In anticipation of the upcoming fourth season of our HBO show which will premiere this February, we are releasing all of season three for free online. Watch all the episodes here, and don't miss the premiere of season four on Friday, February 5, at 11PM on HBO.

For 45 years, America was locked in the Cold War with the Soviet Union and fear of global nuclear annihilation was constant. The end of the Cold War in 1991 was supposed to usher in a new era of peace and cooperation, but it didn't last. Tensions between the US and Russia have been simmering for years, and the ongoing conflict in the Ukraine has pushed the relationship to the point of full-blown crisis.

In this episode from season three of our HBO show that originally aired on June 26th of last year, VICE Founder Shane Smith met Kremlin officials and American leaders to figure out what was really driving the new standoff between the two global superpowers. We also followed VICE correspondent Simon Ostrovsky as he reported from the front lines of the bloody war in Eastern Ukraine.

Illustrations by Alex Jenkins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"OK, lets begin," said Franz.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow Conor Creighton on Twitter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read: How the US Lost Afghanistan

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

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

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

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

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

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Illustration by Armando Veve

I've been telling friends about Álvaro Enrigue's Sudden Death ever since I started reading the galley a few months ago. The novel centers on the unlikely conceit of a hungover, machismo-drenched tennis match between the painter Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Quevedo in 16th century Italy. But it's also about so much more: empire, art, fate, Cortés and La Malinche and Moctezuma, the brutal founding of what would become modern-day Mexico, aristocracy, the backroom dealings of the Roman Catholic Church and the European court, and balls, for both tennis and reproduction. Beautifully rendered from the Spanish by 2666 translator Natasha Wimmer, Sudden Death is one of the most engaging, audacious, and flat-out fun works of fiction I've read in a while. I hope you enjoy this excerpt as much as I did. Pick up the book at a local bookstore or online February 9.

—James Yeh, culture editor

The Emperor's
Mantle

Don Diego de Alvarado Huanitzin, Nahua of noble birth and master featherworker, was at his shop in San José de los Naturales—once a farm of exotic birds under the Emperor Moctezuma—when he met Vasco de Quiroga. They were introduced by Fray Pedro de Gante, who managed what was left of the totocalli (as such farms were called) after the brutal years of the invasion.

The lawyer and the featherworker were soon on a comfortable footing, since both were of noble birth, both had been part of imperial courts in their youth, both had remained—over the 12 most confusing years that their two vast and ancient cultures had known in who knows how many centuries—in the unusual situation of actually being free.

Vasco de Quiroga had no reason to return to Spain and was greatly excited by the idea of building a society on rational principles. The Indian had nowhere to go back to, but he had managed to find a relatively secure and comfortable spot for himself after years of darkness, misery, and fear. His aristocratic rank was respected and his work was so admired that most of the pieces made in his shop were sent immediately to adorn palaces and cathedrals in Spain, Germany, Flanders, and the duchy of Milan.

Unlike most Mexicans, Don Diego de Alvarado Huanitzin did know what this meant: He had been to Europe. He belonged to the select group of highborn artists who were received by the Holy Roman Emperor on Cortés's first trip back to Spain, and he knew very well that the new lords of Mexico might be eaters of sausage made from the blood of pigs, but they were also capable of rising far above their barbaric ways when it came to building palaces, painting canvases, cooking animals, or—and this impressed him most of all—making shoes.

After setting him up in his new shop and providing him with satin, glue, paints, brushes, tools, and the assistance of the royal cooks, Cortés asked Huanitzin what else he needed in order to pay tribute to the emperor. Shoes, he replied.

From the moment that the ship he had been obliged to board (though not herded onto like cattle) sailed out of sight of American lands, Huanitzin realized that in order to survive his new circumstances he would have to learn Spanish. By the time they arrived in Seville, after stops in Cuba and the Canary Islands, he was attempting polite phrases in the language of the conquistadors and was able to say that he and his son would be happy to make a heavy cloak of white feathers for His Majesty: The sailors had told him that Spain was known for being cold.

Cortés loved the idea of the featherworker and his son making a small demonstration of their art in court—he himself had a spectacular feather mantle on his bed at his house in Coyoacán showing the birth of water in springs and its death as rain—and he immediately gave Huanitzin favored status among his entourage. Not only did the featherworker speak Spanish—terrible Spanish, but he could make himself understood—he was the only one who seemed to show any interest in taking stock of his new circumstances.

Once in Toledo, the conquistador arranged for a workshop to be set up next to the palace stables and negotiated unrestricted access to the kitchen, where the preparation of ducks, geese, and hens afforded Huanitzin a sufficient supply of feathers to make a cape for an emperor who, the featherworker was beginning to understand, had defeated the Aztec emperor because he was infinitely more powerful, even though he lived in a dark, drab, and icy city.

After setting him up in his new shop and providing him with satin, glue, paints, brushes, tools, and the assistance of the royal cooks, Cortés asked Huanitzin what else he needed in order to pay tribute to the emperor. Shoes, he replied. What kind, asked the conquistador, imagining that he must be cold and want woolen slippers. Like yours, said Huanitzin—who, being an Aztec noble and a featherworker, considered a provincial squire turned soldier to be of a class beneath his. With cockles. Cockles? asked Cortés. The Indian pointed to the captain's instep, festooned with a golden buckle and inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Buckles, said the conquistador; shoes with buckles. That's it.

