuals found with any drug would be sent to a team of a doctor, a lawyer, and a social worker for treatment or a minor fine and no penalty otherwise. LEAD, she says, is as close to the Portugal model as American has gotten to date. "Although it still resides in the law enforcement criminal system, it's at least considered to be treated as a health issue pre-booking, so we're eliminating the entry into the criminal justice system."

Watch late VICE Prison Correspondent Bert Burykill try to keep it on the straight and narrow after getting out from behind bars.

Albany, too, is set to begin the pre-arrest diversion program after help from Kaltenbach and others at the Drug Policy Alliance. Like those Seattle and Santa Fe, the New York capital's program would be partially funded by private foundations, but will also be supported by the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare.

All three cities implementing LEAD are in states that have expanded Medicaid, critical to the program's affordability. "That is the key in making a lot of this happen," explains Steve Krokoff, former police chief in Albany and chief of police in Milton, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta. He says that having the insurance in place makes staying on medication for mental illness, for instance, much easier, and the individual in turn is less likely to commit a crime related to their illness.

This month, Atlanta's city council will vote on whether to establish a committee of stakeholders to design a pilot LEAD program of their own. But funding sources remain uncertain. Atlanta Police Department Deputy Chief Joseph Spillane says the best-case scenario is one where a non-profit organization "takes the lead" and secures funding for the social service resources and case management support.

"The resources have to be there for us to divert them to," he says. And with state leadership historically opposed to Medicaid expansion, the poor, homeless, mentally ill and/or substance addicted population LEAD advocates want to target in the city will be hard-pressed to secure the support the diversion program is based on.

Some things change faster than others.

Follow Camille Pendley on Twitter.

All I need is a mattress on the floor and a wifi connection. And my bike. Also, I could use some cheap beer. Do you sell beer any cheaper than this?

All I want out of life is to spend time with my friends every day. And to be able to travel, to have enough free time to work on projects, to stay up-to-date on movies, books, and music, and to constantly be learning and bettering myself. I just want a Dilbert–type gig, something cubicle-based that gives me free time to focus on the creative stuff that's my actual work—you know, until I get some recognition and can quit the day job. I don't feel like I'm asking for too much.

Man I hope I get some recognition soon.

Nobody told me my new meds would react like that with alcohol. My feet are sore from dancing. The party was so awesome, I ended up talking to some weird hippie guy about philosophy for three hours. No, obviously I didn't drive afterwards. I don't know who drove. I don't know whose car that was.

On Broadly: The Internet's Secretive Sprained Ankle Fetishists

Should I start applying to grad schools? Should I learn Japanese? Should I have majored in something like petroleum science? Should I blow off tomorrow's job interview and go to Joshua Tree with you guys?

I'm not really thinking about where the relationship is going. I'm not sure I'm even a relationship person. I guess I can see myself just dating one person if we had some kind of supernatural, soul-to-soul connection. Kids are disgusting.

Sorry in advance about my place. I've been too depressed to clean. I quit taking those meds. I'm not sure I'll ever be society's definition of "happy." I'm not sure there's really such a thing as being "happy."

I can't even really imagine what I'll be like when I'm older than like 35.

To be honest, I don't even plan to live that long.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Work by Liz Atkin as part of a Los Angeles residency

Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) can manifest itself in myriad ways. Sufferers of the condition have a distorted view of how they look, which can lead them to compulsively check their appearances in mirrors, or, conversely, avoid reflective surfaces completely. Obsessive skin picking, seclusion, and cosmetic surgery are also common amongst people with BDD. These behaviors can shut sufferers off from the world and trap them in a cycle of fear and self-loathing. In the most extreme cases, BDD can lead to suicide.

Despite the odd celebrity confession, it's still a "new" condition in terms of understanding and public awareness. It was only recognized as being on the 'obsessive-compulsive spectrum' related to OCD in 2013. One in 100 people in both the US and UK are thought to suffer from the disorder, although it is likely this number is higher. Experts in the field tend to agree that Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), along with anti-anxiety meds, are currently the recommended starting point for therapists and doctors to go about treating it. But there's also a "human problem-solving process" that's been with us a while longer: manifesting and facing our vexations through art.

Two artists taking the raw material of their fears and obsessions and turning them into photography, performance, and film are Liz Atkin and Leigh de Vries.

Atkin, who works mainly in photographic self-portraiture, has been affected by compulsive skin picking since the age of eight, when the condition gave respite from the anxiety caused by conflict in the family home. She trained originally in dance and drama, but it was through a study project where she was asked to record her body that she began to think about her condition creatively. "I had to confront the illness head-on when I started a masters degree in dance when I was 29, and it was then that I realized I could use the illness and study it in terms of a movement pattern in and on my body. I had no idea that was going to turn this disorder around... it was life changing."

Beginning with a flat-bed scanner, the only image capturing device on-hand, Atkin began to record her own image, using whatever was nearby—milk, hair, glue, paint—to create new images. The surfaces and textures of her body and surroundings fascinated her, so she decided to "go in" for more detailed examinations of these parts of her body she obsessed over.

A site-specific performance of 'Curdled' by Liz Atkin

At the first Body Dysmorphic Disorder Foundation Event at London University's SOAS Building earlier this year, Dr. David Veale, one of the UK's leading experts in the field of BDD, held a discussion on how self-portraiture could help in the treatment of the condition. One of the recent findings he brought up was how a person with BDD or OCD has a different reaction to anxiety than a non-sufferer. Essentially, when the limbic cortex/fight or flight centers of the brain are active, a BDD sufferer will attempt to deal with the fear by switching on the part of the brain that deals with detail. In order to become or feel "safe," the brain of a BDD sufferer will focus in on something—hair, skin, legs etc.—as the source of distress, and obsess, hide, or mask, in an attempt to feel better. Or, in the case of Dermatillomania (skin picking), the act itself will induce a soothing, trance-like effect. This tuning in on detail is something that Liz Atkin's work on her skin picking captures brilliantly.

De Vries is a musician and artist who had been plagued with negative thoughts about her appearance since adolescence. "In all the projects I worked on up until this point, I was putting out how I wanted the world to see me. But because of my BDD, weeks before a photo shoot, video shoot, or going into the studio to sing, my BDD would really attack me on multiple levels. It got to a point where I isolated myself in my house for a few months—I didn't even make contact with anyone. Then it came to me: 'Why don't I express this through my art?'"

Leigh de Vries with her prosthetic face piece

De Vries came up with the video and audio installation Exposure—The Broken Reality Tunnel, a walk-in, two room box that features two videos of her walking around Manchester town center wearing a prosthetic face piece, created by make-up FX expert Shaune Harrison. The two video rooms are connected by dark tunnels, where the voices of de Vries and other BDD sufferers talk about the condition. It's a darkly beautiful construct that reflects the feeling of being trapped with your thoughts.

"I wanted to create the monster I perceived myself to be and physically wear it in public to create some mending in my mind by having the actual experience," says Says de Vries. "When we have something in our mind, versus the physical, the version in your mind is way worse. Shaune and I worked through a mood board of what I thought I looked like. I imagined I looked like someone with Elephantitis, with huge growths coming out of my face and body. The closest we got was a huge tumor growing out of my face. I had the idea to work with secret cameras—I wanted to capture my own journey of isolation but also make a social commentary on how people react to people with deformities. We had these great secret cameras called pivot heads, on glasses that have full HD and motion, and I had a little button camera on my blouse so we had three camera points. It was possibly the scariest day of my life so far."

Neither artist has sought professional help for their condition. De Vries has been in contact with other sufferers via social media, and also through working with the Body Dismorphia Disorder Foundation. For her, the work itself creates relief. "It's quite beautiful in that way, that by revealing my darkest secret, I'm with it in a compassionate way and instead of being ashamed, I'm proud. I feel revealing the chaos means I feel closer to people and people feel closer to me—it's kind of like this weird way of saying 'I'm fucked up.' And people then say 'Oh my God, so am I!'" Likewise, Atkin talks about how the process of creating art mirrors the "tuning in" and focused relief of skin picking ("It's the same "hit" making art—using fingers, scrutinizing my body"). When, during a tough period in her life four years ago, Atkin did approach a doctor for the first time, they advised her that she was already engaged with what therapists would call advanced, breakthrough stages.

A still from 'Exposure' by De Vries

Both Atkin and de Vries want to use their work to help others. They are involved in outreach programs, particularly youth groups—as these are conditions that usually begin in adolescence—and art therapy. Atkin has done talks about her condition and is intending to do more outreach work here when she returns from her fact-finding mission to the US, which she is paying for via crowdfunding. "The USA is many years ahead in terms of awareness and research for skin picking and hair-pulling disorders." She has also been invited to show her work at the UCLA Medical Center and University of Southern California.

We all pick at ourselves—and on ourselves—from time to time. And we're all susceptible to negative self-image. When our minds take us to dark places, it's good to have art to show us that we're not alone. Liz Atkin and Leigh de Vries have shown us that art doesn't have to be conventionally pretty to be beautiful. And neither do we.

Millions of people take drugs. Hundreds of millions if you include alcohol and nicotine and, if you're a pedant or the author of the actual UK government's Psychoactive Substances Bill, caffeine—or anything else that has any kind of tangible effect on your brain or body.

Last year, 100,000 of those people took part in the Global Drug Survey, which is exactly what it sounds like: a chance for drug users around the world to contribute to a study into how people get fucked up.

This year's survey launched a couple of weeks ago, so if you want to take part and contribute to a bank of information that helps the GDS team develop handy tools like the world's first guide to safer drug use, or Drugs Meter, a phone app that tells its user all they need to know about their personal drug use, click here.

Jake Ouimette with a century-old cannibal trophy from the Philippines. Photos by Alexandra Heck

Driving along Weston Road, a quiet area northwest of downtown Toronto, it's easy to trip out on the weird nostalgia that comes with seeing so many old storefronts, restaurants, and churches with obscure signs. But there's one place where the vibe is most appropriate—an old building where the door is closed and the blinds are pulled. There is no sign here except for a little paper stuck in the window that reads: "The Skull Store."