Naturally, Cortés didn't buy Huanitzin a pair of shoes stitched with silver thread like his—not only were they monstrously expensive, walking in them was like squeezing one's toes into a pair of flatirons—but he did buy him good high-heeled boots with tin buckles, and along with them a pair of stockings, a few white shirts, and a pair of black breeches intended for some nobleman's son that fit the featherworker like a dream.

The Indian accepted the garments as if they were his due—without paying them much attention or thanking him for them—and made one last request of the conquistador before getting to work: Could you also find me some mushrooms? Mushrooms? To see mellifluous things while I'm worrying the king's drape. It's called a royal cape, a capón real. I thought that a capon was a bird with its burls cut off. Balls. Not balls, it's mushrooms I want. Here they would burn us both if they discovered you drunk on mushrooms. I'd hardly be dunked in them, it's not as if they're a pond. There are none in Spain. Well then, the royal capón won't be as mellifluous.

Huanitzin liked his new clothes, though he didn't think them fitting for a master featherworker who was once again on the grounds of an emperor's palace, so he used his first Spanish goose feathers to embroider one of the shirts—the one he wore on special occasions—with pineapples that he imagined were the equivalent of the Flanders lions he'd seen worked in gold on Charles V's cloak. The breeches were sewn down the side seams with bands of white feathers, turning him into a first wild glimpse of mariachi singers to come. The cooks spoiled this tiny man, who inspected their birds' scrawny necks and armpits in a getup like a saint on parade. When he decided that a fowl was worthy of being plucked, he kneeled over it, took a pair of tiny tweezers from his sash, blew the hair out of his eyes, and defeathered the part of the bird that interested him with maddening care—the cooks knew by now that once he chose a specimen it would have to be moved to the dinner menu because there was no way he'd be done with it before lunch. Hours later, he would return happily to his shop, generally with a harvest of feathers so modest that it hardly filled a soup plate. Sometimes he looked over the birds and found none to be of interest—there was no way to predict which he would judge worthy material for the king's cape. Other times it happened that there would be no birds cooked that day. When this was the case he still lingered in the kitchen, leaning on the wall so as not to be in the way. He admired the size of the chunks of animal moving on and off the hearth. What is that, he asked every so often. Calf's liver. He would return to his shop to tell his son that the king was to eat castle adder that night. But what is it? Must be a fat snake that lives in ruined towers, he explained in Nahuatl.

By the time the letter from Pope Paul reached the last outpost of Christianity, which just then was the Purépecha village half rising from the ruins of what had once been the imperial city of Tzintzuntzan, everyone was already calling Huanitzin "Don Diego," and he was still wearing the cotton shirts embroidered with pineapples that he believed were the height of European fashion, as well as his Toledo boots. By now he also read and spoke Latin, utterly garbled by his artilleryman's ear. Look, said Vasco de Quiroga, handing him the letter on which he had just broken the papal seal of Paul III. The featherworker read it, running his finger under the lines. I'll go with you, he said at last, so I can pay my regards to Charles.

Don Diego didn't miss the old gods. His mostly symbolic relationship with the succession of religious beliefs that life had visited upon him was based on rituals that felt just as empty when he offered up his work to the four Tezcatlipocas of the four corners of the earth as when he offered it to the three archangels and the Nazarene. Must we call him the Nazarene, asked Tata Vasco—who greatly enjoyed their conversations—every so often. That's what he was, Don Quiroga, a Nazarene, and you know that I'd prefer you to call me Don Diego; I wasn't baptized just to be your latchkey. Lackey, Don Diego, lackey. He liked it that the incense and blessings came only on Sundays and lasted barely an hour—I'll be back in a splash, he would say at the shop to announce that he was going to mass—and that praying didn't involve piercing the member with a maguey spine, and that the culmination of the Communion ceremony was just a little piece of unleavened bread and not the corpse stew eaten at the palace under Moctezuma—human flesh was a little gummy and the dish in which it was served was overspiced. He didn't miss the blood spurting from the sacrificial heart, the hurling of heads at crowds dazed on hallucinogens, the rolling of decapitated bodies down steps.

He did miss the order and hygiene of the Aztec government; the police who did their jobs, the sense of belonging to a tight circle of friends who ruled a world that didn't stretch very far; the security of knowing that he only had to speak Nahuatl to be understood by everyone. And he was still grieving. No matter how pleasant his situation, he would have preferred that the Spanish invasion had never happened, that his parents had died of old age and not of thirst during the siege; he would have preferred that his wife hadn't been raped to death by the Tlaxcaltecas and that the Spaniards' dogs hadn't eaten his twin daughters. He would have liked to bury his brothers and cousins, killed in combat, and he would have preferred that his brothers' wives hadn't been taken as slaves, hadn't had to choose to throw their babies into the lake rather than see them endure the life that awaited them.

Huanitzin had hidden in the totocalli with his eldest son when the sack of Tenochtitlan began, and the two of them had been saved because Cortés had a weakness for the art of featherwork. With everything lost, Huanitzin had started over, and he felt that he had exchanged one set of privileges for another. His son would never wear the proud calmecac topknot, but he wouldn't go to war either; he wouldn't learn the poems that had made the empire great, nor would he enjoy the privilege of being considered an almost sacred artist at the palace, but he had gained the wonderful, liberating joy of horseback riding, and all the things new to Indians that he liked about this world: the shoes, the beef, the elegant shirts with pineapples that were by now the trademark of his house and that in the times of Moctezuma would have been considered an effrontery punishable by death.

No, said Vasco de Quiroga, I think I'll go alone; it's a meeting of bishops to save the Church, not the gypsy caravan Cortés brought along to entertain the king. The featherworker shrugged his shoulders: If you need anything, let me know. What could I possibly need? I don't know—a handsome peasant to take to the pope? A peasant? To flail him, as a sign of our devotion. No one touches His Holiness. Of course, that's why he's pope, but I'm sure his bishops flail him. Hail him. That's right, flail him. Not a handsome peasant, the padre continued to provoke him. Why? He's a man of God, Huanitzin; he must be 80 years old. It's a matter of coming up with the right peasant, Huanitzin concluded, wrinkling his brow and fingering the scanty beard he might better have shaved. How can you think of a peasant for the pope? A nice one, answered the Indian. Then, unperturbed, he bid the bishop goodbye: I'm off, it's raining now.

Though Huanitzin was part of the Tzintzuntzan hospitaltown, he decided to build the aviary and his featherworking shop some distance away. Quiroga had decreed that his hospital be built on top of what was once the palace of the Purépecha emperor, and the Indian was of the opinion that it couldn't be a good place. I'm not going to build a totocalli on that crossload of souls, he'd said, it'll be the death of my little birds; and then we work at night, there's no knowing what we'll see when we have to clot ourselves with mushrooms so we can do mellifluous work. Quiroga accepted his reasoning; it was true that to calibrate the luminescent effect of the precious feathers, the artists worked mostly at night and in environments of controlled light: windowless sheds in which the only sources of light were beeswax tapers. I've already chosen the little plot where I'll build the shop, Huanitzin said to Quiroga; or better yet, why don't you come and deed me it, since you're a lawyer.

The plot was a sloping valley that began on a mountainside covered in the black fringe of a pine forest, and it ran down to the shores of a lake. It was completely isolated from the other settlements, the emerald meadow cropped by a flock of sheep, the mountains watchful in the distance. It was by far the most beautiful spot Quiroga had seen in the basin of Lake Pátzcuaro, which was itself, in his opinion—and mine—the most beautiful place in the world. Where are you going to put the shop, the bishop asked the featherworker. The Indian pointed to the top of the valley: Will you deed me the whole valley or just the shop? In Mechuacán there are no deeds, replied the padre; every thing belongs to everyone. I ask because it belongs to some Purépecha, said Huanitzin, but they only want it to plant squash and keep sheep. The bishop thought for a moment: You can put the shop here, but only if you start a town of featherworkers. How will I flounder a town, when I have only one son? Bring in the Purépecha. Do you mean I should teach them featherwork? The bishop nodded. And you'll give me my deeds? Quiroga harrumphed and shook his head: I can give you a declaration of origination. And some deeds for my little shop. No.

For months, another Indian, who called himself a notary and said that he represented the interests of Don Diego de Alvarado Huanitzin and the newly founded village of Nearby, waited from sunup to sundown in the antechambers of the archdiocese without being received by Quiroga. Finally, the bishop made up some deeds just to get rid of him. Only then did he learn that in the perfect valley he had visited with the featherworker, a workshop had already been built, as had houses for five families and a communal dining hall.

From Sudden Death by Álvaro Enrigue. Copyright 2016 by Álvaro Enrigue. Published by arrangement with Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

Photo by Nick Sethi

On August 13th of last year, Kerby Jean-Raymond stared down the barrels of three Glock 19 handguns aimed at him by a trio of blue-clad New York City police officers. The 28-year-old is the designer behind Pyer Moss, the high-end fashion label that makes $3,000 leather jackets and dresses celebrities like Usher and Rihanna. He's about as far from a "thug" as you can get. And yet, there he was in some coppers' crosshairs, one false move away from having his name added to that long, sad list of unarmed black men who've been gunned down by police.

He hadn't done anything to provoke the confrontation. He'd just decided to take an evening stroll around his neighborhood in Jamaica, Queens, while he talked on the phone with his cousin. His free hand was wrapped in a cast, a casualty of a recent jet-skiing trip in Ibiza. Being a fashion designer known for his dark palette, he had opted for a black-colored cast. But in the eyes of the boys in blue that night, Kerby wasn't a young man just taking a walk, and his cast wasn't just a cast; he was someone threatening, carrying something lethal.

As Kerby lifted his injured hand to scratch his face, he heard a voice bark out at him: "Put it down! Put it down!" He turned to his left and saw three police officers pointing their firearms at his body. They thought his cast was a gun. "I felt like I wanted to piss on myself," he told me. "I just yelled, 'It's a cast! It's a cast! It's a cast!'"