I'm at the Skull Store to talk to the two brothers who run the shop, Jake Ouimette and Ben Lovatt. They're the only dealers of human skulls in Canada.

Walking into the store is almost a sensory overload. Skulls and bones of almost every kind line the walls, cases, and shelves. The place smells like a distinct mix of cleaning products and musty attic.

As I find out, that's exactly what it is—Ouimette and Lovatt specialize in cleaning and selling fresh bones of animals as well as dealing with ancient artifacts, sometimes human.

An abnormal skull and a 1940's medical specimen with labels.

"We don't have a lot of human things, because they go fast," says Lovatt while leading me to the tall wooden case by the cash register. In it are two heads; one is from a medical cadaver and the other is an ancient decorated skull from the Dayak tribe of Borneo.

I ask them how difficult it is to obtain these skulls and how it's even legal.

"It's actually relatively easy for us," says Lovatt, explaining that most animals require a CITES permit, which is a regulatory body that controls international animal trade. "Humans are the only primates on that planet that don't require a permit."

I ask them if a man came in the store tomorrow, terminally ill, and says that after he dies he would like to donate his skeleton... And they both shake their heads before I can finish.

"A fresh one is a whole different game," says Lovatt.

They sell cleaned pig, sheep, and beaver skulls that many artists purchase for both inspiration and material for projects.

Due to the number of bans and rules on the trade of these specimens, most of what they deal in are antique pieces from private collections.

Lovatt explains that there are still companies that deal in cleaning and preparing medical cadavers in the United States through official avenues. In Canada, however, the rules are very strict around the making of fresh medical specimens.

"We're very protective of that stuff," he says.

The medical skull on the shelf is $1,000 . Lovatt says that it was from an elderly person, so the lower jaw had already degraded and someone had fitted a new set of teeth on it. He says generally, people who buy skulls are looking for unaltered specimens, so that's why it's cheaper.

An unaltered specimen goes for approximately $1,200 .

Some customers are artists looking for subjects to paint, or paint on. The brothers provide coyote skulls for one tattoo shop in Orangeville that does an annual art show.

Other customers are collectors, zoos, and museums. Bones from The Skull Store have even been used as props for film shoots. The brothers provided the crew of Suicide Squad with animal skeletons while they were shooting in Toronto. The brothers don't know how they were used in the movie, "but we're excited to see," says Lovatt.

Ben Lovatt and the elephant skull.

"We've had stuff in Vikings and Planet of the Apes and all that stuff as well," he says.

Sometimes, full human skeletons come through the store.

One skull they have is a 1940s medical skull covered with labels and writing. The wife of a doctor brought the skull into the store after her husband passed away. Those old bones were just sitting around, collecting dust. The brothers put the specimens on the museum side of the shop, they are not for sale.

"This," says Ouimette, pulling a large board of skulls off the top of the cabinet, "is probably the craziest thing we have."

The piece is a collection of two boar skulls with a human skull fixed to the board in the center—a 100-year-old cannibal battle trophy from the Philippines. The entire piece is charred black, and still smells of campfire.

Ouimette and the trophy

The warriors had slain the man whose skull is now in the center. As part of the ritual, they cooked him with the two boars. They believed that in order to channel the spirit of the killed warrior they needed to eat the flesh. The Skull Store also has shrunken heads, elongated heads, and even the hands of mummies.

The pair got into the bone business after working in the exotic pet rescue. Lovatt says that they acquired some of the rarest animals on the planet and when the animals died, throwing out the carcasses seemed like such a waste.

One day one of the world's rarest crocodiles showed up in a tub on Lovatt's front door.

"It was on the edge of death and was too far gone to save. We wanted to do something to preserve it," he says. "There's a legacy they can continue to have if they're preserved."

A beaver skull close up

Ouimette was working as a contractor before teaming up with Lovatt. He was sick of getting hurt on the job and was looking for something new.

When they became business partners, "we never would have guessed it in a billion years," says Lovatt.

Their families were a little bit skeptical at first, but after the brothers were able to show their family the store, they began to understand their passion. Lovatt says after the exotic animal rescue, the Skull Store was not a total shock to the family. If anyone was going to pick a weird job, it would be them.

"Dad was happy the gators I wrangle these days are dead," says Lovatt, with a chuckle.

Lovatt holding two vertebrae from the Pilot Whale that he and Ouimette collected last spring.

The brothers have purchased private collections of bones as well as the contents from a museum that was shut down in a school in North York. Many of these pieces are placed on one side of the store, the museum side. They are not for sale.

"People bring their kids in here on weekends," says Lovatt, explaining that there is an education and preservation aspect to their business.

Lovatt speaks passionately about each specimen in the shop. Aside from human rarities, the store has a wide variety of animal bones, dinosaur bones, and other artifacts.

"We have a real raptor's egg for sale," says Lovatt.

He points out an egg, slightly larger than a mango, in the case beside the front door.

"Oviraptor from Mongolia, about 75 million years old," he says, explaining that it was dug out of the ground over 100 years ago and traded internationally through private collections before coming to them.

Bones being cleaned by flesh-eating beetles

They supply bones and artifacts to both the ROM and the Toronto Zoo, as well as clean the skeletons of deceased zoo animals.

One recent project was the skull of a young elephant that passed away in the zoo. Her massive skull sits on a cart in the back room of the store.

In the same room is a massive tank that holds a lizard. Psycho is Ouimette's pet Nile Monitor. When Ouimette is cleaning bones, Psycho loses it in his tank, waiting for scraps. He runs around and presses his face against the glass, excited for a nibble of exotic jerky.

They lead me into the far back room, where all of the cleaning goes on. The smell of sweet, acrid decaying flesh is highly concentrated in the small space.

I try and pull my shirt over my nose as I peer into one of the fish tanks full of bugs. They use beetles to break down the flesh left on the bones. Inside the tank, half-cleaned beaver bones are scattered about, covered in flesh-eating beetles. I get on a ladder to see properly. The smell gets stronger.

The small room has a counter and a stove. Under the counter are Rubbermaid bins brimming with partially cleaned whale bones.

The brothers made a trip out to Nova Scotia last spring and collected the remains of a 14-foot pilot whale that had washed up on shore. They drove back to Toronto in a Dodge Grand Caravan, filled with rotting whale. I cringed imagining the smell.

"Febreze made a few bucks that day," says Lovatt.

A human skull that was bought with the North York School board collection. It has some sort of abnormality, possibly dwarfism.

A few large soup pots sit on the stovetop. Sometimes they have to cook the flesh off the bones.

"Bleaching and boiling are no-nos in our industry," says Lovatt, who explains that they try and avoid those two practices as it makes the bones very brittle, and in time they'll crumble and disintegrate.

Ouimette opens up a cooler filled with yellow soapy water. Inside is a beaver head, soaking to soften the flesh.

"Do you mind picking it out for me?" I ask.

He grimaces and gets a soup strainer. The head still has its tongue, jaw meat, and eyeball set far in the skull. It's clear that there is a long way to go before it's ready for sale, a steal at $85.

Follow Alexandra Heck on Twitter.

Look at Stephen Maurice Graham's website, Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram.

"You are punks"

Are you doing your part in the fight against ISIS? Are you, for instance, refusing to call them ISIS? For a while now, world leaders have preferred not to say ISIS, which is sinister and glamorous and sounds like the villain in a budget superhero movie, and opted instead for ISIL, which sounds like conjunctivitis medicine. But it turns out that what ISIS really hates is being referred to as Daesh, an Arabic acronym that sounds a bit like daes, someone who tramples or crushes, and dahes, someone who sows discord. Please, they're begging, don't call us Daesh, we hate it, it's our only weakness; get Suzanne Moore to stop saying "Daesh" in the Guardian and we'll do anything you want.

What other things might ISIS hate? We have to find out, so we can start doing it immediately. Start with the obvious: Muslims hate pigs, right? Racists have been throwing bacon at mosques for years now, but after the attacks in Paris one inventive Californian proudly posted evidence (or possibly an old, unrelated photo) of the row of pig's heads he'd supposedly laid across his street to protect his neighborhood from the global Islamic menace. (Question one: Did he really think Muslims couldn't just step over them? Question two: What happens when he needs to drive somewhere? Question three: Where do you even get 20 pig's heads, and what happens to the rest of the pig?)

What else? You pour warm beer and double cream into a single funnel, the tube coiling directly into your open mouth: I bet those guys in ISIS are really gonna hate this! Sorry, honey, I know you don't like it when I leave the toilet seat up, but ISIS dislikes it even more. We could take in Syrian refugees, we could try to stop the flow of arms and cash fueling the conflict, or we could watch Family Guy while pissing in the bathtub, something that famously makes ISIS absolutely furious. Once citizens in wartime were told to cut back and make do, sacrifice their private needs for the national effort; now if ISIS hates the West for its smug, childish brutality, we're going to win by being more smug, more childish, more brutal, more bloated, more obnoxious, more selfish, more stupid than we were before.

This is the world that the Open Letter to ISIS on Facebook inhabits, at once blindly pigheaded and incredibly lonely. Statistically speaking, you have probably either seen or composed one of these: Thousands of people, apparently under the strange misapprehension that all their friends have joined ISIS since the last school reunion, have taken to the internet to directly address the masked instantiations of metaphysical evil.

Finchie's open letter

Some of these have become inexplicably popular. For instance, the most recent to go viral, prompted by an ISIS video that included Ireland in its "coalition of devils" (along with other similarly aggressive imperial powers as Switzerland, Kosovo, and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia). "What's the craic lads!" our author writes, immediately justifying a massive retaliatory strike against Dublin. He explains to ISIS that the Irish are peaceful folk, unlike that other country immediately to the east, but should ISIS try to attack anything other than Bono's house or County Leitrim "in the name of Alan, (or what ever he's called)," they will "beat the shit out of all of you using mammies wooden spoon."