After they lowered their weapons, one of the cops came over and patronizingly patted Kerby on the back. "Next time, get a yellow one," he said, furthering the notion that it was Kerby's fault that he'd almost been shot while walking around his own neighborhood, minding his own business.

Photos by Getty. Courtesy of Pyer Moss

That moment wasn't the first heated encounter Kerby, a New York City native, had with the NYPD, but the intensity of it gave him the push he needed to radicalize his work in fashion. It wasn't long after that incident that the designer dedicated Pyer Moss's entire spring/summer 2016 show to protesting American law enforcement's extrajudicial killings of unarmed black people. "I realized I had to use my show to talk about this problem. It's not going away, it's happening everywhere, all the time."

This stand was an extremely bold move for New York Fashion Week. Despite all the claims of artistic expression, at the end of the day, NYFW is about commerce. It's where fashion editors and buyers who run retail businesses go to decide what they want to sell. It's certainly not a political space. By practically staging a Black Lives Matter demonstration during his show, Kerby stuck his neck out in a way that not only put him at odds with his fashion peers, but also fucked up his business. The now infamous collection and show cost him $63,000 dollars to produce, and it lost his label more than $120,000 in business when retailers pulled their orders because they saw his message as bad for their bottom line.

Photos by Getty. Courtesy of Pyer Moss

Although the show was attended by the usual cohort of magazine editors, professional buyers, and fashionable celebrities such as rappers A$AP Ferg and Angel Haze, it was no ordinary NYFW presentation. Before Kerby's models even hit the runway, he played a searing video consisting of pointed interviews with the family members of black people murdered in acts of police violence, such as Sean Bell's fiancée, Nicole Bell, and Eric Garner's daughter, Emerald Garner. The interviews were interlinked with graphic video footage of police brutality and photographs of victims such as Tamir Rice and Walter Scott.

After the video began, male and female models wearing Kerby's latest collection came streaming down the catwalk. But these were not your typical runway looks. Their shoes were doused in fake blood, and their garments bore the names of dead citizens such as Eric Garner. One model wore white shoes with Garner's last words—"I can't breathe"—scrawled on them in black marker. But the pièce de résistance came in the form of radical graffiti.

"Kerby told me, 'Now go out there and shake the can,'" said artist Gregory Siff, who ran onto the catwalk and spray-painted the garments of three models during the show. The stunt, which was intended to look impromptu, symbolized the indiscriminate and inevitable nature of police violence against the black community—it's a brand of violence that Kerby feels we're all a bit too comfortable with.

Photo by Nick Sethi

I met Kerby a week after that show at his design studio and production factory, located on the 14th floor of a midcentury building in Manhattan's Garment District. There were rows and rows of silver rolling racks stuffed with the clothes from his past collections. A mood board sat above a makeshift office desk, plastered with pictures of models in his typically elongated garments. And in the back, there were several sewing machines and cabinets full of colorful fabrics stacked on top of one another, ready to be cut into handmade samples.

Kerby's lanky six-foot frame floated toward me on one of those electric hoverboards that got Wiz Khalifa arrested. He was rocking a look that seemed to come straight out of his runway shows. He sported a low-cut fade, a T-shirt of his own design that borrowed the cut of a baseball jersey, black shorts over skin-tight Nike compression pants, and a pair of perforated Air Jordan 6 Retros in black, grey, and infrared.

This was an intense time for the young designer. He was still grappling with both the critical praise and the financial setbacks of his last show, but he seemed to take it all in stride—possibly because the trials he faces today as a designer are nothing compared with the obstacles he's had to overcome in his journey from growing up in a three-story walk-up in a rough part of East Flatbush, Brooklyn to owning his own global million-dollar business.

Photo by Nick Sethi

Since launching Pyer Moss in 2013, Kerby has produced five successful collections. His gear is retailed in 21 stores worldwide, including the iconic British boutique Browns of London, which is known for supporting the likes of Alexander McQueen and Christopher Kane early in their careers.

Unlike many other designers, he also owns his own factory, which is in the same space as his design studio. He uses the factory not just for Pyer Moss but for making the clothes of emerging designers who "don't have the facility space or who are getting gouged because New York is such an expensive place to produce." Not to mention, when he's off work, he whips around New York City in a sophisticated Batmobile.

All these things—the car, the factory, the long list of orders—seemed to embody Kerby's ascendance. But in light of his near-death experience in Queens, these material and professional successes haven't insulated him from being treated like any other black man on the streets of New York City. And it's that painful duality that's ever-present in his best work.

"I can't imagine myself doing anything else," Kerby said to me about the firestorm caused by his last collection. "I live to do this, but at the same time, I don't like the industry. People assign this magic to fashion, but for me it's about what you can do with fashion."

Although he's lost some business, his approach has earned him the respect of fashion vets such as Marc Ecko, who said to me, "I respect that he uses his platform and his time in this place to express something more than simply fashion as a product. He doesn't have to do that, but he does—and that's bold to me."