The letter has done the usual rounds, being featured on the Lad Bible and on countless of those creepily algorithmic clickbait sites—occasionally with the baffling title "This Irish Guy's Open Letter to ISIS Has Everyone But ISIS Laughing." Because ISIS aren't laughing. They read it, and they're really pissed off.

But that was, at least nominally, only a bit of fun. There are others—too many others—which are either deadly serious or a joke far more finely and deftly ironic than any of us deserve.

A Canadian navy ship. Photo via Flickr user Dennis Jarvis

A 47-year-old Canadian veteran was recently granted disability benefits on the basis that the food he ate while in the Navy had made him obese.

The veteran, who remained unnamed by the Chronicle Herald, made his argument to Veterans Review and Appeal Board in October that the unhealthy food supplied by the Canadian Navy over his 26 years of service had made him extremely unhealthy.

During his time in the Navy, the veteran said, the food caused him to gain 140 pounds and eventually suffer from high blood pressure and diabetes. The board initially denied him his request, but later granted his benefits when he was able to establish a link between the food he ate while serving and his current condition.

Canadian disability benefits vary depending on the severity of the case and the calculated need of the person with the disability. There are a total of 21 classes to be ranked in, with class 1 being the highest. Those who qualify for the highest amount of disability benefit can collect up to $2,663 if married with multiple children. It's unclear how much the veteran received.

Physician Niall Buckley, the doctor who produced a report on the man's condition for Veterans Affairs to look at, made an argument for the veteran's hypertension by drawing a link between the shift from the man's original diet—which consisted of lean meat and organic foods—to the high-sodium, high-fat food served on board navy ships.

Despite taking a position against the food served on board Canadian ships, Buckley said he doesn't think it's a Navy-specific issue.

"I don't think the food aboard the ships is any different than the food in the average kitchen in Nova Scotia," Buckley told the Chronicle Herald. "It's the same processed rubbish that most everyone is eating.

"The only thing unique about him is that he was on a different diet altogether before he went into the military."

Food may be the only outlet for a lot of sailors, however. After a series of drunken incidents on board the HMCS Whitehorse, the Navy banned booze on all ships that aren't tied to a dock or celebrating approved events such as Christmas parties.

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter.

All photos courtesy of Frisse Kater

Throwing a party always seems like a good idea until it's over. It's only in the early morning, once you're fully hungover and covered in unfamiliar liquids, that the regret sinks in. This usually happens after a) you realize in a drunken and/or otherwise intoxicated state, you did something regrettable, or b) you see the mess that's exploded into your house: the empty bottles and beer cans strewn about, passed-out friends littering your floor, the strange-colored vomit caked on to your shower.

This is where Tugrul Cirakoglu comes in. Cirakoglu is the owner of Frisse Kater, a cleaning company based in Amsterdam that specializes in post-party clean-up. He started the company last year, after he'd completed a masters degree in London and witnessed a number of horrifying things at dorm parties: people pissing in the sinks, people breaking things, people getting in fights and splattering blood everywhere. He realized there weren't any companies in the Netherlands offering to clean up those kinds of messes and saw a business opportunity.

On their website, Frisse Kater claims their services are used only for the "dirtiest, most extreme, and disgusting after-party clean-ups that you could ever imagine." I had to wonder what they meant by that. So I called them up to hear about what they've witnessed.

VICE: What does an average party clean-up look like?
Tugrul Cirakoglu: We're usually called after parties, where about 50 to 100 people attend. For the Netherlands, that's quite large, because houses here are quite small. Everyone has been drinking, using drugs, and everything gets messy. There's usually alcohol and food all over the floor, muddy footprints, broken glass, puking, sometimes urinating, or even people taking shits on the walls. It can get really extreme.

I'm sorry, what? People taking shits on the walls?
I think that was just one time, but yeah. For a normal person, everything would be extreme, but for us, the most extreme things are human feces.

Do you usually field calls the day after a big party, when the host realizes that someone has taken a shit on their wall?
We have some people who are really prepared and they'll call us like, two months before the party and the next day their parents come home. So we rush there and we clean everything. But in those situations, we don't clean it too well, because then the parents will be suspicious.

There was this one party where they rented a restaurant. The owner , and 50 guys came in for the party. What they were doing inside was basically this initiation event for their club. First they had dinner and drinks, and then these ten guys were taken inside the bathrooms and they were violently beaten with whips; they were punched, kicked, smacked with those rubber placemats in bars where they put shot glasses. And then that evening, the owner called us and was like, "Yo man, I really need you guys. Something happened." So when we came, we saw all the mess and what had happened and he told us everything. I was like, Whoa, this is really heavy. We never experienced anything like that before. There was blood, and it was really dirty.

Read: The VICE Guide to House Parties

That's insane. Do you charge extra for situations like that?
We charge by the hour, but if it's extreme, we say, "Hey, this wasn't the agreement." Sometimes, people will call us and when we arrive, we immediately see that there was no party—the guy's just extremely messy and dirty and needs his house cleaned.

People actually do that?
Yeah. Last month, we were called by a guy. I don't know if he went on or what, but there were trash bags left in the home for so long that everything inside had rotted, and maggots and flies started growing inside the bags. Eventually, they escaped and the whole house—literally, thousands and thousands of flies and maggots—were crawling around on the ceiling, the walls, on the furniture, in his toilet, in his kitchen... everywhere. We've never seen anything like that.

In the beginning, we didn't expect people would call us for that type of thing, so the materials we brought with us were normal cleaning materials. Now, we bring a van filled with cleaning materials for hazardous cleaning—we have masks and protective gloves and gear for these types of jobs. We also have special cleaning chemicals to kill the most extreme viruses and stuff.

Do you ever have to deal with drunk people while you're cleaning house parties?
Sometimes we see people lying on the floor or on the couch, completely passed out. In some cases—it's a bit more rare—we come to parties and there's still one or two people tripping. Most people aren't really a problem if they're just sleeping, because they don't bother you. If they wake up, they're normally just like, "Where the fuck am I?" The difficult people to deal with are the ones who are still and want to actively engage with you. There are different kinds: people who are really annoying, they can't stand still; and people who are so high on drugs that they think it's the best thing in the world and they also want you to experience it. The first kind might keep coming up and touching you or trying to hug you; the second kind keeps coming up to you like, "Hey, I have some coke, take some!"

There's another interesting group, which is people who are high but get on this "cleaning trip." They get extremely active, so once you start cleaning, they want to help—brushing everything, sweeping everything. They start scrubbing aggressively. They are really fun.

"There's no chemical substance to deal with difficult customers. You can't just spray something on them and they'll go sit down and leave." — Tugrul Cirakoglu

There are some really gross photos on your Flickr. Like, there's one photo with a bunch of used condoms on the floor. There's another one with what appears to be a shit in someone's sink.
That was cat shit actually, but it was a commercial restaurant.

What?!
Yeah, we also do commercial cleaning, and even in commercial cleaning, somehow, the craziest people always manage to find our number and call us. Personally, I never eat at restaurants. I have to be starving, because of the things we see in commercial places.

Aside from cat shit in the sink, what kinds of things have you seen in restaurants?
We see a lot of places where the owner has zero knowledge about cleaning. One time, we went inside this restaurant. We always ask the owner if we can see the closet with their cleaning supplies, because when we see what they have, we immediately know the situation. So I asked, "Where are the cleaning cloths?" You know those yellow cloths that you just use one time and you throw them away? Those were the only cloths that he had in the restaurant. I was like, "How do you know whether your staff has just cleaned the toilet with this cloth or the kitchen counters?" And he was like, "Hmmm, I don't know." So basically, you're telling me that you don't know whether this cloth here on the table has been used to clean the toilet or the kitchen or the bar or the table? What are you doing?

Warning: Don't Drink the Cleaning Products

That can't be very common though, right?
No, it happens in so many places. You know Windex? We've seen that used in so many restaurants as an all-purpose cleaner, even though it's just for cleaning windows. When we ask them, "Hey, don't you have a product to clean bacteria and sterilize your kitchen?" And they say, "Doesn't Windex clean everything?" That's very disturbing.

Which is worse: restaurant kitchens or houses after a party?
I would say both of them are dirty. I don't have any problem with someone not cleaning their own home, because that's a personal problem. But if you have a restaurant or a coffee shop, you are serving people food and drinks there, and you have to clean! You can't just wipe everything with Windex and make it appear shiny when in reality it hasn't been cleaned for years. For me, that's like committing a crime.

Your job doesn't sound very fun. Does this job totally suck?
A lot of people ask, "It must be so difficult to do this job, because these places are so filthy." But no, that's the easiest part. We use our professional cleaning supplies and everything gets clean really quickly and easily. The problem is, there's no chemical substance to deal with difficult customers. You can't just spray something on them and they'll go sit down and leave.

See more photos from real parties Frisse Kater has cleaned below.

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

Note: In the column "How Scared Should I Be?" VICE staff writer and generalized anxiety disorder sufferer Mike Pearl seeks to quantify the scariness of everything under the sun. We hope it'll help you to more wisely allocate natural resources: your fear.

The little blurb above all these columns says I rate the scariness of "everything under the sun," but in retrospect, the sun is pretty scary in its own right. I already know it was worshipped as a god by pretty much every early human culture, probably because it's an all-powerful, benevolent, and sometimes vengeful ball of fire. It's bigger than I can possibly wrap my earthbound brain around, its core is almost exactly 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and if it ever switched off, we would all have 8 1/2 minutes to kiss our asses goodbye.

To make matters worse, the sun is also the scariest kind of god—the unpredictable kind.

Solar storms are the sun's way of reminding us not to get too comfortable. The sun's just chugging along like normal, then suddenly it belches out a blast of energy the same intensity as 160,000,000,000 megatons of TNT. Expressed in Hiroshima A-bombs, that's about nine trillion of them—in other words, a really big blast.

While most of that energy can't reach us on the Earth's crust, it can screw up our gadgets, some of which are now essential for our everyday lives. In the case of a severe storm, we'll have about 12 hours of advanced notice to batten down the hatches, and that's good news because in 1989, an unexpected solar storm plunged all of Quebec into darkness.

Humanity is only beginning to figure out when to brace for impact though. Last year when scientists told us to expect solar storms on Earth, the storms hit Mars instead. Even in 2015, we know a fair amount about what's going on inside the sun, but we can't necessarily link it to what happens on Earth. It's mildly unsettling to know there's one more thing out there that can randomly impact my day. But how bad could it really be?

Like stories about outer space? Check out this VICE documentary:

"I don't want to scare people," said Antti Pulkkinen, a heliophysicist who monitors and studies space weather—that's what they call it—at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center where he leads a group that provides weather information relevant to NASA space missions. Solar weather, he told me, "has a real impact that needs to be considered and understood."

Pulkkinen explained that turbulence within the sun causes what he called "complex structures in terms of a solar magnetic field." Some of that complexity shows up in what we call sunspots, which are dense pockets of magnetic activity that appear during the more active periods in the sun's 11-year activity cycle. Sunspots appear to result what Pulkkinen calls the "1-2-3 punch" of a solar storm. And each punch comes with its own effects on us Earthlings.

"The first punch is the flare—the release of electromagnetic radiation," Pulkkinen said. "That release can actually alter upper atmospheric composition, and that can lead to changes in radio wave propagation, and change how, for example, GPS signals go through the upper atmosphere."

These aren't the kinds of GPS errors that make you turn down the wrong street when Google Maps fucks up. You're only likely to encounter a problem when you're doing serious precision work, for instance, piloting a passenger jet. "If you're flying an aircraft and you're using GPS service to get your position, when you have these kinds of storms, you may actually have some error bars in your location," Pulkkinen told me, five days before I'm about to get on a plane, I should note.

If GPS fails, he said, "they have to fall back on secondary position services. This can definitely affect airline operations, and any other type of activity that requires high precision for the position."

Solar flares can also hinder radio communications. Since the wifi I'm using right now uses a type of radio to transmit signals, I asked if a flare could knock out my internet connection. It probably couldn't he said. When Pulkkinen said "radio," he meant "the kinds military operators use that broadcast radio waves through the air, or use the upper atmosphere to bounce the waves." The military shoots radio signals into the upper atmosphere—sometimes for mysterious reasons—but apart from the possible national security implications if those signals failed, that doesn't really affect my everyday life.

The second punch is particle radiation—as opposed to the more benign electromagnetic radiation from punch number one. But even if I were sunbathing naked during the biggest solar storm of all time, I probably wouldn't absorb any of it. "You would be completely safe," Pulkkinen said. "Earth has a thick atmosphere and a magnetic field, and those two are really good shields from the radiation."

But that's not to say humans will never be impacted by sudden radiation storms from the sun—they just have to be in space. And as much as I'd love to take a trip to the ionosphere with Elon Musk, I'd have to get pretty far into space to have my health jeopardized by blasts of radiation—even the International Space Station is too close to the Earth to be affected.

"As we move forward and go to deep space missions—asteroid capture, or maybe Mars missions at some point in time—that's when these fast-moving particles become an issue that really needs to be addressed," Pulkkinen said.

It's worth pausing here to note that the radiation that comes from solar storms would have been a problem for Matt Damon's character in The Martian, since Mars' atmosphere is much thinner than the Earth's and the planet doesn't have a magnetic field. But according to Pulkkinen"it's the transit from the Earth to Mars, and from Mars to Earth that is the high-risk part of the mission." He said NASA's future plans for a spaceship that goes to Mars include a kind of pop-up radiation panic room, where astronauts can hide in order to prevent themselves from getting horrible, sun-induced cancer.

Blackouts, like the one in Quebec in 1989, are caused by the third punch, known as coronal mass ejections.Those are the actual particles fired at super-high speeds toward Earth, forming what Pulkkinen called "magnetic storms." In addition to the Quebec incident, Pulkkinen said, "there was actually a transformer in Salem, New Jersey, that got damaged by the extra heating during a magnetic storm."

Magnetic storms can also move low Earth orbit satellites around. "It can actually lift the atmosphere a little bit," Pulkkinen said, which can cause jitters and lost connections. Low Earth orbit satellites include the ones that take satellite photos, and unless these messed-up satellites photograph me pooping, I'm not too worried about this effect.

But storms don't always happen during the sun's peak activity periods, which makes predicting them precisely even more difficult. "We do have space weather during solar minimums, so the storms can take place at any part of the solar cycle," Pulkkinen said. "It's just more likely from a statistical standpoint that they'll take place around solar maximum conditions."

So when billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Singer warned investors that the economic effects of 2014's solar storms—the ones that never materialized—might impact their pocketbooks, he may have been working from bad intel.

"There have been studies where people have correlated solar activity with all kinds of phenomena, whether it's birth rates, death rates, or economic fluctuations," Pulkkinen said. "Maybe there is something to it, but until we understand the causal connection, we should be really careful jumping to further conclusions."

While the idea of a blackout or a plane going off course makes me uncomfortable, it's not like solar storms are likely to cause some kind of global catastrophe. For the time being, the odds of my personal safety being jeopardized seem astronomical. A lost signal here and there seems like the likeliest horror I might ever endure as a result of the sun's wrath.

"If you look at the historical events, these electric power issues are one of the most significant impacts we've experienced already," Pulkkinen said. But he didn't let Earth completely off the hook:

"I think as our technology advances and we explore new worlds, it's likely that we'll be more and more exposed to space weather," he said. "Space weather will be a growing dimension of our endeavors as a species."

But here in 2015, I can't seem to get scared.

Final Verdict: How Scared Should I Be of Solar Storms?

1/5: IDGAF

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

A group spoon with strangers is not something I (center person) thought I'd be into. I was wrong. Photos by Brian Bettencourt.

I've never been to Burning Man but I have several friends who consider themselves "burners."

They've tried to explain the culture and community to me on several occasions, sometimes at great length, but my takeaway is inevitably: (privileged) white people wear costumes and get high in the desert, attaching a disproportionate amount of significance to the shit they do/build there. (Sorry guys!)

So, when I pitched going to a Burning Man party in Toronto to my editor, no part of me expected to like it, let alone enjoy getting felt up by faceless strangers. But more on that later. First, I'll explain where my prejudice comes from.

Burners have 10 Principles, examples include Radical Inclusion and Decommodification, but before Saturday, I assumed these tenets amounted to pretentious bullshit that I didn't need to concern myself with. The Facebook description for the event, officially called Toronto Burning Man Decompression: Playa North, didn't do much to ease my concerns.

"A decompression party, decom, or decomp is a local reunion for Burning Man participants to help ease themselves back into everyday society after the 'big event,'" it said, adding there would be opportunities to "share feelings, art, performances, and memories."

Really? How many memories could you realistically have from getting stoned and drunk three months ago? And isn't Burning Man itself a massive decompression from life?

Anyway, it was with this mindset that my friend Brian, a photographer, and I headed off toward Playa North. Before long, we were both declaring it the best night of our lives. Here's how we got there:

Wanting to be immersive, Brian and I decided to take one of the shuttle buses transporting people from downtown Toronto to the party, north of the city. Immediately, we noticed that our costumes were worse than everyone else's. I was wearing a tie dye onesie underneath a tutu and Brian was reusing a Spiderman suit from a past Halloween. Other people seemed to really incorporate an LED element to their costumes. (While struggling with the onesie in the bathroom later, I told one guy that he was lucky he was just wearing jeans and a t-shirt. Mildly insulted, he replied, "I worked on this all day" and flicked a switch, causing his entire outfit to light up electric blue.)

Other people put a lot more effort into their costumes than we did.

The first person we met was Floyd, a dude in his 40s who randomly attended Burning Man a few years ago, not knowing what the hell it was. He had a hard time telling us what to expect, at one point making a comparison to Field of Dreams, the 1989 Kevin Costner movie about baseball and dead dads (after reviewing my tape, I still don't understand what Floyd was getting at).

Floyd told us Burning Man was like the baseball movie 'Field of Dreams.'

"It's different. It's hard to describe," he said. "You just gotta experience it. Everybody wants you to have a good time." Floyd is black and I asked him if he felt like the festival was overwhelmingly white.

"I wouldn't say it was super white," he replied. "Probably like 70 percent."

Then he told us we should give him some of our vodka because he'd agreed to be interviewed. We did.

This seemed kinda dangerous.

There were people doing pyrotechnics—literally waving flames around—outside the venue, a large industrial space. Once inside, we dropped off our booze at a long table called the "gift bar," which functioned as an alcohol potluck. It was an introduction to the principle of gifting, which is what it sounds like: you give stuff to people and you get stuff. Within an hour, someone had gifted me MDMA and Brian "self-confidence" (a woman told him he was beautiful). "That never happens in the real world," he said, somewhat awestruck. On a practical level, we realized that we wouldn't have to pay for anything at this party, which basically placed it within our top ten right off the bat.

While walking around, we were led through a maze, several dance floors, a smoke pit, "theme camps" with stuffed animals chilling in tents, a fake VIP lounge to mock the concept of VIP, and a room where people were performing bondage, among other things. It was sensory overload, like the set of a recent-era Harmony Korine movie, complete with actual "sets," ideal for taking photos.

A place to be yourself

"That's the groping station," Lindsay Millard, the event's publicist, told us. I am naturally drawn to boobs, so I immediately walked over and asked a woman standing by the station if I could touch hers. "Why?" she asked, somewhat sourly. "Uh, I thought that's what you do here," I replied. She explained that I had to actually go inside the station to get groped. I was worried she was mad at me, but then she offered to kiss my breast; it was surprisingly intimate. Shit was getting pretty weird and Brian and I decided to go with it, so we stepped into the station, effectively a closet with glory holes poked into the walls. Anonymous hands reached in and felt up Brian and I as we faced each other. "Someone tried to jerk me off while I tried taking your photo," he remarked afterward. A similar thing had happened to me. Normally, this would have freaked both of us out, but in this context, we enjoyed it. We received the physical pleasure of being touched without having to deal with a creepy social interaction.