Photo by Nick Sethi

The sense of responsibility that Kerby brings to fashion can be traced back to his youth in East Flatbush. I rode there with him in his souped-up car to get a better understanding of who he is. Typical for New York City, the historically Caribbean neighborhood has changed a great deal over the past ten years. Today, it's becoming increasingly gentrified, with a Target and homes that can fetch $1,000,000. But when Kerby was growing up there in the 90s, the crime rate was more than 70 percent higher, and the neighborhood was ground zero for the crack epidemic and all of the violence that came with it.

Like Kerby, many of the artists who grew up in this area tinge their expression with the struggles of black urban life: Local rappers who've come to national prominence such Bobby Shmurda and the Joey Bada$$ use their music to paint grim pictures of the violence that Kerby saw growing up. Meechy Darko of the Flatbush Zombies put it like this in the song "Blacktivist": "My biography is gory. / My life like an American horror story... / Second Amendment, nigga, grab your guns. / Invest in a vest if you're from those slums..."

Kerby saw this kind shit on a daily basis. His face still bears the scar of a stabbing he suffered on the playground by another student when he was only 11 years old. And our first stop in East Flatbush was the corner where his cousin, Maton Pierre, was shot in the back of the head in January 2012. It was also only a few streets away from where 16-year-old Kimani Gray was killed by two plainclothes police officers the following year. The fact that Kerby was able to avoid the perils that have decimated so many of the people he grew up with is not lost on him. "I have a certain survivor's guilt of being somewhat removed from the neighborhood," he said to me.

Next we went back to his childhood home, a red three-story walk-up across the street from his elementary school. He was raised there by his Haitian father, who still resides in the house. Kerby's mother, however, died in 1994, when he was only seven years old. The designer didn't find out she had passed until a neighborhood kid teased him about it when he was 11 years old. He came home and confronted his father, demanding to know what had happened. But his father felt that a young Kerby "couldn't handle" the truth. Instead, his dad told him that she was on vacation in Haiti. Kerby's father still hasn't revealed to him how his mother departed.

"My stepmother told me had sickle cell anemia. But I was a science wiz at the time. if she had the trait, then I'd have ." Kerby said these misdirections only made him lash out more when he was young. Today, the pain is still with him. So he inscribes the number "94" on many of his garments, a nod to the year she died. And his brand's monicker is a direct homage to his mother's name, which was Vania Moss Pierre.

"My brother's mother passed when he was really young, and I think that has shaped him into a very ambitious person," said Florence Duval, Kerby's cousin, who considers Kerby her brother because they were raised together. "You know, when people go through things, it makes them want to have more and live better. He was always a very determined and focused child, and he always went for what he wanted."

Photo by Nick Sethi

When Kerby was young, what he wanted was sneakers. Even in his preteens, he was lusting after the kicks worn by the older high school kids, because they had everything—Air Max 95s, Jordan XIs, Huaraches...

"I couldn't really afford Jordans, so I would get the Eastbay catalogues and circle and cut out the ones I wanted," said the designer, who now has a collection of more than 700 pairs of sneakers he keeps in storage. His obsession with sneakers grew until those sneaker cut-outs covered his bedroom door and school notebooks.

When it came time to apply for a high school, Kerby saw in the New York City high school catalogue a course called "Garment Construction," held at the High School of Fashion Industries. He decided to apply there because he thought that class would get him one step closer to the sneakers he wanted and maybe a job designing at Nike. But it didn't work out quite the way he planned.

"The first thing I had to do in the class was make a baby romper out of fabric with M&M logos all over it. I hated it," he said. "The whole time I was making it, I was thinking, This is stupid. Who would wear this? But my sister had her first baby around that time, and I gave her the romper. It was a testament for me. It was like a launching pad, because I thought, What else could I make ?"

Watch "State of Emergency: Ferguson"

The High School of Fashion Industries, located in Manhattan's affluent Chelsea neighborhood, was an escape for Kerby from the Brooklyn street life that was swallowing up so many of his friends. But it wasn't a totally smooth transition. "I got in trouble for the first year for being disruptive in class, and my homeroom teacher gave me an ultimatum to either take a suspension or intern with her roommate, who was an assistant to fashion designer Kay Unger. I took the internship because I didn't want my dad to kick my ass."

Kay Unger is a veteran New York designer who's a member of the Council of Fashion Designers of America. Her brand is found at nearly every major department store, and powerful women such as Oprah and Hillary Clinton wear her clothes. She met Kerby a week after he started his internship and quickly made him her personal apprentice.

"Right off the bat, I saw in Kerby an innate talent for design thinking and solving problems," Unger said. "He has always had an element of genius for understanding a consumer and for finding the straight line between two points."

In 2003, when Kerby was 15 years old, Unger gave him $150 so he could start his own T-shirt line, which was first called Mary's Jungle and later called Montega's Fury. In 2009, he sold that line for $14,000 to help pay for his tuition at Hofstra University on Long Island. When Unger helped actress Georgina Chapman and model Keren Craig start the high fashion label Marchesa, she brought Kerby on board so he could see firsthand how to build a successful brand. This was essential training for his future work with Pyer Moss.

"Kerby is an intellectual designer," Unger told me. "He has seen so much in his short life. Now a very successful brand, Pyer Moss is a platform for Kerby to share his knowledge, to voice his own perspective, and to interject against racism and unfair treatment of blacks throughout our country. Kerby's vision is all about how we move forward as a culture and as a society in order to redefine the narratives that haunt our past and define our present."

By weaving messages that question systemic inequality in America into his designs, Kerby Jean-Raymond is providing a new model for what high fashion can do and whom it can come from.

Kerby showed the first collection of Pyer Moss almost two years ago. "I needed stuff that would fit my long arms," he explained to me, holding his arms. "I made a motorcycle jacket and a few shirts that fit my arms and long torso. My girlfriend at the time said I should make it into a collection." His former girlfriend and current operations manager for Pyer Moss, Brittney Escovedo, helped Kerby's first camouflage motorcycle jacket get on the back of pop singer Rihanna, who wore it immediately and set the blogs on fire, creating hype that propelled the brand.

"I am a supporter of people realizing their dreams, so it was natural for me to push Kerby to start Pyer Moss," said Escovedo. "His passion was undeniable. He had a unique perspective that I knew would be well received. He worked tirelessly to get the fit and aesthetic just right, and I leveraged my relationships to make sure that Pyer Moss was getting the attention of the fashion elite."

Pyer Moss is all about mixing old-school tailoring and more futuristic athletic-inspired gear. As such, according to Kerby, "the Pyer Moss aesthetic is shorts over compression pants and a leather jacket." This blend of utility and luxury quickly attracted fans like LeBron James and performers like Usher, who had Kerby design his entire wardrobe for his last tour. "The man understands shape well," Usher told me. "He cuts his clothes in a way that represent the culture but doesn't bastardize it."

Photo by Nick Sethi

Today, Kerby's Pyer Moss label sits at the cutting edge of American fashion, not just because its unique pairing of sportswear and tailoring, but also because of its bold use of fashion to spark awareness about bigger issues. This political consciousness didn't start with the last collection; instead it's been growing steadily as a defining element of the brand. With this approach, Kerby puts himself alongside innovators like Alexander McQueen and Hussein Chalayan, who challenged dominant perceptions in society with their bold presentations.

Kerby is also having an impact by simply being a black designer in the upper echelons of the fashion industry, which has long been plagued by diversity issues. Right now, African-American designers only account for 12 of the CFDA's 470 members. Not to mention, black designers only made up 2.7 percent of NYFW's officially scheduled 260 shows in the fall/winter 2015 season. And unfortunately, there are still a lot of institutional obstacles keeping things that way. Kerby commented on this with his fall/winter 2015 collection, which was partially inspired by the fact that a PR company who repped Hood by Air passed on representing him because it said it "already had a black designer" on its roster.

Photo by Nick Sethi

Of the small number of black designers who have actually reached the level attained by Kerby, the majority of them chose to remain silent about the injustices that plague the black community. By weaving messages that question systemic inequality in America into his designs, Kerby is providing a new model for what high fashion can do and whom it can come from. He's also creating a new lane for more youths from urban communities to drive down.

I saw this impact firsthand as I sat in the passenger seat of his Audi R8, racing west down 47th Street. When we stopped at a light in Midtown, a young Dominican boy wearing a baseball uniform saw Kerby, a young black man who looked like him, behind the wheel of his very expensive, elite car. He ran up on us and asked what kind of car Kerby was driving. Kerby told him with a smile. Then he started to guess what Kerby did for a living to have such a nice ride—but he couldn't get it right. Of course, design never crossed his mind. "Are you in real estate?" the kid asked. A stunned expression washed over Kerby's face. He poked his head out the window as he rolled through the light and said, "No, I'm a fashion designer."

Pyer Moss will be showing its fall/winter 2016 collection on February 13th during New York Fashion Week. Check back to VICE.com later this month for our coverage of Kerby Jean-Raymond's latest creations.

Follow Antwaun on Twitter.

Check out Peter Bagge's website, Twitter, and buy his books from Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly.

Update, 9:32: Huckabee is out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow Jenni on Twitter.

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

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

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

Photos by Nick Gazin

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

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

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

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

The drawing based on my photograph

I'm so honored.
Thanks for taking it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow Nick on Instagram.

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

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

US News

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

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

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

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

International News

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

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

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

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

Google HQ in Palo Alto, California.

Everything Else

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Works from Amalia Ulman

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

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

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

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

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

Follow David on Twitter.

On today's episode of Daily VICE, Empire's Jussie Smollett talks about the power of music and the responsibility of young artists to inspire social change. Then, Motherboard heads to Austin to see if Elon Musk's Hyperloop is any closer to becoming a reality, and we check out the deep-breathing workshops that are supposed to induce trance-like states.

Yes his acting is mechanical, his muscles implausible, and his segue into right-wing politics mired by sex scandals and incompetence, but it's still difficult to hate Arnold Schwarzenegger. The 68-year-old Austrian oak remains a modern day renaissance man; he turns terrible movies into brilliant ones by himself being terrible, sort of how two odd numbers always add to make an even one. Plenty of action stars have fallen from stardom since the release of his first big film Conan the Barbarian in 1982, while Arnie has just gotten more famous with each passing year.

Which is why I was somewhat surprised to see the two-term California governor announce Edinburgh and Birmingham, UK, meet-and-greet sessions, proffering "An Experience with Arnold Schwarzenegger." These black-tie soirees promised a big band orchestra, an Arnie impressionist, and a "breathtaking Schwarzenegger entrance" alongside an upscale, à la carte meal. Ticket prices range from £100 to £1,500 "VIP" tickets don't include a personal "hello" from Arnie.

By the time I'd logged on the website, the event was almost entirely sold-out.

Schwarzenegger's hardly blazing a trail when it comes to such occasions. "Evening with..." events are enjoying something of a reboot. Olexy Productions, the Yorkshire firm behind the this one, has brought Al Pacino, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Sly Stallone, and Mike Tyson to our shores recently, for sit-down Q&As with Jonathan Ross types in front of a whooping audience. In a world where people care more about their Instagram likes than they do about happiness, charging a fortune for a quick snap and a high five may be the future of fandom.

You have to wonder what's in it for Arnie, though. Money, sure. But for a chap worth an estimated $200 million, is jetting in from California only to recycle some anecdotes and have drunks from Birmingham throw their arm around you worth a few extra bucks? And who exactly are these people forking over a month's pay for a stilted, five-second meet-and-greet with an actor whose last truly good film, the undisputed Christmas classic Jingle All The Way, came out in 1996.

I decided to pop along to Birmingham and find out.

Two Roxy Mitchells and a sad looking terrorist

By the time I arrive at Birmingham's International Conference Centre, the lines are already snaking out the main hall and down a few flights of stairs. Everyone is extravagantly dressed but in quite a shitty way, as if en route to a high school prom.

Once inside, Arnie is everywhere. There's Terminator pinball, offbeat Arnie artwork, and plenty of car-sized signage sporting his chiseled mug. The atmosphere is all a bit confused. The dress code (and ticket price) gives the impression of a swanky dinner. The wall-to-wall branding and merch makes it more like Comic Con for action nerds.

There's a VIP section, with flush inhabitants slurping shots of black liquid through a straw. I'm soon informed it's a hot new health craze, activated charcoal, something that'll turn your poo black (this is a good thing, apparently). "People often think it will taste of burnt sugar," says the PR guy. "But it really doesn't." He's right. It tastes like watery charcoal.

It's there I bump into Alex Reid (he of cage-fighting fame) with his tightlipped squeeze, Nikki Manashe. Reid, who cribbed his questionably-spelled nickname "Reidernater" from Schwarzenegger, gushes to me about his Austrian idol.

Alex and Nikki

"I love films," he says, four buttons of his shirt undone. "I grew up on them. Schwarzenegger and Van Damme are my heroes. I'm an actor. I went to acting school. That physical presence he has—it's his acting, his physique. It's just inspiring. Wow!"

Before heading into the auditorium, I spot an impressive bit of Arnie artwork, set to be sold in tonight's auction and made exclusively from nails. I approach its creator, Marcus Levine, a surly looking man sporting headwear that resembles a leather condom. Before I can open my mouth he says, "I can't tell you how many nails, I don't count them," before wandering off. "He's so bloody stressed," his friend apologizes.

Inside, the auditorium is drenched in purple UV and (electric) candlelight, every corner guarded by a life-sized Terminator, or else a wandering impersonator whose prosthetically made-up face makes it look like he's been in an accident. Stage left, a swing band schizophrenically flits between covers of Frank Sinatra, Nirvana, and the theme tune Postman Pat. At the tables, besuited attendees—around 80 percent male—knock back bottles of Peroni, champagne, and what looks like slow-cooked lamb. I wouldn't know. My pockets aren't deep enough to afford the tea.

The auction lots are announced on-stage (Conan sword, Terminator exo-skull, too many signed movie posters to mention), and I chat to a proud 40-year-old fanboy named Ross. His parents drove him up from Kent. His ticket set him back £500 , which scored him dinner, early entry, and a table near the stage. Still, he's crossing his fingers for first prize in the raffle: a meet-and-greet with Schwarzenegger.

"Oh, mate, that'd do me—it'd make my day," Ross beams, resplendent in a kilt and knee-high socks. "I've been a fan of his since his bodybuilding days, and I've got so much memorabilia, it's unreal.

"I work at the college, North West Kent, and I think if I actually got to meet him I'd ask if he'd go to the college and do a talk."

Nearby, I notice a skin-headed pensioner, trying in vain to take a photo of himself with a replica of Predator. "I won £100,000 on a scratcher in December," says Eric, 69, who drove to the Midlands from Clapham North yesterday. "I've got every single one of his movies. I'm going into the auction. I want his leather jacket."

Minutes later, and after sales of a poster for £2,200 , Eric makes good on his promise: winning Arnie leathers for a cool two thousand. "I'd have gone to three," he smirks, hands still quivering.

Then it's showtime, and following an opening monologue by "celebrity interviewer" Jenni Falconer (who after Googling I can tell you hosts the 6-8 AM shift weekends on Heart Radio, once did a photoshoot with FHM, and appeared on the first series of Splash), there's a five-minute intro video, a thick cloud of dry ice, and finally, Arnold Schwarzenegger. The crowd's cheers are thunderous, yet the people might wish to query the "breathtaking entrance" they were promised by the website, as it amounted to Arnie walking on-stage and waving. Anyway, he sits, makes a joke about the smoke, yells "GET TO DER CHOPPAEURGH!" and we're underway.

Among the inevitable volley of catchphrases, Schwarzenegger holds court on topics as broad as the planned Twins and Conan sequels, his stint in government ("I worked seven years for free"), and how OJ Simpson was originally pegged for the role of the Terminator ("I said, 'Maybe he's not believable enough.' Little did I know..."). Even Donald Trump gets a shout out, though the mic suddenly goes haywire when Arnie is asked about his chances.

Once the technical issues are resolved, Arnie, not missing a beat, says: "I told you I'd be back." Cue laughter. Applause. More cheers. Schwarzenegger wears a constant grin, though whether he's genuinely enjoying this—or simply playing the role of a man who needs to tolerate repeating decade-old slogans before leaving with a bag of cash—remains unconfirmed.

On the tables, plenty are on their third bottle of merlot, and a large portion are busy fiddling with their smartphones—taking pictures of Schwarzenegger on stage, filming bits of the Q&A, or else just watching it through the fully-zoomed, pixelated screen. I also count at least five people browsing Facebook or Twitter seemingly uninterested in the thing they just paid hundreds of pounds to see.

Then Arnie disappears back to the VIP section where the meet-and-greet's afoot. YouTuber Lord Aleem, a millionaire teenager who vlogs about sports cars, is first to emerge, clutching a glossy photograph with him and a sweaty Arn. "To be honest with you, I haven't watched as many Arnie movies as most people, but he is definitely one of the most inspirational figures I have ever met," he says, explaining he didn't actually have to pay for his ticket as he was invited. "He told me never think that anything's impossible, always have the vision, and if you work at it you'll get there—which is right. OK, so it's everything we already know, basically, but his voice does sound amazing."

I'm consistently told I'm not allowed into the meet-and-greet's inner sanctum, not even for a peek, but with a professional looking camera in one hand, press lanyard in the other (and by sneaking through an unlocked door), I'm in.

Schwarzenegger sips champagne between posing for photos, engaging in hollow chitchat with his fans. Schwarzenegger's a fascinating chap, but how deep can you go in a conversation that spans 16 seconds? Most just tell him how they, specifically, are the biggest fans: "We came all the way from Australia to see you," says one couple. "We're brother and sister, we never see each other unless it's to watch one of your films," goes another.

Eventually, the throng is shooed away, and I find myself in a (probably) once-in-a-lifetime position: alone in a room with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

"Thank you, Mr. Schwarzenegger. Thank you for your portrayal of Howard Langston in the seminal 1996 Christmas movie Jingle All The Way. I don't care that it has a 17 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, you and I both know it was ahead of its time and will one day be celebrated as the single greatest piece of festive cinema."

That is what I wish I had said. But I don't say that. Those words don't pop into my head until I'm half way down Broad Street. Instead, as Arnie's imposing 6'2" frame looms over me and his nervous looking PR team exchange concerned glances at the door, I instead merely shake his massive paw and fire off a quick photo—as tongue-tied and unoriginal as everybody else.

But what of the hundreds of others here who didn't even get to meet Arnie? Someone told me earlier that these ritzy affairs are how megastars like Schwarzenegger "give something back" to their fanbase. But if that were true, he'd do it for nothing, right? It's not beyond him. He did exactly that in a California government office for seven years, and speaks of it like a badge of honor. Really this was just the grim endgame of celebrity culture, squeezing cash out of your most loyal supporters, and offering them little spectacle in return. Madame Tussauds, only this time with humans.

As I pass Lord Aleem playing on his phone in the hallway, I wonder how long it will be before people pay £400 for the chance to bid on his leather jackets.

Joseph Coward, right, as a child

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joseph now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow Joseph on Twitter.

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

This article originally appeared on VICE Canada.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related: Watch 'Spice Boys,' our documentary about the hard lives of Britain's synthetic marijuana addicts

You can think of this issue with pressing pills as you would making a batch of chocolate chip cookies: The same number of chocolate chips aren't going to make their way into each individual cookie. "The problem with how fentanyl pills are manufactured is that there's no consistency. So one tablet may have one milligram of fentanyl, and then the next tablet made in the same batch could have three ."

Fentanyl and its analogues are regulated under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act in Canada. And in October 2015, fentanyl and its analogues also began to be regulated in China. However, W-18 is not an analogue of fentanyl, and as such, it's not regulated under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act in Canada.

"It comes down to availability, accessibility... Here's a drug that's 100 times more powerful than fentanyl, but ; I think it's about making money here and now, and they have no regard for the customers who they're selling the drugs to."

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

Follow Allison Elkin on Twitter.

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

This article originally appeared on VICE Canada.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are we necessarily empathetic when ingesting a pill?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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