Bondage

Later, Brian and I circled back to the bondage room. A girl getting tied up with red rope let us take her photo. A bunch of people were doing a group spoon. I crawled into the middle and we all cuddled for a while.

"There comes a point where most people decide they're not going to do something and every time I to that moment, I decide that's what I have to do," said a musician named Colin, who ended up being one of our favorite people. We chatted a lot about how we could never do the things we were doing at a normal bar. And how we felt "real." "You can just kind of float around the environment... You can be part of the environment," said Colin, dropping another wisdom bomb. In the moment we all emphatically agreed with Colin, although admittedly, it makes less sense now.

Throughout the evening, we encountered several attendees who had come from places as far as Edmonton and Ottawa. At first, we were puzzled as to why people would travel long distances to get to this party, but once we started drinking the Kool-Aid, it wasn't that hard to understand. As long as you were being respectful of people, you could do whatever the fuck you wanted (see principle 5, radical self-expression). There was no judgment, no "social norms." Millard told me there are "rangers" who act as safety nets in case something goes wrong. "No one will tell you not to climb a giant piece of art but they'll help you if you fall off." That's probably why there were so many corporate, government-employee types around, letting their freak flags fly.

As the party wrapped up, Brian and I scanned the various rooms in search of straggling ragers, but by 6 AM, people were mostly passed out, so we called an Uber. The next day I felt like a bag of garbage physically, but I couldn't stop smiling when I told people about the party. I thought I would be more embarrassed about the gushing Brian and I had done throughout the night, but I only cringed a couple times while playing back my recorder and I found myself replying to texts from my new friends with a sincere intention of seeing them again.

This doesn't mean I'm going to become a diehard burner. I'm too lazy and it seems like there's quite a lot of effort involved. But Saturday was certainly the freest I've felt of inhibition, maybe ever. If I have to rock some body paint once in a while to catch that feeling, so be it

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

When Epicly Later'd started, one of the first things I wanted to do was an Ali Boulala episode. I imagined doing a whole season just on him. He was the perfect subject of the show—hilarious, amazing at skateboarding, infectious to be around, yet also a bit of a mystery. Where and how did he become how he is? There couldn't be anyone else on Earth quite like him.

This was before the drunk driving accident that killed Australian pro Shane Cross and put Ali into a coma. At the time, it was all way too dark and depressing for us to cover—back then, we were doing episodes about Dustin Dollin shopping for pants.

Fast forward to a year or so ago. I posted a photo on my Instagram of Stevie Williams, where Stevie said "I want to do an episode your show, but I don't want any of that depressing bullshit..." Ali Boulala commented on the photo, "I'll do an episode, but I'm sure it will be all depressing."

I contacted him to see if he was serious, and was soon on a plane to Stockholm to visit him. He hasn't done too many interviews since the accident, so I wasn't sure what I would find—but staying with Ali for a week was nice, and most of the trip was full of laughs and good food.

You can see that he has not shut the door on the past, though. There is a picture of Shane Cross on his living-room wall, and it always hangs in the air. But Ali is moving towards putting his life back together, and I'm proud of him for that. This is a heavy episode, and I want to thank Ali for his honesty.

–Patrick O'Dell

Photo by Olivier Marty/Courtesy of Henry Holt and Metropolitan Books

Riad Sattouf is a French-Syrian cartoonist and movie director who lives in Paris. The first volume of his graphic memoir, The Arab of the Future, was published in English this fall. A best-seller in France, the book covers the peripatetic existence imposed upon the Sattouf family between 1978 and 1982 by Riad's father, Abdel-Razak, a PhD history professor and devotee of pan-Arabism, who dragged his wife and children from Paris to Tripoli to his hometown, Ter Ma'aleh, a small Syrian village north of Homs.

In Muammar Gaddafi's Libya, laws against private property meant that you couldn't put a lock on your door, so when the Sattoufs went out together one day, another family moved in to their house. In Hafez al-Assad's Syria, Riad was jeered by his cousins as a yehudi—the Arabic term for Jew—on account of his then-long blonde hair; he watched children shit on the street, piss in holes otherwise employed in the dispensing of drinking water, and murder a puppy for fun.

To those who insist that incisive proclamations and penetrating insights about now be embedded in any work whose subject matter crosses paths with Syria and Libya at any time in their histories, The Arab of the Future will be a disappointment. No universal truths about autocracy, the Middle East, or radical Islam are revealed in what is essentially a very personal story of an extremely chaotic family. The book, whose title pokes fun at Abdel-Razak's pan-Arabist obsessions, shows the hypocrisy behind one man's understanding of that failed political ideology, makes tangible the absurdity of living under propaganda-mad dictators, and it humanizes, for better or worse, certain segments of very poor Muslim populations in two specific parts of the Middle East. But that's about as far as its politics, or those of its creator, are willing to go.

When we spoke in New York in early November—before the attacks in Paris on the 13th—Sattouf was less interested in analyzing international relations than he was in discussing Donald Trump's hair, which wouldn't leave whatever news channel was on the TV above us. As I walked him back to Grand Central after the interview, we swapped pictures of our kids and talked about the costs of raising families in our respective large cities. After November 13th, he quietly ignored my repeated attempts to ask about what had happened; he only let me know that he and his family were OK.

We met in the lobby of the Iroquois Hotel. I suggested that we grab a drink and steal space in a quiet little nook up front. He looked in at the empty restaurant and said, "Why don't we go sit there, at the bar—like a couple of alcoholics."

VICE: I read that you may make up answers occasionally in interviews.
Riad Sattouf: I "make up"? What is "make up"?

Invent, lie...
Not really. I don't invent things, I don't think. Sometimes I refuse to answer, because people ask me questions, wanting to know the rest of the story in The Arab of the Future. And I don't want to tell. So I don't especially invent things, I just refuse to answer and make jokes instead.

The picture on the inside cover is of you as a little blonde child nervously holding a pistol. Is there any particular reason you chose it?
When I was young, I was obsessed with guns.

Do you know why?
No. I think, you are a boy—you have to like guns. And I liked them very much. I had a lot of plastic guns. There was always a gun with me. Like I had to protect myself from something.

There's a scene in the book in Syria in which you're playing war with your cousins, and they make you play with "the Jews" figures, which are insane. Did you keep any of those?
No, and you know, I tried to find them... I went on eBay and elsewhere, and I haven't been able to find any. And a guy wrote me, a collector of toy soldiers, and he said, "I'm really interested in your idea of those toy soldiers, and I haven't seen them anywhere—did you invent it?" And so I was thinking, I hope I didn't invent them. But in my mind, I don't think so. I think they were true.

All comics reprinted with permission from Metropolitan Books

I want to ask you more about invention, because you were, what, in the first volume? Two to four years old? So I'm reading this thinking, I don't remember hardly anything before I was maybe five.
I think I have a good memory, a visual memory. It's not sound memory—I don't remember the talking, but I remember the images well. I remember images from before what I'm telling in the book. I remember when I couldn't walk, and I was sitting in a chair, and a giant was giving me things to eat, like a giant finger. And I remember a white cat that my grandmother had; he was a very mean cat. Everybody was talking about how mean he was, and he was jumping everywhere and harassing people, and he died in 19... 80... no, he died in 1979. So I was one year old.

You use one dominant color to shade each country—yellow for Libya, blue for France, and rose for Syria. What's the particular reason that you chose each one?
When I started to remember, I realized that the different places had colors in my memory. For example, in Libya there was a lot of sand everywhere. It was very hot and yellow. In France, it was in Brittany, so it was the sea. In Syria, it was the red of the soil. Clay. If you stay in a room that is red for one hour, and then you go out, the world will seem green. You invert the dominant colors. And I wanted that to happen with the scenery. That when you changed from one country to the other, you would feel disoriented.

The way that you portray your mother in this book, she's extremely passive. You know, your father comes home in Paris one day and says, "Hey, by the way, I actually got a job in Libya and we're moving there." And she just goes along with it. Or, "Hey, let's move to a tiny village in Syria where you'll be the only woman not wearing a hijab and you'll have to eat in a separate room from the men and only get to eat our scraps." No protest. And yet you also show her as really smart, with strong opinions and a good sense of humor. But it seems like she kind of let your dad—I don't want to say walk all over her—but he just kind of led the way, and she followed.
Yeah. She was like that. At that time, she had stopped her studies and was taking care of her children. She was a housewife. And she was hoping that her husband would become somebody important. Because my father was a bright man in Libya and Syria. He was a doctor in France; very few people could say the same thing. So she was waiting for him to become somebody important, and she supported him. She was waiting, because he was always saying, "We will be rich, I will buy a Mercedes, I will have a villa—a huge villa."

He seems like he was kind of obsessed with power, the way that he sort of idolized Gaddafi and Assad.
He was in love with education and school, and he wanted the Arab world to become independent from US influence and Russian influence. He wanted to build a huge Arab nation. It was pan-Arabism, you know. But on the other side, he was not for democracy, he was not for liberty. He thought that if we let Arabs choose their leaders, they would choose a religious, stupid leader, and he wanted to... he was dreaming of staging a coup and executing everybody and becoming the chief. He was fascinated with power.

So what did he think education was going to do if he didn't actually believe in any of these people?
I don't know. This is a paradox.

Your father seems possessed of similar contradictions when it came to religion. He didn't practice his religion, and believed that education would free Arabic people from the constraints of dogma. But at the same time, having been raised as a Sunni in a small Sunni community, he hated Shias. And, of course, he wasn't that into Jews either.
Yeah, he saw himself as a liberal. So he thought that religion was keeping people in the dark, but at the same time, he thought that the devil was real and magic was real and jinn were waiting around the corner. I think that his childhood, which I tell a bit about in the first book, was full of terror. And I think—because in his village they had no electricity, no water at that time—it was a very tough life. So it was a very intense reaction to reality, like if something unusual happened, we don't know what it is—it's magic.

Has your mom read this book?
Yeah.

Did she tell you how she felt about the way that you portrayed her?
Yeah, she told me... [ laughs]

All right, fair enough. Well, let's turn to you, and the young version of you in The Arab of the Future. The story is rendered in what seems to be a purposefully childlike way—that you're not looking back on these events as an adult filtering them through age and experience as much as you are almost trying to relive them as a child.
Yeah. It was very important to show the point of view of a child on the situation. Without judgment. And to put the reader in the position of a child, and to let him judge by himself. Sometimes there are readers who tell me, "Oh my god, your father, he's so awful. He's so mean. I hate him. How can you live with him?" And then a guy after comes and says, "Your father, he's very touching. Very touching with his mistakes and everything." And I like that. I think it's better—I'm not sure exactly how to say it—to leave the story inside.

"Writers from Arabic countries—I don't want to speak generally—but a large portion of the people who are speaking about these countries, who are 'known' as 'writers' in Europe, are from rich families. They are from the upper class of the Arab world. But I lived and experienced life with children and young people from a social class that rarely has its stories told."

I know that among other things people have said about this book is that your portrayals of your father and his family are somehow comments on Arabic people more generally. Is that fair to say?
No, of course not. And that's why I chose the title The Arab of the Future. Because it's, uh, a ridiculous title, you know? There is no meaning; it's meant to reinforce the fact that I'm speaking about a point of view of one family. But I did have a lot of reactions from other people, from Algeria, from Morocco, and they said, "Oh, my family was like that." People can recognize themselves inside them. I'm sure some American people can recognize their father in the guy who likes guns.

I think that the specificity of my book is that my father was supposed to be from the upper class, because he was a teacher, but he wanted to live with his family in his village where there was a very low class. Writers from Arabic countries—I don't want to speak generally—but a large portion of the people who are speaking about these countries, who are "known" as "writers" in Europe, are from rich families. They are from the upper class of the Arab world. But I lived and experienced life with children and young people from a social class that rarely has its stories told. I think that to show the way we were living in this village, it's very important, compared to a lot of ways we see the Arab world. You know, when you see, like a girl from a monarchy buying a huge plane, putting Emirates on it... It's not only billionaires.

Or on another token, it's not just ISIS or rebel fighters.
Yeah, there are normal people.

So you worked for Charlie Hebdo, or did you just publish your cartoon there?
No, Charlie Hebdo, I used to work there, for eight years. In 2003, Cabu, one of the cartoonists who worked there [who was killed during the massacre in January], offered me a job. And he was one of my idols; he was the idol of most French cartoonists. Because when we were children, he appeared on a TV show where he helped children learn how to draw. And I'm still using the things I learned with him in my comics. So in 2003, he offered me a job at the paper, but I don't know how to draw political cartoons. But I loved Cabu, so I told him yes, but that I didn't want to make those kinds of drawings. So he said, "Do something else. You want to make a comic?" And I suggested a comic series called "The Secret Life of the Young." They're scenes I would see on the subway, or the street, and I drew them in my notebook. People having arguments, mothers speaking to their children in bad ways or telling them strange things. So I published this comic strip for eight years, but I wasn't a part of the newspaper. I sent my strip by email.

So you didn't go to editorial meetings?
No, never. Nobody ever asked me my ideas about anything. My work was separated from the news. And then after eight years of doing it, I found it quite depressing, always seeing horrible things on the street. I said I wanted to stop, and I left the newspaper—it was six months before the attack.

Has The Arab of the Future, which was a bestseller in France, changed your public profile at home?
Yeah, it's completely different.Before I published Arab of the Future, I had comics fans, like indie fans. After Arab of the Future, I had moms. Dads. Moms and people who were telling me, "I'm sorry this is the first comic I read; I don't read comics but I love it." It's very new.

Do you like that?
Yeah, I love it. I like when people from real life like my comics. For 15 years, I was drawing comics, and sometimes you would say, "Why am I doing all this? Nobody likes my comics. I'm alone at my table and nobody is here to get my picture. I'm here, and there is always a guy who comes and looks at my comic and says, 'I like superheroes,' and he goes away." So when you could reach people who are not interested in comics, but they like the story, I'm very happy.

After you had moved to France and your blonde hair turned dark, did you get made fun of again? Like when you were in Syria, and they were calling you yehudi, did you get the dirty Arab or something in France?
Of course. When I arrived in France my hair started to turn brown and curly, and I had zits, and I became ugly. And—I don't know if in English it's the same—but in French, I have a girly voice. So when I was younger, all the guys would say, "Hey you're gay," "Hey faggot."

So people were telling me I was a Jew in Syria, and in France they were telling me what a faggot I was. Gay till I was, I don't know, 16 or 18 years old. And—I've said this elsewhere, but it's very true—because I was thinking, I'm not Jewish. I'm not Jewish. But if I had been Jewish, or if I had been gay, it's incredible how life would have been for me. Each time someone said to me, "Hey gay, fuck you," if I really loved men, I would have gone crazy. So I became very sensitive to all those questions of people who are hated by a mass who don't know why. I have a lot of affection for the outsider, the excluded person.

Follow Aidan on Twitter.

The Arab of the Future is available now from Metropolitan Books.

This story originally appeared on The Trace.

On November 3, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a 14-page report on gun violence in Wilmington, Delaware, a medium-sized city of roughly 70,000 residents that also experiences one of the highest murder rates in the country. To judge by the language in its title—"Elevated Rates of Urban Firearm Violence and Opportunities for Prevention"—the study might seem to have been an overlooked watershed: Despite a 2013 executive order by President Barack Obama to resume research on gun violence, the CDC has adhered to a two-decade-old congressional restriction that effectively bans such inquiries. Now here was a document suggesting it was tiptoeing back in.

Read through the Wilmington report, though, and you get a different story—one about the strange contortions that result as the CDC seeks to fulfill its public health mission without violating Congress's orders.

While the new study analyzed Wilmington's 127 recorded shootings in 2013, it does not address how the perpetrators acquired their weapons, or if attempts to limit access to firearms might lead to a dip in crime. Instead, the Wilmington report outlines already well-established trends and risk factors: that 95 percent of city residents arrested for violent crimes are young men; that a history of violence is a strong predictor for being involved in a firearm-related crime; and that unemployment is often a risk factor for violence. The report concludes that "integrating data systems" across Delaware would allow social service providers to better understand the issue.

If the CDC wasn't going to consider the role of firearms in Wilmington's gun crimes, why do the study at all? The answer is in the research's origins, which lie in a bizarro world of not-actually-about-gun-violence gun violence studies that are an outgrowth of the congressional ban. "It's not like the study was initiated by the CDC," Dr. Linda Degutis, the former director of the center's national injury center, told The Trace. "It was a response to a request from the city."

Specifically, the Wilmington study is a product of the CDC's "Epi-Aids" program, which assists states and local governments with public health problems through the agency's Epidemic Intelligence Service division. Because the CDC is under immense political pressure to avoid doing anything that might even appear to "advocate or promote gun control" (in the words of Congress), Epi-Aid requests like Wilmington's—which revolve around firearm-related public health issues—put the agency in a difficult situation.

In a proper epidemiological study, guns themselves would be treated as a risk factor for many types of violence or injury—just as mosquitoes would be treated as a risk factor for contracting malaria, for example. As it is, the agency is confined to rehashing social or environmental factors that have already been thoroughly studied by injury researchers.

"When a health department requests an investigation of something, that's basically within the CDC's authorization, because they're not necessarily saying 'Let's do gun violence research.' They're saying 'Let's figure out what's going on here,'" said Degutis, who said she left the organization last year in part because she was frustrated with the difficulty of conducting research on gun violence.

The center's moratorium on gun violence research stems from an NRA-backed budget amendment passed in 1996. Obama ordered the agency to relaunch gun studies shortly after the Sandy Hook massacre, but his budget requests in 2014 and 2015—which would have dedicated $10 million to the issue—were refused by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. The CDC still regards gun violence as so off-limits that it's not even listed under the Table of Contents section in its recently released index of research priorities. Throughout the 47-page report, the word "firearm" is only used four times: three in reference to youth violence and once in reference to suicide prevention.

Essentially, examining behaviors where guns play a role, without delving into the issue of firearm accessibility, allows the CDC to appear responsive to a pressing local public health issue without triggering alarm bells in Congress. It's a pattern that plays out at the agency with some regularity: A 2012 CDC investigation of youth suicides in two Delaware counties barely mentions guns, even though they're the most common method of committing suicide in the United States. And in June, the CDC published a paper on recent gun injury statistics—but Degutis says that effort, too, was based on existing information the organization already had access to the figures through its general injury databases.

CDC spokeswoman Courtney Lenard had this to say when asked why a study on firearms violence wouldn't explore whether gun accessibility plays a role in gun crime rates: "Prevention requires understanding the factors that influence violence—considering the complex interplay between individual, relationship, community, and societal factors," she wrote in an email. "It allows us to address the factors that put people at risk for experiencing violence as a victim or perpetrator."

David Hemenway, a gun violence researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health, didn't work on the CDC's Wilmington report. But he's skeptical that it effectively addressed firearm crimes in the city. Hemenway described its lack of focus on access to guns as "crazy," adding that access is often a key data point to help predict where crimes will occur.

"You can't take your eyes off something so important as the guns," he says, "because what the guns do is make things lethal."

Follow The Trace on Twitter.

Header image: From 'War is Beautiful' by David Shields, published by powerHouse Books. Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times/Redux

On my way to meet David Shields, I kept track of how often I saw a copy of the New York Times. I was to interview Shields in a diner on the Upper East Side and when I arrived I'd seen the color photograph—a scene from Paris in the aftermath of the November 13 bombings—on the front page a total of 12 times. The paper had been in the hallway of my Brooklyn apartment building, in the bodega where I stopped for coffee, in the hands of several people on the train. I passed through several subway stations where, through the train window, I could see kiosks selling the Times amidst gum, soda, Vogue, and other everyday objects.

The ever-presence of the Times in my daily life was no surprise and that, in itself, is part of the layered argument Shields makes in his newest book, War Is Beautiful, published by powerHouse Books last month. An apt description of this book comes from one of its many blurbers, Jonathan Lethem, who refers to War Is Beautiful as a "device of inquiry." One of the many inquiries raised regards the possibility that the ubiquity of the Times and the illusion of its neutrality combine to leave it less scrutinized than other media. If we buy that, then it will be all the more disturbing for us to allow the text's central claim, that these beautiful, frequently seen war photographs work, without us realizing it, to "glorify war through an unrelenting parade of beautiful images whose function is to sanctify the accompanying descriptions of battle, death, destruction, and displacement," as Shields writes in his introduction.

The discussion about the ideological effect of the Times's curatorial choices is put forth by multiple voices in War Is Beautiful . Dave Hickey's afterword is as useful as Shields's introduction. There are 23 blurbs that take up an uncommon amount of space on front and back jacket flaps, some of which acknowledge Shields's point without conceding it. After reviewing a thousand front-page war images, Shields noticed recurring visual tropes—nature, playground, father, God, pietà, painting, movie, beauty, love, death. Each photograph is presented to us within one of these frames, and each section begins with a carefully chosen quote (from writers like Edmund Burke, Cormac McCarthy, and photojournalist John Hoagland), which frame the frame.

Some of the most important voices in the book's chorus are in the very back of the book in small print—there Shields lists not just the photo captions run by the Times, but also the original captions authored by the photojournalist themselves or their photo agencies. Alongside an image of a body lying alone in the middle of a muddy red road, the Times ran the caption, "AMBUSH: An Iraqi soldier was killed yesterday by marines who were ambushed in central Iraq." The original caption chose to highlight the other figure in this image, a US marine facing away from the corpse in the foreground. The original caption begins, "A US marine walked past a dead Iraqi soldier killed in a firefight with US marines early this morning..." It's here in the descriptions of the images that the greatest sense of unease arises. While the difference between these captions may seem subtle to some, they represent choices about how to report the reality of war. The former caption begins with movie poster sensationalism—AMBUSH!—while the latter evokes a quieter (but deeply grim) moment of soldiers passing and walking away from dead strangers.

This multiplicity of voices causes the book's overall tone to be, of course, conversational. Shields does not seem to be demanding readers view the photographs just as he views them; rather, Shields is there looking at the images along with you, saying, "Just look at this image. What is this? Why is this on the cover of the Times?"

VICE: Before you canceled your subscription, what was your regular interaction with the New York Times like? Would you have physical copies lying around your house? Would you only see it tucked in with your daily email?
David Shields: I grew up reading the Times. I grew up in California and we always got the Times, which wasn't the standard thing if you were living in San Francisco in the mid-70s, but we got the paper delivered because both my parents were journalists. So I've been an inveterate reader of the New York Times for 40 years. Living in Seattle now, I'd get the hardcopy in those ubiquitous blue bags. From 1991 through the first Gulf War, until I stopped subscribing in 2013 or 2014, I'd get the paper every day at four or five in the morning, and then I'd read the paper with breakfast.

From 'War Is Beautiful' by David Shields, published by powerHouse Books. Photo by Mohammed Abed/Agence France-Presse-Getty Images

When did you begin to notice a problematic pattern with the war images on the front page of the New York Times? And how did that noticing turn into a book?
The genesis of the book was in October 1997 when the Times went color on the first page. It seems to me, looking back, that two or three times a week I'd be stunned, riveted, disgusted by these really beautiful images. I'd look forward every morning to what—for lack of a better term—I'd call my war porn: these images of ravishingly beautiful war. I recognized a problem, but I didn't know where the problem was coming from. I'd start to wonder: Is this just me? Am I over-reading these images? Is it the paper? Is it my relationship to the paper? Initially, I just filed it away under a thought experiment, but over years and years, I continued to notice the same things. Look at this picture.

[Shields shows me a picture on his phone. It's from November 12, 2015. The picture appeared on page A1 of the New York Times.]

The article is supposed to be about burial, but tell me that it isn't really about those stunningly, stunningly beautiful women. That was just three days ago. It looks like the cover of Vogue. That's a curatorial choice. You may not agree with my reading of these images, as some of my students don't, but can we please talk about the fact that on the front page of the New York Times for an article ostensibly about burial, they've chosen this picture, this gallery of incredibly beautiful women. Can we talk about the relationship between atrocity and beauty? That's the book to me. I would see pictures like this two to three times a week. So I kept on asking myself, Is there a book here? Do I have the nerve to publish a book like this? And then, out of boredom and out of the notion that a writer's job is to cause trouble for himself and the culture, I started the book. I really do ascribe to this quote of Flaubert's that "the importance of work can be measured by the harm spoken of it," or Kafka's, "A book must be an axe for the frozen sea inside us." Those are beautiful statements to me. I loved the idea of doing a book that put me in harm's way and it puts the Times in harm's way and it puts the reader in harm's way. And so, for a few years, I worked with some research assistants and we gathered these pictures and we found a thousand, color, combat pictures. Seven hundred of them fit our criteria, and virtually none of them hugely contradicted my thesis. I started putting them into categories. I have such strong memories of meeting my research assistants and looking at these piles of photographs and seeing that we'd have 50 that proved the beauty thesis, 50 pictures of "War as Fashion Shoot," 50 that were "War as Movie Outtake," 50 that were "War as Pietà." I could see that this wasn't just my hallucination, the evidence was there. Then it was an endless job of curating these images and very carefully choosing quotes and placing them in a particular pattern so that each chapter has its own mini-movement.

So, it was getting the physical paper, getting thrilled and repulsed by the pictures, then having the stupidity to do a book that gathered them. Then I felt that I could no longer subscribe to the Times, either physically or digitally, because I do feel the paper is acting in something close to bad faith in using these pictures. We'd, maybe, expect to see these images in USA Today or the Wall Street Journal, which are overt in propagandizing the war, but these pictures are in the New York Times, the so-called "paper of record." Which to me is sending problematic messages in their marriage of beauty and violence.

Photo courtesy of the author

I think a lot of people think of themselves as being more media-savvy or image-literate than ever. With the help of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report...
Are people getting their media savvy sense primarily from Stewart and Colbert, you think? Or from wider program of the tradition of Derrida...?

"I kept on asking myself, Is there a book here? Do I have the nerve to publish a book like this? And then, out of boredom and out of the notion that a writer's job is to cause trouble for himself and the culture, I started the book."

I think it is structuralism and post-structuralism, post-modernism, Stewart and Colbert, Twitter...
Right, BuzzFeed, Reddit. Twitter. An image comes up, and we are able to sort of "crowd-source" the evaluation of it in our feed. People will point out things like a publication slightly darkening the skin of a perpetrator. We think of ourselves as being able to deconstruct every image and yet the Times remains weirdly above the fray.

From 'War Is Beautiful' by David Shields, published by powerHouse Books. Photo by Joao Silva/The New York Times/Redux

Do you think people think are mistaken in thinking that we are living in an increasingly media-savvy or image-literate time? Or is it that the Times is just less scrutinized than other news sources? How does it maintain its position "above the fray"?
It's proverbially shooting fish in a barrel to take a Sean Hannity clip and show how he'll say one thing about Bush/Cheney and turn it 180 degrees when talking about Obama/Biden. When things like this are pointed out, it is often well done and useful, but it isn't exactly revelatory. It's helpful to point out the idiocies and hypocrisy and propagandizing of Fox News, but any person of any education with any slightly progressive bent will say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I knew that." But I think the Times, without pretending to be any sort of left-wing paper, is understood to be, at worst, centrist, and at best, slightly center-left. They'll endorse a Democratic candidate always for president, but they are essentially a centrist paper. If this had been a Murdock-owned paper, there'd be less of a point to make, but the Times is thought to be the "imperial arbiter," the "impartial umpire," the "paper of record," "all the news that's fit to print," "the first draft of history," etc. So it really matters what they're running on the front page.

For example, it's amazing that papers agree not to show coffins coming back from the war. That's a huge propaganda win.

The book is meant to say, "Can we please worry more about these pictures?" Look again at that picture from November 12, 2015. Can we not agree that it's an editorial choice that is marrying the beautiful and the traumatic in ways that are doing cultural work? These images are disseminating ideology in complicated ways that I can't totally tease out. But it is there and it's not talked about enough. Why this picture? Presumably, you have many pictures to choose from of this burial site and you run this picture? It's amazing to me. It's absurd.

From 'War Is Beautiful' by David Shields, published by powerHouse Books. Photo by Wathiq Khuzaie/Getty Images

In Dave Hickey's afterword, and in discussions you've had elsewhere about this book, there's attention called to the ways in which the image is squared in all these specific ways, the lining up of subjects in the vertical middle, the diagonals—there's a perfect diagonal in this November 12 picture. There's a diagonal lining up of the subjects in the vertical middle. It makes for a very studied composition.
And those shovel handles are amazing the way they line up. It is very painterly. I think that Hickey does an awfully good job of pointing this out with the images in the book.

It adds to the book's ever-building argument that these images are imitating great artworks of the past few decades and are, therefore, not trying to capture the reality unfolding in front of the camera. As I read your book, I kept wanting to maintain a distinction between "beauty" and what we might call "aestheticizing," where "aestheticizing" could potentially do critical work or help a viewer see—through the lens of thoughtful, purposeful art—the war in a more serious and real way.
I know what you mean, like Guernica or something...

From 'War Is Beautiful' by David Shields, published by powerHouse Books. Photo by Chris Ison/Press Association

Do you think that art could usefully frame war in some productive or useful way? Or will any attempt at artfulness take away from the horror of war? Is there some middle ground?
How would you define "aestheticizing"? A very casual definition? Making that definition could be a whole seminar.

"The point-blank execution of the Vietnamese man and the naked girl running from napalm? Those pictures, to me, have a raw and naked reality. The pictures now always seem to err on the side of sorrowful, dignified, noble."

Yes, right. For starters, "aestheticizing" would have to do more than merely sanctify. In your introduction, you talk about beauty as sanctifying force.
Yes, and dignifying. That's an important term to me. The idea that horror, suffering, sorrow could, through these images, appear ennobling, dignifying, and therefore worthwhile. Again, the November 12 picture makes human sorrow seem dignified and it makes war seem noble. That's the cultural work that beauty is doing here. I'd just like the Times to acknowledge that. Either the Times is being terribly naïve and is just moving product or—and this is the more insidious and paranoid reading—they know exactly what they are doing and are, in a way, working hand-in-hand with the US government to promote global warfare. I mean, the truth is somewhere in between those two. I sort of lean more toward the former. The decline of print journalism, the ubiquity of the web—they're doing anything to have people pay attention. They are going to run Vogue-level model beauty on the cover. They'll be damned if they're going to turn down that picture.

I think this book definitely exists in a strong relationship to Reality Hunger. Some people thought I was arguing for the abandonment of art or something like that, but that's not what I want. I want an art that's congruent with the 21st century, art that is working harder to capture contemporary reality and isn't just retreating to tired conventions. In the same way, I argue that these images are retreating to tired pictorial and visual tropes. Hickey does a great job of showing how picture after picture is a footnote to—an almost clear quotation of—Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Diebenkorn, Rothko, Pollock. Gerhardt Richter is in five of these images. These pictures are aspiring toward the crystalline beauty of glorious art. I mean, Richter is a great, great painter, but his work is framed as art. I feel that what these pictures never do is work hard to faithfully document observed reality. It would be nice if sometimes the horror show got conveyed. I think some of the images and video that came out of the Paris bombing, especially on BBC, conveyed some of the swirling chaos and incipient horror of the moment.

From 'War Is Beautiful' by David Shields, published by powerHouse Books. Photo by Damir Sagolj/Reuters

I'm curious how this problem of representing the war gets resolved. On one hand you've got this beauty problem. If the images representing war are aiming, as your introduction and Dickey's afterword argue, at beauty, and if beauty works on the viewer as a sanitizing, ameliorating, and—most problematically—distancing force, then what we end up with is a tacit glamorization or ennobling of war. On the other extreme, we could call for the only photographs that are chosen to document the reality of war as faithfully and, potentially, as brutally as one could. But there has to be a middle ground. What do you think a middle ground looks like?
People have said to me something like, "Well, what does Shields want the photographers to do? Does he want the pictures to be aggressively banal and not beautiful?" It's not like I'd urge the photographers to turn in blurry photographs of bloody thumbs torn off, but these current pictures to me, to my understanding, err so far on the side of rapture, of swooning beauty, that there's precious little of the horror of war. These are highly sanitized images of war, and so can we at least acknowledge that? This feels like a PG war. It's a Disney war. Let's talk about that.

In the Times during Vietnam you've got Eddie Adams and Nick Ut publishing Pulitzer-Prize winning, culture-changing photographs. The point-blank execution of the Vietnamese man and the naked girl running from napalm? Those pictures, to me, have a raw and naked reality. They're incredibly beautiful and artful photographs, but those pictures find a useful and productive middle ground that I would argue for. I don't see those pictures in the Times anymore. The pictures now always seem to err on the side of sorrowful, dignified, noble.

I think it is impossible to underestimate the value to the military and the government of embedding journalists and photojournalists within a battalion. The result to me is censoring and self-censoring. If those pictures are uploaded instantly to the whole world, including the very soldiers you're in a foxhole with, then it seems to me increasingly unlikely that the photographer is going to disseminate pictures that are anything other than dignifying the very sacrifices that the soldiers he's living with are participating in. I think there are so many factors that push The New York Times further and further away from what seems to me a more admirable tradition of combat photography—the embedding of photojournalists, the Times overcorrection of their underreporting of the Holocaust, the decline of print journalism, the rise of the web, the huge push of right-wing propaganda think tanks pushing all media toward the center and the right. The Times is trying to survive, but at what cost?

Many of us would not want to lose this belief that art can do important political work.
I don't want to lose that belief.

But I think that this book does challenge that belief at its core. Part of the argument the book makes is that useful cultural work is difficult and all-too rare. Beauty alone does not accomplish it. In fact, it could accomplish the exact opposite—it can take us further and further from reality through its distancing force. So, maybe we can come away from this book and say, yes, it's still possible for art to bring us closer to reality, but when it happens, it is hard-earned and it has to be much more thoughtful and intentional than just making a beautiful photograph.
I think you're right. And I know what you mean. It seems these pictures are happy to be naively beautiful. War as abstracted beauty is a problem. But I like the way you and I are now struggling toward a useful middle ground. Not that every image is going to be a bloody corpse with exposed viscera. That's not going to happen. But—and these are, of course, subjective terms—a useful, well-considered, hard-earned, intentional beauty. That seems like a ground worth fighting for.

Chloé Cooper Jones is a writer and philosopher who studies and teaches in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.

War Is Beautiful: The New York Times Pictorial Guide to the Glamour of Armed Conflict is available in bookstores and online from powerHouse Books.

Mark Zuckerberg via Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

Read: You Can Buy a Human Skull for $750 at This Toronto Store

The Institute for Policy Studies is a DC-based organization that describes itself as "Washington's first progressive multi-issue think tank," one comprised of "a community of public scholars and organizers." It's just finished a depressing but not entirely surprising study, "The Forbes 400...and the Rest of Us," which is exactly what it sounds like: The Institute took a look at the earnings of the super rich folks who make up the Forbes 400 list and compared them to the rest of the country. As Donald Trump would say, the gap is tremendous. To no one's surprise, the wealthiest Americans are really really really wealthy.

To help illustrate the point, the Institute highlights some pretty startling numbers, and even matches them with some helpful charts. For instance, the richest 400 people in America "have more wealth combined than the bottom 61 percent of the US population, an estimated 70 million households, or 194 million people," or more than the combined population of Canada and Mexico. The Forbes 400 also controls more wealth than all the black people in America.

The further up the wealth pyramid you go, the more shocking the statistics get. The top 20 people on the Forbes list "own more wealth than the bottom half of the American population combined, a total of 152 million people in 57 million households." These .000001 Percenters ("a group that could fit comfortably in one single Gulfstream G650 luxury jet," per the report) include Mark Zuckerburg of Facebook, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Phil Knight of Nike—multibillionaires who've amassed staggering fortunes while building business empires. But that group also includes nine heirs, as the study calls them, "from families of dynastic wealth," which includes two Koch brothers, four Waltons (of Walmart), and three children of the Mars candy empire.

The study briefly explores a couple ways to help close the gap, like squashing offshore tax havens and other "wealth escape routes" that help the rich hide trillions of their dollars. The authors also suggest raising the tax rate on the rich.

You can read the report in its entirety here.

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Photo via Flickr user Ken Lund

At least 14 people were killed and another 14 wounded in a mass shooting at a social services facility in San Bernardino, California, the city's Chief of Police Jarrod Burguan told reporters Wednesday afternoon.

Burguan stressed that those numbers are preliminary, as is the belief that the shooters were wearing military-style gear for their assault.

"Preliminary information indicates that these people came prepared," the chief said.

Also unclear is whether assault rifles were used, but Burguan said the shooters were armed with "long rifles," not pistols. "We have a domestic-type terrorism situation that occurred here," he added.

The scene remains active, but for hours police and SWAT have worked to rescue employees from the Inland Regional Center, a sprawling complex near a golf course.

The building houses almost 700 staff-members who "provide services to more than 30,200 people with developmental disabilities and their families in San Bernardino and Riverside counties."

Reporters from local and national media outlets swarmed the area shortly after the shooting around 11 AM local time and began speaking with workers. A father was called on live TV by his son, who had apparently been trapped in the building for some time.

He choked back tears as he learned in front of the world that his son was safe.

Sergeant Vicki Cervantes of the San Bernardino Police Department told KCAL that an event was taking place in a conference room inside one of the buildings on the center's campus. At least one gunman stormed into the room and began shooting, Cervantes told the outlet.

The New York Times reports that the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) are on the scene.

The shooting comes less than a week after 57-year-old Robert Dear allegedly killed three and wounded nine more at a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado Springs, Colorado. As of Monday, there had been 351 mass shootings in America so far this year, as the Washington Post reported, making for a rate of over one per day.

This story will continue to be updated as the situation develops.

Follow Justin Glawe on Twitter.

Cable's out. Photo via Flickr user Clive Darra

A cable company out of Fort Simpson, in Canada's Northwest Territories, is facing heat after it posted a list of subscribers who had not paid overdue bills on its Facebook page on Monday.

Senga Service Cable Company posted the list of 25 bills on Facebook, which includes both single individuals and sometime two names bundled together, along with the amount owed for each account also listed on the page.

The post also notes that the accounts listed were to be disconnected Wednesday, with some bills on the list amounting to as little as $94, all the way up to a high of $1406.

Jennifer Simmons, a spokesperson for the company, told CBC News that "excuses" from non-paying customers is what prompted the company to out the owing accounts.

"We always got excuses from everybody," Simons said. "Promissory notes and everything, and it never arrives. So we found the most effective way is to publicly post the names."

Although the posts have been removed, screenshots obtained by CBC show some of Simmons' posts on other pages in the town. In one, she challenges the notion that what Senga Service did was unethical.

"Well then maybe it's a lesson to not live outside your means," she appears to have wrote.

"People who can't afford services shouldn't get them. Period."

Screenshot via Facebook

One of the outed people on the page was former MLA Kevin Menicoche, who said that he called the company after seeing the post featuring his name.

"I did speak with them," he told CBC News. "I said: 'I'm not embarrassed, but it would be nice if you had contacted me individually.' They thought that was one of the options available to them, but there's got to be an issue of confidentiality."

According to Simmons, however, there is no issue. After consulting lawyers, CBC says, she came to the conclusion that, as long as you don't publish someone's personal information, such as SIN, phone number, or address, posting their name and amount owed to shame them into submission is fair game.

Let's hope credit card companies don't follow suit.

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter.