Spacey giving you them log-the-fuck-off eyes

You have met them, the new type of person that has emerged in the last couple of years through the cracks of your classic popular tribes—not quite a hipster, not quite punk or cutester, not an earnest pothead or fuckboy, but something else, something other—The Man Whose Entire Personality Is Built Around Really Liking Breaking Bad.

There he is, inexplicably turning up to your house party at the exact start time you stated on Facebook, in a Los Pollos Hermanos T-shirt and a porkpie hat. He insists on knocking on doors when there's a perfectly functional doorbell right there. He always has some blue candy meth in his pocket at all times. "It's actually really good," he's saying. "Breaking Bad. The show. The show I like. The one I was just talking about. The show. It's like... it's about everything, you know?" Does he have a theory about what Jesse did after the finale? No, worse—he has 6,000 words of fanfiction about it. "Heh, did you see SE02E03?" he asks. "Crazy ep. Crazy." What is his opinion of the episode "Fly"? "It is the best hour of television ever made." Later, when you're trying to have fun, you have to quietly escort him off the premises after he uses your pube Gilette to shave his head and tries to throw a pizza onto the roof.

Well, good news: That man is hideously depressed, and so are we all, because binge-watching TV shows is trouncing our mental health. That's according to a new University of Toledo study, anyway, which found that, of 408 participants, 35 percent qualified as binge-watchers, and those binge-watchers reported higher levels of stress, anxiety, and depression than their non-binge-watching counterparts. The study found 77 percent of participants watched TV for two hours or more without a break on an average day, with anyone doing more than that—four consecutive episodes of House of Cards, a whole thing of Orange is the New Black, Brooklyn Nine-Nine on a loop until Netflix does its little 'you OK hun?' pop-up—classified as binge-watching. So, all of us, basically. Everyone reading this has binged-watched. Everyone who has ever lived, born from about 1985 onwards, is a binge-watch doer. Everyone.

Is it a surprise that binge-watching makes you feel bad? Nope. If you haven't watched so many consecutive episodes of Making a Murderer while lying under a big quilt that you actually started to feel sleepy and heavy in that sick sort of hungover way, then you haven't actually lived. Yes, I said it—the only way to truly live is to do something so fundamentally lazy that your body starts to actively feel unwell. That—not success, not love, not family, not children, not a legacy, not money, not drugs—is the true meaning of living.

"'Binge-watching' is a growing public health concern that needs to be addressed," said the scientists who headed up the study. But so can just watching TV in general. A long-term American Journal of Epidemiology study in 2011 found that watching TV for more than three hours a day put women at 13 percent higher risk of being diagnosed with depression. So can winter weather, or summer weather, or smoking, or sleeping too much, or not sleeping enough. So can, according to about a billion studies from 2010 onwards, too much Facebook. If you get through life without getting scientifically depressed by it, you are some sort of superhuman who should donate his brain to medical research. Anyway, House of Cards came out this weekend, so go easy on it—two episodes a day, three maximum. Try not to knock on tables too much because you are not, we have been through this, Frank Underwood. And don't post any spoilers online. Namaste.

Follow Joel Golby on Twitter.

Drawing by Klari Moreno

This article originally appeared on VICE Spain

In Cuba, sex is everywhere. From the moment you arrive at the airport, it feels like you were just transported to a parallel universe of good-looking, tanned salsa dancers. Walking the streets, there is no doubt you will walk past boxes of Vigor King Size condoms stacked up in chemists' window displays, while in bars of a more sketchy variety, you can buy a Momentos condom with one Cuban peso.

The Cuban regime has banned porn, but weirdly you can watch it on TV in some bars, where patrons will glance at it with the kind of nonchalance that can make it seem like a football game is on, instead of a couple ploughing the fields of love. Sexual prowess is highly valued, but spending time here you'll notice that although sex is engrained in Cuban society, there are also a lot of stories, myths, and superstitions surrounding it. One of them is "the Pearl"—a sort of penis talisman I first heard of from Julia, a Spanish friend of mine who lives in Cuba.

Julia had been living in Austria before she came to Cuba in 2008 to work as an assistant for an artist. "The three years I spent in Vienna had been one long dry spell. Everything seemed cold and complicated there, and I wasn't really interested in anyone. When I arrived here, I immediately realized Cuba would be a different story."

In the weeks before her job started, she met a guy called Nelson. "He was the only man I met during those weeks who didn't show any sexual interest right away—though I later learned that was just a strategy. But I didn't really know anyone in Cuba and I was ready to end my Viennese drought. After our third meeting, I brought him to my place. We made out, which naturally led me to touch his dick. There I felt something hard—not just his state, but, like, a marble under the skin of his penis. I looked down, and that's when I saw the pearl."

According to Arianna Villafaña, a Cuban doctor at the Móstoles University Hospital, the pearl is a small ball, often made of plastic, that's placed under the skin of the penis through a small incision. The surgery is usually performed at home, without any proper sanitary precautions. "The goal is to enhance sexual performance," says Arianna. "The Cuban myth claims that women who feel the pearl will go mad with pleasure."

Dr. Almudena López, a sex therapist and a colleague of Arianna at Móstoles University Hospital, says there is no basis in human anatomy for the pearl to be that successful. "For it to really stimulate the clitoris, the pearl should be placed at the very base of the penis, which never happens. As for the G-spot, that's something you can easily reach with a finger, but it's much more complicated to reach directly with the penis. Of course eroticism is for a big part a psychological affair, and given that the famous pearl has some mysteries to it, it might actually tickle the brain more than any other part of the body."

"I don't remember feeling anything special with the pearl," says Julia. "Or maybe I did, I don't know. But I think my excitement had more to do with the fact that my Viennese dry spell was over. Nelson told me he had it done during his military service without any kind of anesthesia, and that it was quite a nuisance at first, because his skin was too tight. But he was so proud of it, because he considered the procedure to be some kind of virility ritual."

Condoms sold in a bar

Dr. Arianna Villafañe insists that the pearl can have a devastating effect on the health of the owner. During her years working at the Hospital Provincial Saturnino Lora at Santiago de Cuba, she saw cases of tetanus, balanitis, and gangrene as a result of getting the pearl. "I personally only saw a case of balanitis that resulted the surgical removal of the pearl, but I have heard about cases in which part of the penis had to be removed because it had been severely affected by gangrene."

Usually guys who have one or more pearls in their penis are young men in military service, convicts, or sailors—not just from Cuba, but all over the world. The trend is said to have reached Cuba thanks to merchant seamen in the 1960s, who returned from Asia and apparently brought along some techniques of sexual organ modification. In fact, the tradition is said to have originated among imprisoned members of the yakuza, one pearl for each year they spend in jail. But the procedure was also prevalent in the Philippines, while Chinese traders used to go a little further: they'd insert a rattle in their penis to give any sexual encounter the festive soundtrack it deserves.

Through some friends, I get in touch with Manuel, who has a pearl in his penis. Because at this point I had already returned to Spain, we text through Telegram, one of the few chat apps that work in Cuba. Manuel is 35, has four children from three different women, and makes a living buying and selling imported foods from Miami. He first heard about the pearl when he was still a child, but after entering in the military service, he finally encountered some. "When we were showering or getting dressed, I noticed that some guys' dicks had round lumps on them," says Manuel, "I asked them about it, and they explained. A couple of weeks later I had the procedure myself. There was one guy in the barracks who used to always do it to everyone who wanted it, and he did mine too. But I made the pearl myself."

He followed his friend's advice, stole a domino game piece, broke it into pieces, chose the best bit and started polishing it until it was round and the proper size. "It should be thoroughly polished, which means that at the end of the process, you have to keep the pearl in your mouth all day long and suck on it like it's a piece of candy, have it roll around your teeth until it's a smooth little ball. I even trained with the pearl in my mouth. When I was ready, I went to the guy who would do the procedure. I had to lay my penis on a flat surface, and he tore a piece of my skin off with the sharpened lower part of a toothbrush. That's where he made the cut. The pain was terrible, but I knew it would be worth it, because all the jevitas go mad over it. You get a bandage on your dick, so you can't wash yourself or masturbate for a few days."

I asked him whether he was scared he'd get infections or lose his virility, but he said that the pain and the risks are all worth it. "The pearl stimulates the clitoris about 20 times more than if you have sex without it. When I was in the military, people used to tell the story about a guy who fucked a slightly delicate jevita, and she actually had a heart attack. She almost literally burst with pleasure. If you want to seduce a viejita, you just need your pearl, and you have her. It is the best."

The only bursting I can truly see happening is penises bursting with chancres and gangrene, but Manuel is adamant. The next message I get on Telegram reads: "If I was in Europe, you'd try the pearl, girl."

Groucho Marx. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Here's what we know about the forthcoming Groucho Marx biopic: First, it will be based on the 1996 book Raised Eyebrows: My Years Inside Groucho's House, written by Marx's former personal assistant, Steve Stoliar. Stoliar worked for Marx during the last few years of the comedian's life and witnessed all the weird and well-documented drama that went down between Marx and his controlling (and much, much younger) girlfriend Erin Fleming. Second, the screenplay is being written by Oren Moverman, who co-wrote the script for the recent Brian Wilson biopic, Love & Mercy. And third, the film will be directed by heavy metal veteran and horror auteur Rob Zombie.

It's this last bit that has proven controversial. Zombie—best known for his multiplatinum musical career and horror flicks like House of 1,000 Corpses, The Devil's Rejects, and two Halloween remakes—isn't exactly the obvious choice to direct a dark drama about the final years of Hollywood's most fabled comedian. In fact, when Zombie was announced as director, the internet threw such a hissy fit that Stoliar felt compelled to write a piece for The Hollywood Reporter defending Zombie as the right man for the job. But other than a widely distributed quote describing the film as "Groucho's Sunset Boulevard," Zombie has remained silent on his involvement.

That is, until now. Zombie recently spoke exclusively to VICE about his love for the Marx Brothers, how people underestimate him, and the similarities between heavy metal and horror.

Rob Zombie. Photo by Piggy D

VICE: When were you first exposed to Groucho Marx?
Rob Zombie: I was a big Marx Brothers fan when I was a little kid because their movies were always on TV. A Night at the Opera, in particular, was on a lot. So I discovered the Marx Brothers movies around the same time I discovered any movie, really. Also around that time, You Bet Your Life, Groucho's game show, was on local TV all the time. I was hooked on that. Groucho was still alive, so you'd see him on The Dick Cavett Show or The Merv Griffin Show. So I was always a fan.

What do you think it was that drew you to his style of humor?
The Marx Brothers were pretty outrageous, especially for the time. They're almost like surrealists—especially Harpo. But I always loved Groucho's double entendres and quick quips, where it seemed like he was on script but ad-libbing at the same time. They were just so bizarre. But for a kid growing up at that time, certain figures were so legendary—Marilyn Monroe, Groucho Marx, James Dean. Hollywood figures like that were so big that they were everywhere. I remember having a Groucho Marx T-shirt as a kid, I think before I even knew who he was. There was a big Groucho resurgence in the early 70s, I think, because he became hip with the college crowd again. I was probably in the second grade, but it was still prevalent.

You got involved with this film because you'd enjoyed Steve Stoliar's book, Raised Eyebrows. When did you first read it?
I remember buying it in hardcover maybe five or seven years ago. I've read tons of books on the Marx Brothers, but what stood out about Raised Eyebrows was that it was the first one that was just about a certain period of time, and it was written from the point of view of the person who lived it. It wasn't an overall biography that covered his whole life—a lot of those books might have the facts wrong because at first she would seem nice; then she would seem crazy. One day she'd seem like the only thing keeping Groucho alive, and the next day she'd be abusing him. As time went on, Steve realized that she was drugging Groucho and trying to manipulate him for her own showbiz career and kept him separate from his family and children. The story just gets darker and darker.

She's a really complex character. All three of them are. Everybody has to be amazing because all the roles are pretty demanding. In fact, that's one of the problems I had with the first pass of the script: Steve had underplayed his character, I think naturally because it was him. But I said, "Steve, the whole audience is seeing this through your character. You're the super-fan who's 19 and now living in the house with the legend. You gotta stop minimizing your role."

This movie will be judged in way that your horror movies have not been, because it's based both on true events and on a book. Is that on your mind as you're putting the film together?
No, not really. I think it's kind of exciting because in the horror genre, nothing is seen as what it is. It's written off. Same with hard rock: It doesn't matter how skillfully something is made or how much work goes into it, or how incredible it is, it's just, "Oh, it's bad. Who cares?" It's like what used to drive me crazy with the Grammys: The hard rock or heavy metal award would be presented off-screen—even if it sold like 5 million copies—and then something like best spoken word would be presented on-screen, even if it only sold like 600 copies. It's always like that. Then 30 years after the fact, someone does a retrospective on it at the museum of modern art. These things are never appreciated in their time.

All photos courtesy of ESL

It's easy to look at eSports as another male-dominated section of the gaming industry, and by extension, the tech sector. And it's true that the biggest winners of the most spectacular tournaments are typically young males. But there are signs that change is happening.

Nothing about competitive gaming is geared toward it being a discipline where men have a natural advantage—if you have fingers and thumbs, a great relationship with your teammates, the commitment to get ahead in high-pressure environments, and that small quality of skill at the game in question, there's no reason why anyone, of any gender, can't be a contender. At the recent Intel Extreme Masters event in Katowice, all-women Counter-Strike: Global Offensive teams battled for a not-inconsiderable prize pot of $30,000, with the mixed-nationalities WRTP (We Run This Place) defeating CLG Red (Counter Logic Gaming) to take first place.

It sounds like a lot, but WRTP's prize money's not up there with what the best all-male teams are winning. For example, the CS:GO champions at IEM Katowice, Fnatic, pocketed over $100,000. But it's clear progress, and it provides hope that gender equality in representation and reward in eSports can be achieved before long.

One area of eSports where there certainly is a high-profile woman doing her thing is in commentary, or shoutcasting. Lauren "Pansy" Scott is a 25-year-old Brit living abroad in Cologne, Germany, where she's a regular on ESL coverage of World of Tanks, Battlefield 4, and CS:GO. She's been fascinated by competitive first-person shooters since 2003's Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. Playing the Splash Damage–made game led to her attending events in Enschede, Netherlands, though those gatherings were so very far from the massive eSports tournaments we see today.

"Trying to convince my mom that it was a good idea to send 15-year-old me to Holland to play video games with a group of guys I met online was a tough one," Scott tells me, on a break from her incredibly busy schedule. "But I made it there, and it got me hooked. But these weren't the kind of events we see today, with the whole stadium style and huge audience, massive prize pools, and so on—this was far more turn up and maybe have a pint or two as your prize in the end. I was attending as a player, and I eventually went over to play Call of Duty 4 Promod, where I joined a 'professional' team and ended up picking up some decent results, almost making a name for myself."

Scott's future wasn't to be in play itself, though, and she very naturally moved from active participation to animated observation. "Back then, there really was no money to support gaming as a living, and it was creating a huge rift between me and my family. I ended up moving out of my mom's, then my dad's, before my nan took me in. I had to get a job to support myself, as my family really didn't see gaming as being viable, but antisocial working hours caused more than a few problems. So I eventually moved into shoutcasting for Call of Duty 4—I already had a bit of a reputation for playing the game, and casting was a lot less draining on my time.

"Back then, Twitch was in its early days, so you'd have maybe 500 people tuning into a game. But years later, I received an offer from ESL to come on board as a multi-game caster, full time. I'd previously covered a few events for them as a freelancer, and I didn't totally fuck it up, so they wanted to give me a chance. What with my family issues at the time, I jumped on."

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Related: Watch VICE's documentary on the competitive gaming world of eSports

Audience figures for eSports have rocketed. IEM 2015 attracted over a million online viewers concurrently, setting new Twitch records in the process. A year earlier, the Dota 2 International Tournament registered over 20 million total viewers, while the League of Legends season finals achieved 32 million in late 2013. That's some way from a few hundred logging on to listen to Scott calling the various plays of a CS:GO encounter.

"Seeing the eSports scene get to this size, it's everything to me. At the time, to walk away from my family, when we weren't on the best terms, was terrifying. So now it's good to be able to tell them that I'm doing great out here, and that all those years of me being a pain in the ass and being kicked out of the house were for something. I'm utterly proud of what we've achieved. Now people like me are commentating to hundreds of thousands of people. I'm always a little nervous, because I don't want to fail at this point, having given up so much for it—but it's all worth it when you do events like the CS:GO coverage at ESL One Cologne, in a stadium, and people are rapturous for a game that I've loved for years.

"Outside of the live events, the huge stadiums, we don't really see the scale of the online audience watching. But I guess that's a blessing sometimes, as if you really thought about how many people were listening to you, you would end up utterly bricking it."

Just like commentators in any form of sport, keeping abreast of game developments and constantly adding to her many layers of research and experience keeps Scott at the top of her profession.

"I'm a prep-heavy caster," she says, "and I always have been. I like to be able to depend on my notes, in case my brain just goes to mush. So for any given event, I'll create a spreadsheet that works on several functions, providing me with information that will help me be ready for a delay, or a fill that I might need to deal with. I'll have some simple information on there—the name of the event, the teams, the prize money, and the structure of the games. But I'll have more in-depth stuff there, too, regarding recent performances, head-to-head results, players to note, and map-specific results. Then there's my own handwritten notes, which are more about what I've recently observed within specific teams. I'll know about impact players, and what makes them come away with the best results. At the biggest events, I'll look for overarching story lines that we can discuss, and see how they play out over the course of the tournament."

But even then, Scott's not finished. "After all the written prep, I'll try to practice casting the specific teams that we have coming up, so I can put my prep into action and see how it flows by reviewing myself afterwards, by listening back to myself. Now, this is just what I do—I'm not sure if other casters go into such detail in CS:GO. Most of them are more than comfortable to do it off the back of just what they've recently seen."

This level of commitment has made Scott known to an audience of millions. I wonder what it's like for her nowadays, when she gets on with socializing, with just being a woman in her mid-20s, knowing that she could well be recognized on any given evening out.

"I never really let my personal life and my work combine that much, but it's getting harder to separate the two. For example, on New Year's Eve, I was out in Harrow on the Hill, which is as delightful as it sounds, doing the usual rounds of the old student pubs we used to frequent before I moved to Cologne. In one bar, the tender said to me: 'Are you one of those commentators?' My friends found it wonderfully impressive, but it's also hilarious. It's still a little strange for me, to be recognized, as I can be a bit of an idiot on a night out, as most of us can be. I can forget that I have to keep tabs on what I'm doing, as I'm not just a random girl with a gin and tonic, now."

I get the impression that breaks from her career are good for Scott, despite the risk of being spotted and hassled for an autograph or photo. She tells me that casting is "draining on your personal life, and your time outside of gaming," and that 2016 has "already been insane with traveling and work, so I'm excited about the prospect of a break." But what's even clearer from our exchanges is that she's completely in love with what she does, with her living, and how she's part of a culture that continues to grow fantastically. "I constantly want to improve. I think the moment I'm 'content' with my commentating, that's the moment I'm out of it. When it comes to my craft, I want to do the best I can."

Despite the evolution of eSports, its position now as a gaming sector that myriad multinational companies want to get involved in, and media outlets the world over have begun to take very seriously indeed, Scott's sure that it has a way to go before being appreciated in the same way as "traditional" sports.

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"I don't think we will ever get the global access of traditional sports, or at least for a long time yet. You have to think of it in this way: Most people during school would at least play some form of sport, right, so having to suffer through those horrid attempts at playing netball or rounders, if you were truly unlucky, it means that down the line you may accidentally find yourself watching one of these sports, with understanding already in mind. The generation that we have viewing the highest echelons of gaming already has that understanding, from their own personal gaming experience, and maybe in the years ahead that'll grow, and we will find a greater viewer base coming in.

"I do, however, believe we could do more work from the production side of things. I was watching the ESL ESEA Pro League Invitational with my aunt, who has absolutely no understanding of eSports, while we were out in Dubai. She started to get the hang of it pretty quickly once she noticed the players and how player cams actually showed who was on the screen at the right time. This made it much easier to understand that these are real people doing real things, and get a concept of the whole picture.

"That just a small factor, though. At the end of the day, our viewers are already growing naturally, but I think there are small things we can put into place that could certainly help maybe the 'older' generations have a chance of finding eSports accessible."

People wanting to sample eSports for a first time, with Scott's shoutcasting assisting their education, can tune into the CS:GO Pro League finals in London on May 12–15. More information at the official ESL website.

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

One of the reasons that the all-white Oscars this year stung so much is that the awards ceremony has gone out of its way to laud critically acclaimed slave narratives. Django Unchained and 12 Years a Slave both picked up Oscars in the past couple of years; Sundance darling Birth of a Nation currently seems likely to be obsessed over during the next awards season. What's troubling isn't that slave-based stories are getting attention, but that other African-American narratives aren't. Surely our tales are worthy when they're not attached to systemic victimization.

That said,Underground, a new WGN America show, isn't so much a slave story, but a thriller with slavery as the setting. Series creator Misha Green has an explanatory motto: "It's not about the occupation, it's about the revolution." Separating the two could be a tough ask. The occupation here is an emotionally wrought piece of history, and the revolution draws fictional thrills from factual pain.

The brainchild of Heroes co-writers Green and Joe Pokaski, Underground tells the story of a group of slaves who must make a 600-mile trek through dangerous terrain to escape from a Georgia plantation. The revolution is sparked by Noah (Straight Outta Compton's Aldis Hodge), who discovers a "map" to freedom after a failed escape attempt. It adds up to a standard point-A-to-point-B adventure story that's buttressed by its setting.

Underground centers itself on action thrills rather than dramatic heft. But so far, it's not clear what the action is going to add up to. Four episodes in and nearly halfway into the season, we haven't taken the crowded cast out of the plantation. One slave, recruited for his physical strength, loses a child, attacks a slave trader, and gets imprisoned in a box for that assault. Rosalee, a shy house slave played by Jurnee Smollett-Bell, is lashed for defending a child. Those incidents, while brutal, still feel like they're low-stakes, as if they're shockers in and of themselves instead of in service of a larger plot.

The cast of 'Underground.' Photo courtesy of WGN America

Thankfully, even when the show seems to be spinning its wheels, the characters remain well-rounded and sharply written and acted. You see that in an early discussion about the escape and with Amirah Vann's Ernestine, the head house slave, who might be the most absorbing character on the show. A mother more concerned with preservation than justice, Ermestine's moral ambiguities feel convincingly human; the scene where she imagines far worse possibilities—including being put in a breeding farm where she's "forced to have a dozen babies I'll never get to hold"—in a revealing conversation is an early standout.

"We wanted to make sure that each of our enslaved people had agency," Green told me over the phone. "That they were characters who laughed and loved and cried and fought."

An overwrought slave narrative runs the risk of being limited to educational catharsis, which is essential, but not at the expense of seeing brutalized bodies without empathizing on a human level. That's a problem when there's a predominantly white America (and Academy voting membership) that attaches blackness only to pain. Slave narratives deserve to be told, but sometimes it's about the eyes that are watching them.

"Do we want every story to come out to be about slavery?" asked Tia C. M. Tyree, a professor at Howard University's department of strategic, legal, and management communications. "No—we are a dynamic people with a spectrum of stories and experiences to tell. But we cannot shy away from telling what was the foundational story of our existence here in America."

Underground's flaws don't come from lack of effort. The first season was shot at LSU's Rural Life Museum, a memorial of 18th- and 19th-century Louisiana, where scenes from The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and the upcoming Roots reboot were shot. David Floyd, the museum's director and stalwart of its academic reputation, said that "99 percent" of Underground is based on historical fact, including the costumes and replicated artifacts.

The pieces are there. It's a matter of what the show does with them once it's finally off the plantation.

Follow Brian Josephs on Twitter.

Underground premieres Wednesday at March 9 at 9 PM on WGN America.

A grandmother sits with her nine grandchildren at a refugee camp in South Sudan. Ilana Rose/World Vision

"This moment here was in South Sudan, a young country that has been in a state of civil war for the past couple of years and where I have visited a lot of refugee camps," explains Ilana Rose. She steps back from her work, a photo of a grandmother with her nine grandchildren.

Rose says the woman's daughter was just 26 years old but had already given birth to three sets of twins."The really bad trouble started in December 2013," she says. "The daughter was pregnant with these twins here, but the family had to flee. She didn't know where her husband was, and she gave birth on the side of the road mid-escape."

As a prominent Australian photojournalist, Rose has covered subculture and social justice for over 25 years. From S&M culture in the 90s, to indigenous justice at the Koori Courts, and Australian women's affairs—every photo that surrounds us in her Brunswick home stands as a time capsule, quiet vigils to moments in our history.

Lucia Eugenio De Mamani, a leader of her community in Bolivia. Ilana Rose/World Vision

Born in Melbourne's east, Rose started taking photos in her teens and went on to study at Victorian College in the 1980s—one of the only photo schools of the time. It was tough to get her foot in the door of the industry, though: "It was very difficult for women around then to get a job, so I freelanced for all the dailies."

After graduation, Rose went abroad, working in London as the Sun Herald's foreign correspondent for three years. Much of her 20s was spent photographing subcultures from 90s train gangs to the beginning of graffiti in Melbourne. She was the Big Issue's first photographer and shot an 80-piece with the Koori Courts shown on Reconciliation Day at Melbourne's Federation Square in 2005.

Rose's most recent exhibition comes after a four-year stint with World Vision, delving head first into the state of modern gender inequality. She ventured to third world countries all over the globe, such as Ethiopia, South Sudan, Zimbabwe, Bolivia, Uganda, Peru, Indonesia, India, and Sri Lanka. The photos will be shown at No Lillies, a fundraiser for UN Women, currently at MAGNET Galleries.

Sudanese women skipping in Uganda. Ilana Rose / World Vision

"This one here was in Uganda, January last year, where South Sudanese were fleeing over the border." Rose points to a photo of two women, both refugees, skipping in barren land. "This girl on the left and her siblings lost their parents, so when they arrived at the refugee settlement, the woman on the right took the girl under her wing and began looking after her."

Throughout her four years working with World Vision, Rose traveled the world, photographing women in developing countries from Africa to South America. In India, she met a woman with a tattoo in memory of her late husband. It's just his name and a heart. He had died from HIV/AIDS, and the woman was one of many in her community marginalized because of her husband's death. "She told me how much she loved him," Rose remembered.

A woman with a tattoo in memory of her husband in India. Ilana Rose/World Vision

Traveling the world for the past four years, Rose says she's seen first hand that for women in the developing world overcoming gender inequality is a fight for survival. "There are no jobs and entire families must fend for themselves off the land. The one thing that's a real gender problem is that girls are not sent to school," she says.

"Everyone sees education as the key out of the poverty trap, but girls are often the ones doing things like fetching water—a risk that puts them at harm alone on roads for kilometers at a time."

Bolivian goat herder. Ilana Rose / World Vision

Back in Australia, discussion of gender disparities quickly turns to women at work: the theme for the No Lilies exhibition. With a mother who was a feminist in the 60s and who attended university with the likes of Germaine Greer, Rose believes the problem of gender inequality is deeply rooted in Australia.

"I was raised to see myself in no way as a lesser being, and that is because of my mother," she reflects. "I grew up as a 'tomboy'. I've worked in a man's world. I have gay friends, straight friends, friends who are ambiguous in their sexuality—I never look to people for these identifiers. I look inside.

"It seems as if, for me, gender inequality is this lack of understanding that family work and home care are still so undervalued."

A poverty stricken Ecuadorian grandma, who spoke of nothing other than the aspirations she had for her grandchildren. Ilana Rose / World Vision

Individually, Rose's photos are powerful but considered as a whole their message is clear: The female world is not one clad with materialism, beauty, or sex. It is defined by selflessness. "I saw women do everything—absolutely everything, including a lot of manual labor," she says.

"The most amazing thing about these experiences was seeing the parallels between women here and women all over the world. Women everywhere want the best for their family and to foster a love like no other."

Ilana Rose was interviewed by Alexandra Manatakis

Look at HTML FLOWERS's Instagram.

Photo via Flickr user John Loo

In her teens and 20s, Jennifer was making up to $3,700 USD a week stripping in Ottawa, Canada. Almost all of it went to cocaine.

"The effort I put into spending money on drugs, it's not even calculable," Jennifer, now 47, told VICE. "It's an extraordinary amount. I would be a millionaire."

These days, she's living on social assistance.

"I don't have two cents to rub together."

According to a 2002 study by the Canadian Center for Substance Abuse, the "societal cost" of substance abuse, in terms of health care and the criminal justice system, is about $30 billion USD.

For an individual, the price of maintaining an addiction can be devastating, with some relying on crime and prostitution to pay for their drugs of choice, and losing their health, homes, freedom, and families along the way.

VICE reached out to several current and former addicts to ask what their addictions have cost them. (All the costs below have been converted to USD.)

Cocaine

Cost: $60/gram
$450–$1,200/day

Jennifer started stripping illegally at the age of 14 in Calgary before moving back to Ottawa to continue her career. By 16, she was addicted to coke.

"All the other girls were doing it. It got you through the night, you could just do line after line."

Her addiction grew in her early 20s, when she said all of her money—$1,500 to $3,700 per week—went to supporting her habit. Depending on how much money she was making, she'd spend between $450 to $1,200 a day.

"I would probably sleep from 3 or 4 AM until around 1 PM, and the rest of the time I was doing cocaine."

That routine continued until she was about 29.

"At that point, I guess I was too old just to keep stripping, and my drug addiction was too far gone," she said. "I started in prostitution."

Picking johns up off the street, Jennifer said she was pocketing about a grand a night. She started injecting cocaine because the high was "more intense" and continued to snort it as well as smoke crack.

She also began trafficking crack cocaine to pay for drugs, which, along with prostitution and fraud convictions, has landed her seven years in jail. About four years ago, she started shoplifting groceries.

"It was mostly meats and cheeses," she said, adding there is "a lot" of money in black market meat.

"Say a roast is $25, you're getting about $12... You're stealing about 16 a day."

For the last two years, Jennifer has tried to stop doing cocaine, although she told VICE she still has relapses. She also does harm reduction outreach and works with women who've been victims of violence; she recently testified in court against a man she said raped her.

These days, Jennifer is living on social assistance and trying not to commit any crimes, though the temptation is still there.

"I was thinking about it this just morning," she told VICE. "I ran into a friend of mine, and she was saying how much stuff she has and how good she's gotten at shoplifting... and I just turned around and walked away."

Hydromorphone. Photo via Flickr user The.Comedian

Prescription Opioids (Hydromorphone)

Cost: $3 for a 4 mg pill
$75/day

At 43, Sean LeBlanc lives in a small apartment in Ottawa with his girlfriend. Though he has a great job and a steady relationship, "it still hurts to think" that he could be living in a house right now, were it not for his crippling opioid addiction, he said.

LeBlanc told VICE he started using hydromorphone (brand name Dilaudid), a fast-acting and potent painkiller, after his pregnant girlfriend overdosed and drowned in a bathtub nine years ago. At the time, he was a mature student at St. Thomas University and a DJ in Fredericton.

A week after she died, "a guy give me this Dilaudid all loaded up in a rig, and it was exactly what I wanted," he said. "It made me feel nothing."

But the effects of Dilaudid wear off after five or six hours. Within a couple of weeks, LeBlanc said he was physically hooked on the drug and dope sickness had kicked in. He needed more to get high—instead of putting one pill "in a spoon," it took five to get the same feeling. At the peak of his addiction, he said he was doing 160 mg a day, which sometimes meant injecting himself up to 40 times.

"If I didn't spend $100 a day, it was a good day," he said.

He said he stopped attending classes, got kicked out of school, and lost his jobs, eventually resorting to stealing from large chain stores.

LeBlanc said aside from weed and a very occasional dose of methadone, he no longer uses harmful drugs. He does outreach work for fellow addicts.

He told VICE a "conservative estimate" of how much he's spent on opioids is $200,000, and that's not including the cocaine, alcohol, and LSD he was also consuming.

"It breaks my heart, even just thinking about it."

Photo via Flickr user Scott

Alcohol

Cost: $50/day

Heroin

Cost: $220/gram

Rick Sproule, 58, started drinking when he was 12; by 16, he was a full-blown alcoholic.

During the most severe part of his addiction, he says he drank a bottle of rum (20–30 ounces) a day, plus around 20 beers.

"I used to make my own beer as well, so the party didn't stop," he told VICE. "I went downhill faster that way."

It being the 80s, he was making around $5/hr working as a cook and spending half of it on booze. He said the food industry "really lends itself to alcoholism and drug addiction."

While living in Vancouver, Sproule said he also became addicted to heroin. The cost was about $225/gram, and he began using up to $375 worth of it a day.

"It's very expensive," he told VICE. "It gets to the point where you have to do armed robberies and things just to keep using." (He said he's never done that.)

"I'm kind of a middle class guy. I had a family, I had a career, I had a ." That's all gone now.

"I spent $10,000 in four months."

Photo via Flickr user TedsBlog

Crack

Cost: $60/gram
$225/day

Steven's first hit of crack, at age 16, was "incredible."

"It was serious right from the start," he told VICE.

As a teen, he said he'd spend about $60 for a gram of powdered cocaine and cook it with his friends. They would steal electronics and jewelry, and panhandle to pay for it.

As he got older, he took on labor jobs to support the habit, spending around $225 a day for three grams of pre-cooked crack.

He started shooting up hydromorphone to bring him down off crack highs and avoid "cocaine psychosis."

"When you smoke a lot of rock, you gotta find a way to chill yourself out, which is by shooting opioids, so you can sleep," he told VICE. Around seven years ago, he was diagnosed with HIV, which he contracted from using dirty needles; he said his brother is in the exact same situation. For a time, he was living on the streets, but he said he now receives a disability check of about $820 a month. He spends a couple hundred of that on crack, but he said he's slowed down his usage because he's "too tired."

"A lot of people blow their disability... check and get an 8-ball."

On crack alone, Steven said he's spent at least $150,000.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

A table of guns seized by the NYPD in New York in 2013. (Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

Ralph Gilbertson, a 74-year-old living in Richfield, Minnesota, thinks the CIA is watching him. He thinks agents are impersonating his neighbors and the local cops, and he has sent letters out to the managers of his apartment building saying so. He also thinks that the cops' recent seizure of his guns is unconstitutional, and he's likely right.

His weapons—he has three handguns, which he's licensed to carry—were taken away by the police after his building managers called a city agency worried about the apparent combination of firearms and paranoia that he represented, reported the Star-Tribune on Sunday.

But Gilbertson is challenging the seizure of his weapons in a case that shows just how complicated it is to take away someone's guns in America.

While his disposition may make his neighbors nervous, Gilbertson isn't a convicted felon, hasn't been charged with domestic violence, and no court or psychiatrist has ruled he's a ticking time bomb. (He suffers from a mild form of bipolar disorder, but according to the Star-Tribune, "his psychiatrist sent a letter to the judge saying that Gilbertsen is compliant with his medications and poses no danger to himself or others.")

"He's not being charged with a crime," says Joseph Olson, emeritus professor at Minnesota's Mitchell Hamline School of Law. "He's eccentric—that's not a crime in America."

Watch our documentary on DIY Guns:

Guns-rights organizations and conservatives occasionally invoke the specter of a Democrat-and-UN-coordinated mass gun seizure effort, but the Second Amendment is pretty darn robust. In America, it's a lot easier to buy a gun than it is for the government to take that gun away.

For instance, though felons are generally barred from owning firearms, there are plenty of states where there are exceptions to that rule—even for people who have a history of violent crimes. And though it seems simple to say, "People who are mentally ill and potentially dangerous shouldn't have guns," in practice, creating databases of people too sick to own firearms is complicated and controversial.

And even when you aren't allowed to have guns, it's rare that officers will come to your door and pry them from your fingers. The exception is California, where in recent years lawmakers put a bunch of money into a program to seize guns from all the people who aren't supposed to have them. The results, reported the Washington Post last year, weren't promising, mostly because there were too many guns to confiscate:

"At the end of 2014, 17,479 people remained in the illegal gun owner database, down from 21,249 people at the year's start. About 34,868 registered firearms still are believed to be in the hands of people who are not allowed to own them... Last year, agents conducted 7,573 investigations and seized 3,286 firearms. At the same time, 7,031 gun owners were newly flagged."

In January, another gun-seizure law went into effect in California. Passed in 2014, the law allows immediate family members and law enforcement to ask a judge for a restraining order to seize an owner's guns and bar the person from buying guns in the state. The restraining order lasts 21 days but can be extended to a year.

The law was passed in response to Elliot Rodger's violent rampage in 2014; Rodger's parents said afterward they saw warning signs before the 22-year-old went on a killing spree.

Naturally, the idea that the cops could take away someone's guns like that has alarmed Second Amendment advocates, but there are reasons to doubt that the measure will have much of an effect. "It's only a rare case that a family member will have enough suspicion that they'll report it, the police act on it, and that they issue a court order," said Adam Winkler, a UCLA law professor and author of Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America.

California faces the same problems any state trying to enact gun control measures faces—namely that American gun laws are a patchwork of local and state regulations. California's neighbors Arizona and Nevada have some of the country's most relaxed gun laws; unlike California, they don't require require background checks in private sales.

Another problem is that there are over 300 million guns in America—even if everyone wanted to, how could you control a supply that large, especially when surreptitious person-to-person exchanges are also a liability.

"They control gun shows in California because they check on those, but if you're just a guy in a bar and I'm talking to you, and I say, 'I'm looking for a gun,' and you say, 'Well, my friend Jerry's got a gun, and he wants to sell. I'll call him up on my cell phone here and he'll bring it down. What are you willing to pay for it?'" said William Vizzard, professor emeritus at California State University, Sacramento, and author of Shots in the Dark: Policy Politics and Symbolism of Gun Control. "How do you control that?"

For the Minnesota cops dealing with Ralph Gilbertson, his guns, and his imaginary CIA agents, the problem is less abstract: What do you do when people are concerned about someone who has both guns and potential mental health issues?Police may have acted extra-judiciously in this case, but legally, they don't have many options.

"The street cops nowadays have to be psychologists," Lieutenant Mike Flaherty, a Richfield Police Department spokesman, told the Star-Tribune. "People don't wear nameplates saying 'paranoid schizophrenic.' So the police have to go in there and make judgment calls... Is he crazy dangerous, or is he the crazy uncle? We have to make that decision and let the legal system sort it out."

Follow Brian Josephs on Twitter.

To celebrate International Women's Day, here is a story from Helen Oyeyemi's story collection What Is Not Your Is Not Yours, out today from Riverhead Books. "A Brief History of the Homely Wench Society" concerns two societies at Cambridge that don't get along. The Bettencourts, men who made a list of the school's top "homely wenches," and the Homely Wenches, a group that was founded by the women on the list, after one found her name on it. Dayang is a second-year English major who wants to join the group, but is struggling to answer one of the two questions on the application: What is a homely wench?

Helen Oyeyemi. Photo by Manchul Kim/courtesy of Riverhead Books

A Brief History of the Homely Wench Society

From: Willa Reid
To: Dayang Sharif
Date: November 12th^, 2012, 18:25
Subject: JOIN US

Dear Dayang,

Amongst Cambridge University's many clubs, unions, academic forums, interest groups, activist cells, and societies, there's a sisterhood that emerged in direct opposition to a brotherhood. What this sisterhood lacks in numbers it more than makes up for in lionheartedness : The Homely Wench Society. The Homely Wenches can't be discussed without first noting that it was the Bettencourt society that necessitated the existence of precisely this type of organized and occasionally belligerent female presence at the University.

The Bettencourt Society has existed since 1875. The Bettencourters are also known as "the Franciscans" because a man gets elected to this society on the basis of his having sufficient charisma to tame both bird and beast. Just like Francis of Assisi. Each year at the end of Lent term the Society hosts a dinner at its headquarters, a pocket-sized palace off Magdalene Street that was left to the University by Hugh Bettencourt with the stipulation that it be used solely for Bettencourt Society activities. If you've heard of the Bettencourters you may already known the following facts: No woman enters this building unless a member of the Bettencourt Society has invited her, and no Bettencourt Society member invites a woman into the building unless it's for this annual dinner of theirs. And getting invited to the dinner is dependent on your being considered exceptionally attractive.

The Homely Wench Society has only existed since 1949. The women who were its first members had heard about the Bettencourt Society and weren't that impressed with what they heard about the foundational principles of these so-called Franciscans. As for their annual dinner... hmm, strangely insecure of intelligent people to spend time patting each other on the backs for having social skills and getting pretty girls to have dinner with them. But people may spend their time as they please. No, the first Homely Wench Society members didn't have a problem with the Bettencourt Society until Giles Rutherford (Bettencourt Society President 1949, PhD Candidate in the Classics Faculty) was writing a poem and got stuck. What he needed, he said, was to lay eyes on a girl whose very name conjured up ugliness in a manner identical to the effect produced by invoking the name of Helen of Troy. Luckily for Gile's Rutherford's poem, the first wave of female Cantabs working towards full degree certification were on hand to be ogled at. Rutherford sent his Bettencourt Society brethren out into the university with this task: "Find me the homeliest wench in the university, my brothers. Search high and low, do not rest until you've sketched her face and form and brought it to me. Comb Girton in particular; something tells me you'll find her there." The Bettencourters looked into every corner of Newnham and Girton and found many legends in the making. They compiled a list of Cambridge's homeliest wenches, a list which later fell into the hands of one of the women who had been invited to the Bettencourt's annual dinner. This lady stole the list and sought out other women who'd accepted invitations to this dinner. Having gathered a number of them together she showed the list of homely wenches around and asked: "Is this kind of list all right with us?"

"No it jolly well isn't," the others replied. "This is Cambridge, for goodness sake—if a person can't come here to think without these kinds of annoyances then where in this world can a person go???"

They hesitated to involve the women whose names they'd seen on the list. Some of the Bettencourt dinner invitees were friends with the homely wenches, and didn't want to cause any upset. Who wants to see their name on such a list? But in the end they decided it was the only way to gather forces that would hold. Honoring delicacy over full disclosure only comes back to haunt you in the end. Moira Johnstone, the first of the homely wenches to be informed of her place on the list had to suspend a project she'd been working on in her spare time—the building of a bomb. She'd been looking for an answer to a question she had regarding the effects of a particular type of explosion, but the temptation to test her model on a bunch of fatheads was too strong, so she stuck to books and hockey for a couple of days. The others had similar responses, but soon settled on a simple but effective riposte. As they worked through this riposte the Bettencourt dinner invitees and the homeliest wenches discovered that they liked each other's company and were interested in each other's work; they thereby declared themselves a society and gained the support of new members who hadn't been featured on either list. Nonetheless the members of this new society dubbed themselves Homely Wenches one and all.

The 1949 Bettencourt Society Dinner began pleasantly; lots of champagne and gallantry, flirtation, and the fluent discussion of ideas. They were served at table by waiters hired for the evening, and whenever a Bettencourt disagreed with one of the guests he made sure he mitigated his disagreement with a compliment on his opponent's dress, thereby reminding her what the true spirit of the evening was. Fun! At least it was for the boys, until a great crashing sound came from the next room as the waiters were preparing to bring in the first course. Rutherford called out to the head waiter for the evening; the head waiter replied that 'something a bit odd' had happened, but that service would be up and running again within a matter of moments. Waiting five minutes for course was no great hardship—more compliments, more champagne—but when the head waiter was asked to explain the delay he asked jocularly: "Do you believe in ghosts?"

The lights in the kitchen had been switched off and then switched on again as the food was being plated, and then the waiters had heard footsteps in the next room, and then the portrait of Sir Hugh Bettencourt in that very same room had fallen off the wall. The Bettencourt boys laughed at this, but their guests turned pale and went off their food a bit. Who could say what might have happened to it when the lights had gone out? The Bettencourt boys laughed even more. Even the cleverest woman can be silly. When the same sequence of events occurred between the first and second course—footsteps and falling objects, this time all along the floor above the dining room—the Bettencourters stopped laughing and looked for weapons that would assist them in apprehending intruders, spectral or otherwise. Their guests were one step ahead of them and already had a firm hold on every object that could conceivably be used to stab or whack someone, including cutlery. "Do you want us to go and have a look?" asked Lizzie Holmes, first-ever Secretary of the Homely Wench society.

"No no, you stay there, we'll take care of this," Bettencourt President Rutherford said, adding a meaningful "Won't we?" to his patently reluctant brethren.

"Yes, yes of course..." the Bettencourters had to go forth unarmed, since the frightened women refused to release even one set of ice tongs. Up the stairs they trooped, with no light to guide them ("We'll just wait in the kitchen," the waiters said) and they searched each room on the first floor and found no one there. When they filed back into the dining room, however, it was full of uninvited women, each of whom had taken seats emptied by the Bettencourters and were tucking into the platefuls of food the Bettencourters had temporarily abandoned. "Sit down, sit down, join us," cried Moira Johnstone, number-one Homeliest Wench. The Bettencourters looked to Rutherford to see how they should proceed; he decided the only sporting response was a good natured one, so he and his brethren had another table brought into the room, had the waiters set places at it and sat there and ate alongside all the Wenches. Their plan had been just as you must've guessed by now: Earlier that evening the last of the 'most attractive' women to enter Bettencourt headquarters had lingered at the door and let the first of the 'homeliest wenches' into the building.

As far as we know, the Bettencourt Society never compiled another list of homely wenches. The Homely Wenches Society flourished for a time, and then dwindled as ensuing generations of female Cantabs saw little need to to label themselves or to oppose the Bettencourters (whose numbers remain steady.) The activities of the Homely Wench Society mainly come under the banner of 'Laughs, Snacks and Cotching' but in response to advice from Homely Wenches who've since graduated, the Society produces a termly journal. Mostly for the purpose of posterity; we have no real readership other than ourselves.

So if you want to join our questions to you are: Who are the homely wenches of today? What makes you think you're one of us?

Your answer is a key that will unlock worlds (yours, ours) so please make it as full and as bigarurre as it can be.

Hope to hear from you soon,

Willa Reid (third-year History of Art, Caius)
Ed Niang (second-year NatSci, Clare)
Theo Ackner (second-year History, Emma)
Hilde Karlsen (third-year HSPS, Girton)
Grainne Molloy, (second-year Law, Peterhouse)
Flordeliza Castillo (first-year CompSci, Trinity)
and
Marie Adoula (third-year MML, King's)

This is Grainne's self-perception. If you can overlook her narcissism you may come to care for her one day. —M.A.
You sayin you care for me, Marie? —G.M.

At least that's what Grainne Molloy imagines Rutherford said. This is not verifiable! —T.A.
Bah, history students. —G.M.

Again with the unverifiable exchanges, Grainne?? —T.A.
Leave me alone, Theo... —G.M.

Our predecessors are classy ladies. —T.A.

Every member of the modern day Homely Wenches who isn't from South London—i.e., everybody except Ed Niang—had to have the verb 'cotch' explained to them, but once we understood we found it apt. —T.A.

It took Dayang Sharif (second-year Eng. Lit, Queen's) days to think up an answer that was full and bigarurre. As soon as she read the e-mail she wanted in—actually as soon as she'd met Willa and Hilde on the train she'd wanted in—but as with all groups the membership hurdle wasn't so much to do with convincing the Wenches that she was one of them as it was to do with convincing herself. She looked the word bigarurre up and found that it meant both "a medley of sundry colors running together" and "a discourse running oddly and fantastically, from one matter to another." "Medley of sundry colors running together" made her think of her Director of Studies, Professor Begum saying: "I saw you with your Suffolk posse, Dayang. A colorful gang!" She'd looked at him to check what he meant by "colorful" and deciphered from his grin that other definitions included "delightful" and "bloody well made my day."

Day composed an answer that centered on the evening she'd met Hilde and Willa. She'd got on at the Kings Cross with Pepper, Luca, and Thalia, all four of them covered in sweat and glitter, Day at princess level surrounded by three majestic beings—they'd had their Friday night out in London town and now they were ready to get back to Day's room and crash. Hilde and Willa sat opposite them sharing a red velvet cupcake. Day remembered trying not to fret about two whole girls afraid to eat a whole cupcake each. She didn't know them or their fears. She noticed Willa's long chestnut hair and Hilde's eyes, which were like big blue almonds. She'd never seen them before but nodded at them, and they nodded back and continued their conversation, which seemed to be a comparison between medieval and modern logistics of kidnapping. Pepper and Luca were addressing Thalia's complaints about art school, and Day was about to throw in her own tuppence worth when five boys who looked about the same age as them came swaying through the carriage singing rugby songs. Actually Day didn't know anything about rugby so they might not have been rugby songs, but the men definitely had rugby player builds. They stared as they passed Day and her friends; Day felt a twanging in her stomach when they walked back a few paces and their song died away. She could see them thinking about starting something, or saying something. If these boys said something Pepper would fight, and so would Luca, and then what would Day and Thalia supposed to do—broker peace? Hardly. Day could punch... her parents had only been called into school for emergency meetings about her twice, and both times had been about the punching. Not necessarily the fact of her having punched someone, no, it was the style of it. Day punched hard, and when she did so she gave little to no warning. She punched veins. Aside from being disturbing to witness, the vein punching was extremely distressing for Day's target; the link between heart, lungs and brain fizzed and then seemed to snap, then the target's limbs twitched haphazardly as they tried to recover their notion of gravity. Every now and again Day's sister requested punching instruction from her, but this wasn't something Day could teach. She just knew how to do it, that was all. She thought it might be connected to anxiety and the need to be absolutely certain that it was shared. And she really didn't feel like punching anybody that night. She'd had a good time and just wanted to keep having one...

A couple of the rugby boys were black. They both caught Pepper's eye, and all three looked apologetic for staring. But that didn't mean there wasn't going to be a fight. So Day, T, Pepper, and Luca tensed up. Day saw something interesting: Chestnut Hair and Blue Almond Eyes were no longer eating cake and had tensed up too. Not the way you tense up when you're about to run away, but the way you tense up when you're not about to have any nonsense. Their postures had changed in a way that made them part of Day's circle—and actually, looking around, they weren't the only ones. Others scattered across the carriage had become alert too. "Jog on, lads," a barrel-chested man advised, and the boys seemed to reflect on numbers, then left and took their thoughts of starting something with them. When they'd gone Chestnut Hair leaned across the table and said, "I'm Willa." Blue Almond Eyes introduced herself as Hilde and said, apropos of nothing: "When we were little we had chicken pox together."

"Ah," Luca said, sagely. "So you two are close."

Willa rubbed her nose. "Oh, but we didn't do it on purpose..."

Willa was seriously posh. She tried to sound estuary but couldn't go all the way. At the station Hilde turned to them and asked "Are you students here?"

T, Pepper, and Luca talked over each other: As if! Yeah right... and all three pointed at Day: "There she is, Miss Establishment..."

"Please just live your hate-filled lives happily, guys," Day said.

Willa took Day's email address and said she'd be in touch. "We should all cotch sometime."

Cotch? Pepper thought that sounded sexual, Luca said: "Maybe something to do with horse riding? That one blatantly rides horses." Thalia just giggled.

The meeting on the train sort of answered the question of what made Day think she could be a Homely Wench, but it didn't answer the question of who a Homely Wench is. Second year was a year of conscientious study for Day; she couldn't have another exam result fiasco like last year (too much time spent visiting Pepper at Oxford) so she could only return to her questions of wenchness after she'd done as much work towards her degree as it was possible, all the reading and note taking and following up on references that she could do in a day. Queen's was in Day's blood, since it was her father's college too. In his day he'd flown in from Kuala Lumpur specifically to enroll, whereas she'd come in from Suffolk. Her college library was at its best late at night. At night the stained glass figures in the windows seemed to slumber, and the lamps on each desk gently rolled orange light along the floors until it formed one great globe that bounced along every twist and turn of the staircase to the upper levels. When she surveyed the entire scene it seemed to be one that the stained glass figures were dreaming. And she was there too, living what was dreamed. She stretched, sighed. Well, I'm a fanciful wench, but am I a homely one? Aisha was gunning for New Hall, their mother's college.

Day hadn't sighed quietly enough: A few desks away Hercules Demetriou (first-year Law) looked over at her and smiled. She looked away. She didn't think he was evil or anything, but he definitely disturbed her. The issue was all hers for fancying him even though he'd already been elected to the Bettencourt Society. The boy was was tall and well built and had wavy hair, excellent teeth and unshakeable equilibrium. Up close you saw smatterings of acne but that was no comfort. His skin tone lent him enough ethnic ambiguity for small children whose parents had a taste for vintage Disney to run up to him and ask: "Are you Aladdin?" He'd flash them a dazzling smile and answered: "Nah, I'm Hercules."

Hercules of Stockwell. So full of himself. This was not an attraction that Day could ever confess to anybody. Hercules talked to her, though. He'd say, 'See you in the bar, yeah?' as he and his friends walked past her and her friends. Then Mike or Dara or Jiro would turn to her and say things like, "So will you see him in the bar? Or his bed, for that matter?" Horrible. When Hercules Demetriou spoke to Day her heart beat loudly and her loins acted as if they didn't know what the rest of her knew about him. What was he after? Day didn't actually think she was unattractive: Her appearance was mostly passable, and sometimes even exceeded that. Two things that were not in her favor were her spectacles, which often led people (including herself) to incorrectly anticipate a sexy librarian effect. You know... the glasses come off, the hair tumbles down and there she is. Nope. She had unreasonably large feet, too. She'd never walk on moonbeams. Why would the perfectly proportioned Hercules Demetriou keep trying to befriend her? It made no sense. Unless the slimy Bettencourters were compiling another List after all.

The young hero was still looking over. She took her glasses off, cleaned them and then typed a couple of paragraphs.

Who is a homely wench? Is a girl who exhaustively screens every man her mother contemplates seeing a homely wench? Leaving these things to Aisha meant just letting it all go to hell. How about a girl who sometimes finds it easier to talk to her dad's boyfriend than she does to her dad—what manner of wench is she? Day's dad still fasted at Ramadan even though he didn't go to mosque anymore, and from time he flared up at signs of Day and Aisha's 'secular disrespect', which he was almost sure they were learning from their mum (They weren't. If anything they were learning it from Dad's boyfriend, Anton.) But apart from being less hung up on manners, Anton was less sensitive than Dad. Day had once mentioned being envious of her friend Zoe for having two mums—she'd been talking about the miracle of having two mums who were both so cool, but her dad had taken her words to mean that she didn't want all the family she had, and he'd looked so crestfallen that she'd spent ages explaining her original comment and making it sound like even more dismissive of him and Anton until he'd had to laugh.

A girl at the desk next to Hercules'—Lakmini, Day thought her name was—wrote him a note; must have been a hot note because he fanned himself with it. But Miss Dayang Sharif couldn't have cared less what the note said, no way.

Who are the Homely Wenches of today?

She wrote about her first boyfriend Michael, her first and only boyfriend to date. She'd been in love with him and they broke up but the love didn't. In fact the love got—not truer, just better. Their friend Maisie's parents were away on the same weekend as Eurovision so Maisie opened up her house to 'all my Eurovision bitches', which turned out to be not that many. Just Maisie, Day and Aisha, until Michael showed up, with two friends he'd never told Day about, Luca and T. A taxi pulled up outside of Maisie's house and Michael, Luca and T got out, the three of them were dressed in silk sheaths—real, heavy silk. Maisie rushed to the front door: "What? Who are they? Are the Supremes really about to come in right now? I must have saved a nation in a past life..."

It took a couple of hours to get around to talking to Thalia and Luca. She only had eyes for Michael. For the first time she was seeing that he had everything she coveted from pre-Technicolor Hollywood. Hip-swinging walk, lips that tell cruel lies and sweet truths with a single smile, eyelashes that touch outer space. If Bette Davis and Rita Hayworth had had a Caribbean love child, that child would be Michael just as he was that night. They hugged for a long time, and later they talked on the balcony outside. "Thank God for the internet," he said. "I wouldn't have found Luca and T without it. All sort of nutters out there, but mine found me..."

He settled on the name Pepper. Day remembered the rest of that night in stop-motion—whirling around the room holding hands with Luca, who held hands with Aisha, who held hands with Maisie, who held hands with Pepper, who held hands with her, dancing around in a circle with bags and coats stacked in the centre, cheering for the countries whose stage performances made the most effort or projected the most bizarre aura. Luca and T became friends too. "For life, yeah? Not just for Eurovision..."

Thalia didn't even like Eurovision. She said she'd come along to meet Day. "This one talks about you a lot," she said, gesturing towards Pepper.

Day's stepdad Anton, who had had trouble remembering Michael's name, hailed Pepper with joy, even as he teased Day about the times she'd said Michael was the one. Day just shrugged. Pepper wasn't always on the surface, but whether she was with Pepper as Pepper or Pepper as Michael, Day had found the one she'd always be young with, eating Cornettos on roller coasters, forever honing their ability to combine screams with ice cream.

So... who is a Homely Wench?

Day wrote about Luca, muscular and much pierced Luca, and how that first Eurovision they spent together his hair was the same shade of pastel mint as the dress he wore. He and T were a bit older, in their early 20s. By day he sold high fashion pieces: "Everyone wants to fly away from here but not everyone can make their own wings... so they buy them from me..." By night he was an unstoppable bon vivant, deciding what kind of buzz was right for that night and mixing the pharmaceutical cocktail that had the least tortuous hangover attached. He'd had nights so rough he could hardly believe he was still alive- "But this can't be the after life. Ugh, it can't be!" Luca laughs long and loud and his body shakes as he does so. He's better at forgetting than forgiving; he says this is the only thing about himself that scares him. Speaking of him Day's father says "So... vulnerable," at the same time as her stepdad says 'Brazen!' Neither is quite right. When Luca was younger he got kicked out of his parent's house for a while; they'd hoped it'd make him less brazen, but it didn't—he stayed with friends and got brasher, and when he came home it was like he took his family back into his heart rather than the other way around. Day knew Pepper and Luca were together. She'd also heard that Luca liked to pursue straight men. Thalia referred to this tendency as "Luca's danger sport." Pepper said Luca'd be fine. "He's got us."

Oh, and Thalia—Day had to talk about T. Thalia's aesthetic was the most civilian (Pepper had learnt the most from her YouTube makeup tutorials) and Thalia was her full-time name. She was reserved, refined, she lived with an older man none of her friends had met; the only reason her friends even knew about the older man was because of a week when T had been ecstatic because she'd sold five triptychs and received a really considered, insightful note about them from the buyer. But then she found out the buyer was her boyfriend, so she was furious for a couple of days, and then the fury mingled with elation again. Luca argued that the boyfriend was merely investing in T's work, which would no doubt make T famous one day (Whenever T heard this she said, "Care," to indicate that she didn't.') T painted scenes onto mirrors, dramatic televisual two shots from stories that had only ever been screened in Thalia's mind. Her mirror paintings left gaps where the facial features of the characters would normally be, so that your face could more easily become theirs. T's brushstrokes are thin, translucent, and mercurial in their placement; they swirl into one other. Her colors are white and silver. Around the images Thalia paints a few words from the script: an alphabet frame. Day's favorite was a voiceover:

The poison taster is feeling a bit ill. He's well paid but he hates his master so much that today, the day he finally tasted poison, he's eaten a lot and is managing to keep a normal expression on his face until his master has eaten at least as much as he has. Eat heartily, boss, don't stop now...

Who's a homely wench? Luca is, and Day is, and so are Pepper and T and Hilde and Willa and anyone who is not just content to accept an invitation but wants more people to join the party, more and more and more. Day can just hear Pepper and Luca climbing up onto a tabletop at such a party and screaming out (they'd have to scream through megaphones as you're envisioning a gathering that'd fill Rome's Coliseum many times over): Hello everyone, it's great to see you all, you homely beasts and wenches.

Send.

The Homely Wenches have no fixed headquarters, and all the members agree that this keep them humble, relying as they do on the soft furnishings and snack-based offerings of whichever woman is host to Wench meetings for the month. February was Day's month for hosting meetings, and this particular meeting had been called to discuss articles for the Lent term edition of The Wench. There were to be two interviews: one with a bank robber who'd turned down a place at Cambridge and half regretted it. Marie was covering that story; she had a feeling for bittersweet regret and mercenary women. The other interview was with Myrna Semyonova, author of a novel Sob Story, which she'd written to make her girlfriend laugh, consisting as it does of a long, whisky soaked celebration of all the mistakes two male poets (one young, one middle aged) had made and were making in their lives. The narrator of the novel was the bar the two poets drank at, and since Semyonova had published the book under the pen name Reb Jones she was hailed as the new Bukowski. Willa was covering that, and her reaction to Sob Story's being taken so seriously was the same as that of Semyonova's girlfriend: It made the joke twice as funny. Ed was working on a piece about female love interests in the early issues of her favorite comic books and how very odd it must be for them to operate within a story where you're capable, courageous, droll, at the top of your field professionally and yet somehow still not permitted the brains to perceive that the man you see or work with every day is exactly the same person as the superhero who saves your life at night. "Seems like someone behind the scenes clinging to the idea that the woman whose attention you can't get just can't see 'the real you', no?"

Day looked from face to face. Marie would get on with T; they both favored grave formality and never letting a single hair fall out of place, though Marie's Zaire French accent and her tendency to wear jackets over her shoulders without putting her arms in the sleeves gave her attitude more impact than T's. The Society was too small to have a leader, but if they'd had one, Marie would've been it. Sometimes, when Marie and Willa spoke together in French, glancing around as they did so, Day felt that they were disparaging her mode of dress, but Ed had reassured her that that was just how people who could only speak English naturally responded to fluent French speakers. Ed, named after Edwina Currie, was much easier to get to know. You could chat to her about anything; she was upfront in a good way. If she didn't understand a reference you made she just said so and then asked to hear more about it. It was hard to picture her becoming friends with the likes of Marie and Willa without the aid of the Homely Wench Society. She was black like Marie and a Londoner like Willa, but, as she put it herself, "a different kind of black, and a different kind of London." Willa had never set foot on a council estate (she'd walked past a few and had been "petrified")—Ed thought Willa was joking about that, but she wasn't. Until very recently Ed had never seen a horse in real life, not even the ones at Buckingham Palace. Taking an actual trip to Buckingham Palace was something mini-Ed would have considered "a mission," if indeed it had ever occurred to her. Willa thought Ed was joking about that, but she wasn't. Day could see it all. Ed had a solid boyishness about her, and had once been asked to participate in an identity parade, one of whom had a mark on his face, a cut between nose and mouth. The boy with the mark had tried to persuade Ed to mark her face too, with a key—"A really cool key as well... it ended in a lion's head." The boy with the mark said he knew people who'd do favors for Ed for the rest of her life if she just cut her face. Ed reasoned that whatever this boy had done, his victim must have marked him so as to be able to know him again. Therefore Ed was better off out of it. Where she was from the hard nuts mostly communicated with their eyes, so she moved her jaw as if chewing gum, and as she did this she shook her head no. Her petitioner accepted this and moved on to the boy next to her. Marie thought Ed was joking about all that, but...

Theo and Hilde didn't think anybody was joking unless they were explicitly told so. Theodora Ackner, Nebraska's finest, was still disconcerted by Europe's ghosts. Hilde, Ed, and Grainne could no longer hear them, but the ghosts seemed to wake up again around Theo, since she actively listened for them. Lisbon, Paris and Vienna were tough places for her, beauties clotted with blood. Hilde refused to accompany Theo to Oslo. "About a quarter of my family lives there, Theodora. Let me know these things in my own way."

And then there was Grainne Molloy, who had lobbied to be recorded in the annals of the Homely Wench Society as "the irrepressible" Grainne Molloy, unsuccessfully, since, as Hilde pointed out, "Sometimes you are repressible, though." While Grainne did truly lose her temper several times a day, that frenetic energy of hers occasionally served to obscure another trait: the cool and calculated collection of incriminating anecdotes.

The newest Homely Wench was half in love with every single one of her fellow Wenches, but she wasn't sure what she, Dayang, brought to the mix. She'd been a member for just over three months and hadn't had an idea for an article or group activity yet. She snapped the group photos so she wouldn't have to see physical proof of her being odd man out. Maybe she could do something toward recruitment; a few of her friends from college and faculty had seemed interested when she mentioned the Wenches.

Flordeliza, the youngest Wench, their first-year, arrived late. As expected. "Afternoon, ladies!" She grabbed a handful of biscuits and flopped down onto Day's bed. She'd been growing out a side Mohawk since the summer, so her front hair was still much longer than it was at the back. Her clothes were crumpled and she'd clearly slept without removing her eyeliner; Day had barely noted this before Flor announced that she had a tale of shame to tell. But also a tale of possibility.

"Go," Theo commanded from the window seat; she'd arranged Day's curtains about her so that they resembled a voluminous toga.

"Empress, I hear and obey... but first of all, you're not allowed to judge me."

"We're all friends here," Marie said, sternly.

Flordeliza revealed that a member of the Bettencourt Society was into Yorkshire Filipinas. "Or maybe just into this?" She pointed at herself.

"Oh God," Grainne shouted. "Oh God, Flordeliza, what did you do?"

Day waited to hear about Flor and Hercules. She felt a bit sick but that was just obstructed emotion, a sensation the Dayang Sharifs of this world know all too well. Spring was definitely in the air, even as early as February. Everyone except Day was in some sort of romantic relationship—Marie with a townie who rode a motorbike, Willa with a curator at the Fitzwilliam, Theo with a guide who led tours of Dickensian London, Ed and Grainne with each other, and now Flordeliza with her Bettencourt boy. Day's only hope was that Hercules Demetriou would come out of this story sounding so greasy that Day's physical response to his proximity would be mercifully dulled forever.

(The other day she'd passed him and a few other boys she suspected were Bettencourters on King's Parade, apparently conducting a survey that involved soliciting the opinions of women. "More like ranking them," she muttered, and Hercules had smiled at her and said: "Sorry, what was that?"

"Nothing. Hello."

"Hi. Listen, do you want to—"

"Sorry, I can't. Bye!")

Flor wasn't talking about Hercules, but about a third-year at her college named Barney Chaskel, a boy she hadn't pegged for a Bettencourter because, "Well, he's sort of low-key and makes fun of his own obsession with conspiracy theories and... he's sweet."

"Sweet?!" came at her from every corner of the room. Day asked it loudest, more with curiosity than incredulity. Hilde said: "Flor, aren't you going too far?"

"Look... on the way over I actually thought about presenting all this as if I'd seduced him on purpose to get info, but the truth is I didn't know Chaskel was a Bettencourter until this morning! I said I had to run to a Wench meeting, and he was like... surely not the Homely Wenches? And I was like, yeah, the very same, and then he went 'How funny, I'm a Bettencourter...'"

"'How funny'...? This 'Barney Chaskel' thinks our decades of enmity are just a bit of fun...?" Theo wondered aloud.

"Flor," Marie said, in sepulchral tones. "So far this is the tale of our enemies evolving into ever more superficially pleasing forms. You mentioned that this was also a tale of possibility?"

"Flordeliza, if there's a twist introduce it now or there might be beats in store for you..." Ed added.

But Flor did have something good for them after all. She'd followed Barney Chaskel to Bettencourt Society headquarters and had seen him punch in the code that let him into the building. That was why she was late: She'd seen the sequence, but not its exact components. So she'd cased the joint, observed that the Bettencourters left through another door, and given herself three chances to repeat the code Barney had punched in.

"Babe," Willa said. "BABE. Third time lucky?"

Flor laughed and said: "Second." Grainne and Willa hooted and jumped on her, but Hilde, Ed and Theo were unmoved. "There's no need for us to enter Bettencourt premises," Hilde declared. Theo agreed: "The Wenches made the ultimate gesture years ago."

"No, come on, come on, we've got this so it'd basically be folly and sin not to use it!" Grainne said. But Ed backed up Hilde and Theo: "Yeah, it'd be nice to fuck with the Bettencourters' heads a bit more, but I'd rather we move on, concentrate on building ourselves up. We need more pieces for The Wench... weren't we just about to hear an idea from you, Day?"

"I think we should go in," Day said. Everybody went quiet, but her words were mainly for Marie, who hadn't expressed an opinion either way. "I think we should go in and do a book swap."

"A book swap?" Marie echoed.

"Yup. I'm betting the Bettencourters don't have many, or maybe even any, books by female authors on their bookshelves. And speaking collectively we don't have that many male authors on our own shelves –"

"Yes, but that's our desire to honor what's ours, Day," Hilde said.

"I know," said Day. "And I do. But I want to read everything. When it comes to books and who can put things in them and get things out of them, it's all ours. And all theirs too. So we go in, see what books they have, take a few and replace them with a few of ours."

"No muss no fuss," Theo said, grudgingly.

"I wanted to trash the place but I don't care what we do as long as we do something," Willa said. "I suppose that would've wrecked Flor's budding romance though."

Flor covered her face but didn't deny being keen on Barney Chaskel.

Marie spoke up: "I too do want us to do something. I have been waiting for a chance to do something to the Bettencourt Society, ever since a Bettencourter used me as a human shield on my very first Thursday at this university..." she stared out of Day's window and into the very moment of the incident. Her face was transfigured with wrath.

"Another guy was chasing him," Grainne whispered to Ed and Flor. "He said he never thought the other guy would hit a girl..."

"So I think we should do something with what you've brought us, Flor," Marie concluded. "All in favor of Dayang's suggestion, raise your hands." She raised her own hand. Day raised her hand too, as did Flor, Grainne, Willa and Theo. Theo said she was only coming along to make sure they did it right.

Day found Hercules Demetriou sitting at her usual desk in the library. Rather than talk to him she went to his usual desk, which was unoccupied, and set up her laptop there. He looked over at her three times, she looked over at him once. Just once, and he came over. Argh, was it that pitifully obvious?

He drew a chair up to her desk and leant on the corner of it. Everything about him was dark, delicious, fluid—that gaze especially. If she moved her arm just a little it'd touch his. There was an envelope in his hand.

"Listen, I heard you like John Waters," he said.

"I do," she said. "So?"

His sister Anthea ran a cinema in Stockwell... he described it as "pocket-sized." He made it sound like the kind of the place both Ed and Willa would frequent. So the Homely Wench Society wasn't the only way they could possibly have met and liked each other after all. Anthea had given Hercules two tickets for a screening of Female Trouble, and...

"No."

"Are you sure?"

"Are you finding it hard to believe that a girl wouldn't want to go and see a film with someone as amazing as you?"

He drew back, but didn't retreat. Instead he subjected her to a deeper look. The first to break the gaze would lose, so she didn't blink. "I was just finding it hard to believe that a John Waters fan wouldn't want a ticket to Female Trouble," he said, then dropped his gaze, laughing a little. "Here. Take two." He put the envelope down in front of her and went back to his desk.

Then he came back: "Dayang, can I ask you something?"

Oh my God. "If you must."

"Why did you come here?"

"Here?"

"Here, to this university."

She thought of Professor Arjun Begum, one of the professors who'd interviewed her, and how he'd said he liked the connections he could see her making in her mind, and the way that she tried to tend them so that they thrived. Nobody had ever said anything like that to her before. Usually it was "Aren't you overthinking things, Day?" But a gardener growing thoughts—she liked that. Also in Freshers' Week Professor Begum had saved a dead end conversation for her. She'd been cornered by a Professor who clearly felt he had some stuff to say about Malaysia and seemed to have been waiting for the right pair of ears to hear it all. "Your people," this professor boomed, having asked about her hometown, summarily dismissed "Ipswich" as an answer and enquired into her genetic makeup. "Your people have a saying..." he waved a hand so that port swirled around in his glass, but Professor Begum stole his moment of gravitas by remarking that one of the things he found interesting about contemporary tribes was that more of them were hand selected—"Nowadays there are people who choose their people one by one, as they encounter them... I can't decide if that's braver or more timorous than simply going by gender or ethnicity or favorite bands..."

If Day had been less shy—if she'd been her sister, for instance—she'd have hugged Professor Begum right there and then. He was one reason for her being there, and for her wanting to keep making space for other people engaged in the long, long comedy and tragedy of choosing their people one by one.

Hercules tired of waiting for Day to answer him: "Didn't you want to see who else was here?" he asked. "I know that's part of the reason why I came. It's the reason why I go to most parties."

Parties? She couldn't stop herself from smiling. "OK... same."

"So," he said. "I'm here. You're here. You find me off-putting at the moment, but why don't you try treating me like a person? You might like me."

"Bettencourter," she said.

His eyebrows shot up and he said: "Ah." Not an enlightened 'ah'. If anything he was more puzzled.

"It's Lent term. Aren't you supposed to be looking for someone to bring to that dinner of yours?"

The penny dropped. "You're a Homely Wench, aren't you?"

"And proud."

He gathered up his things and left the library, shaking his head and muttering something she didn't catch. Day took the cinema tickets out the envelope and texted the date on them to Pepper:

Female Trouble in London yes or yes??

YESSSSSS

The Bettencourters were well read in various directions; that's what their bookshelves said about them, anyway. Plenty of stimulating looking books, less than ten percent of which were authored by women. The substitutions were made by torchlight, as nobody thought it was a good idea to switch on the house lights at 4 AM and risk some passing Bettencourter coming round to see if any of his brethren was up for another drink. (The keys to the rooms of the house were on a hook beside the light switch in the entrance hall, so the girls peeped into the Bettencourt Society drinks cabinet, too. It was more of a walk in closet than a drinks cabinet, a closet vertically stocked with hard liquor from floor to ceiling. There were even little ladders for more convenient perusal. Day had never seen anything like it.)

Flor, Day, Willa, Marie and Theo unloaded their rucksacks and filled them again with books from the Bettencourt shelves. Not having read any of the books she was taking, Day made her exchanges based on thoughts the titles or authors' names set in motion. She exchanged two Edith Wharton novels for two Henry James novels, Jean Stafford's short stories for John Cheever's, Marlen Haushofer's The Loft for Robert Walser's The Assistant, Dubravka Ugresic's Lend Me Your Character for Gogol's How the Two Ivans Quarrelled and Other Stories , Maggie Nelson's Jane: A Murder for Capote's In Cold Blood, Lisa Tuttle's The Pillow Friend for The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James. She stopped keeping track: If she kept track she'd be there all night. But she left with a quality haul, and so did the others. The Wenches had their noses in books that were new to them for weeks. They waited for some challenge to be issued from Bettencourt headquarters, but none came forth. They didn't seem to have noticed that their library had been compromised. Maybe a drink swap would have been more effective.

Flor and Barney of the Bettencourters really seemed to be becoming ever more of an item; it was gross but the Wenches acted as if they didn't mind so as not to encourage a Romeo and Juliet complex. Besides, Theo summed up what all the Wenches were feeling about the Bettencourt book haul when she looked up from the pages of Kim Young Ha's Your Republic is Calling You and said resentfully: "They have good taste though."

Hercules Demetriou didn't show his face at the Female Trouble screening, not that she missed him when there was popcorn and Pepper and so much divine and diabolical mayhem onscreen, plus criminal beauty and Cookie Mueller. Just 'cause we're pretty everybody's jealous!

"Were you expecting to see someone?" Pepper asked her, as they walked out of the cinema. "You kept looking round."

She lied that she'd been watching the audience. It was a plausible lie because she was the kind of person who watched audiences.

Hercules was waiting on the staircase that led up to her room, his legs stretched all along the step, his feet jammed into two slots in the banister. He was reading one of the books Flor had left at Bettencourt headquarters: for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. When he saw her he scrambled to his feet and hit his head on the stone ceiling. She felt his pain, so she patted his shoulder as he went by; he took her hand and followed her up the stairs until she came to a halt.

"What?"

"Is this yours?" he asked, holding up the book.

"No."

"But you've read it?"

"Yup."

"It's great, isn't it? It sort of rocks you... reading it is sort of like reading from a cradle hung up in the trees, and the trees rock you with such sorrow, and as the volume turns up you realise that the trees are rocking you whilst deciding whether to let you live or die, and they're sorry because they've decided to smash you to pieces..."

"But then you're put back together again, in a wholly different order..."

"And it hurts so much you don't know if the new order will work."

"It'll heal. It has to hurt before it heals, don't you think?"

He was smiling at her again. He hadn't let go of her hand yet. It was nice until he invited her to the Bettencourt dinner. She hesitated for a surprising length of time (surprising to her, anyway) before she said: "Herc, I can't."

He wasn't daunted; she'd shortened his name, that had to mean something! "You're a Homely Wench. I'm not saying I get all that that entails, but I don't think the Bettencourters and the Wenches are that far apart in the way they see things anymore. Laughs, snacks and cotching, yeah? And we have a journal too: a journal read only by us. Can't we read each other's? I know you want me to pretend you don't look like anything much, but you're a beauty. Sorry. You are. Just come to the dinner, come and and meet the Bettencourters and actually talk to them, come and meet the people they think are beauties too. We're not like last century's Bettencourt Society. I guarantee you'll be surprised."

They both laughed at this closing speech of his. She didn't want to blush but blushed anyway, and he saw that. He thought she was a beauty! What a wonderful delusion. And she liked the idea of the Societies reading each other's journals. Maybe the Wenches could get the Bettencourters to share their liquor, too. She could just about imagine putting on a slinky dress and going along to this little dinner, making the acquaintance of his brothers in charisma and the boys and girls they'd brought along. But she could also picture the looks that some of the diners would give other diners, the words that'd be murmured when the subject of evaluation left the room. Really... her? Or Nice, nice. Both possibilities made her feel weary. With boys there was a fundamental assumption that they had a right to be there—not always, but more often than not. With girls, why her? came up so quickly.

"I can see you believe you lot are new and improved, but to have this dinner where each of you brings one person to show off to the others..."

"Isn't that what all socializing's like when you're in a relationship?" Hercules asked, resting his chin on her palm. This boy.

"Yes, well, I don't know about that –"

"Never had a boyfriend? Girlfriend?"

She took her hand back, stood on tiptoe and whispered into his ear: "Ask someone else."

"You'll be jealous," Hercules whispered back.

Day waved him away and climbed the last few steps to her door. "I won't. Goodnight, Herc."

He cupped his hands around his mouth and walked backwards down the stairs, calling out: "You like me. She likes me. She doesn't know why and she can't believe it, but Dayang Sharif likes me!"

The Homely Wench Society's final meeting of Lent Term was held in Flordeliza Castillo's room at Trinity. Plans for a trip to Neuschwanstein Castle had been finalized and there was no real business left to discuss, so Dvořák's The Noon Witch was playing, Grainne was sitting on the windowsill puffing away at an electronic cigarette with a face mask on ('A ghost! A well moisturized ghost!'), Flor was lying with her head in Day's lap having Orlando Furioso read to her, Ed and Marie were mixing drinks, and Theo carried Grainne's to the window and then back to Flor's desk as Grainne's smoke went down the wrong way and she staggered over to Ed, sputtering: "Bettencourters incoming... Bettencourter invasion!"

Flor must have been in on it. Must have. Her room wasn't easy to find. As a matter of fact, who's to say that that the events of that historic afternoon weren't the culmination of a scheme Flor and Barney had hatched between them way back in September?

The small but lionhearted Homely Wench Society gathered at Flordeliza Castillo's window and looked down upon the mass of menfolk below, many of them bearing beverages and assorted foodstuffs. At their head, in place of their president, was Hercules of Stockwell, waving a white flag with much vigor and good cheer.

Excerpted from What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi by arrangement with the Wylie Agency and Riverhead Books.

Lena Dunham is one of the best known endometriosis sufferers. Image via

The news that Girls star Lena Dunham was recently hospitalized for complications stemming from her endometriosis is one of the first times I've ever seen the condition get coverage in the mainstream media. It's a disease characterized by incredible pain that very few people know about. But 10 percent of people with a uterus will suffer from endometriosis at some point in their life, including me.

I was 19 when I was first diagnosed with endometriosis, a condition that causes the tissue that normally grows inside your uterus to spring up in other places in your body. I knew something was wrong for a long time, right back to the second time I got my period when I was 13 years old. The pain was so intense I couldn't go to school. I would faint if I stood up too quickly, I could barely eat, and I couldn't sleep. I had to take weeks off at a time because the pain was so horrific and my bleeding lasted much longer than we'd been taught a period was supposed to.

I saw my family doctor about it, and he told me pain was normal when you get your period. I had to continue to complain until I was finally referred to a gynecologist. But he told me my pain was normal as well. He did prescribe a contraceptive pill, an attempt to shorten the length of my period. And after a couple of years, it did, but the pain never stopped or even lessened.

Over the next few years, the pain continued to progress. I kept visiting my gynecologist, convinced there was something wrong with my body, but nobody—no specialist, family member, or friend—seemed to believe me.

The pain of endometriosis comes from nowhere—shooting, sharp, and intense. It hits in the lowest point of your stomach, cramping up in waves. I'm told it's not unlike the feeling of labor contractions. Sometimes it'll shoot to your lower back, meaning there's no comfortable position. Then there's the nausea and dizziness, which feels as though it will never end.

So at 19, at yet another appointment, I finally told the OBGYN I was so sick of being in constant pain that I wanted to die. This seemed to shift something—he sat up and asked me questions, and after an internal exam, he came to the conclusion that I had endometriosis. I had no idea what it was but was booked in for a laparoscopy and a hysteroscopy—two procedures where a camera is inserted to examine the pelvis and the lining of the uterus.

This is a pretty common experience for people with endometriosis: It's hard to get a diagnosis. The fact that female pain is often not taken seriously enough by doctors plays a role. My case isn't even the worst I've heard of. For some sufferers, endometriosis is unbearable.

I had surgery to burn out the endometrial tissue, and I was told that I should no longer experience pain once I had healed. This was a lie. It has been over two years since that surgery, and although the internal ultrasounds tell me my uterus is no longer drowning in excess endometrial tissue, the pain hasn't stopped.

But being diagnosed with a disease that has no cure is not the worst part about endometriosis. There are so many misconceptions, and I believed all of them at some point: If you read any article on endometriosis, including the Wikipedia page, you'll see it says that endometriosis undoubtedly leads to infertility. This is not always true. Many people with endometriosis have children. But for ages I thought my diagnosis meant that was it for me, I could never have kids.

And then there is my favorite and most regular experience of endometriosis pain: the flare up. I will be out socializing, or at work, and all of a sudden, for no logical reason, my stomach bloats up to four times its size and pain seizes my body. There is nothing I can do about it, except try to explain to those around me, bosses included, that I did not plan this, I am not making it up, and I need to get myself home.

I keep hoping that one day they will find a cure, but there is so little awareness for an illness that is so debilitating to those who have it. Some days I can be fine, and I'll be on my feet for hours. Other days, I wake up, and I cannot move. The pain cannot be relieved. Lying down, sitting up, bathing: It's still there.

They can perform surgery, give you hormone-based medication, prescribe you strong painkillers, but there is no guarantee that any of these may work. Until awareness is raised for this disease, the government and medical industry will not put further research and education into fighting it and finding a cure.

That's the other thing that makes living with endometriosis difficult: So few people even know what it is, let alone how debilitating the pain can be. So that's what I'm hoping for in writing about my experience—that a couple of people might learn more about what endometriosis means for the people who battle it. We are strong. We can fight this.

Follow Eleanor Rigby on Twitter.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

The promotional materials for 88 Kushner-KABR, also known as Trump Bay Street, show a building designed with comforts and amenities certain to attract opulent buyers: There are panoramic views of the Manhattan skyline, an address just blocks from the Hudson River, and real estate developers with a proven reputation for success.

But this sales pitch for the 50-story, 447-unit apartment building isn't meant for buyers. It's targeting wealthy foreign investors, whom developers hope will trade capital for permanent residency in the United States.

The building is a second tower under construction alongside Trump Plaza in Jersey City's booming luxury real estate market. The $218 million high-rise, announced in 2014, was heralded by The Wall Street Journal as the first big deal between Donald Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who is married to Ivanka and heir to a real estate fortune of his own. To finance the project, the developers (Kushner Companies and KABR Group, a New Jersey real estate firm) are using $50 million of the $218 million project from wealthy immigrants, secured through an investor visa program known as EB-5, as a Bloomberg Politics report pointed out on Sunday.

The EB-5 investor visa program, created in 1990, offers visas to immigrants who invest $1 million in a commercial project that will create or preserve at least ten jobs in the United States. (They can invest $500,000 if the project takes place in a high-unemployment area.) The program provides a maximum of 10,000 visas each year, many of which lead to green cards: In 2012, only 6 percent of EB-5 visa holders were denied for permanent residency, according to the Brookings Institution.

"This is a really different visa program," said Audrey Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, DC. "Most visa programs don't involve any kind of a business deal, and most business deals don't involve issuing visas."

For most of its existence, the EB-5 visa program was largely unused. But as lending standards tightened after the 2008 recession, American developers began to see the program as a viable source of low-interest financing. A more robust recruiting infrastructure emerged abroad, particularly in China, pitching affluent investors on the idea of an EB-5 visa as a relatively certain path to permanent residency in the US. The program hit its visa limit for the first time in 2014, and again in 2015.

A spokesperson for Donald Trump's presidential campaign declined to comment in detail about the Republican frontrunner's involvement with the EB-5 program and the second tower being built alongside Trump Plaza in Jersey City. "This was a highly successful license deal but he is not a partner in the financing of the development," she wrote in a statement via email. Trump often works with developers who pay a licensing fee to use his name, while not dealing directly with financing.

"Most visa programs don't involve any kind of a business deal, and most business deals don't involve issuing visas." — Audrey Singer

At a debate among Republican presidential candidates on March 3, the real estate mogul defended another business endeavor centered on immigration—the use of temporary foreign workers at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida. The New York Times reported that while 300 US citizens had applied or been referred for jobs at the exclusive club since 2010, only 17 had been hired. "This is a procedure; it's part of the law," Trump said at the debate. "I take advantage of that. There's nothing wrong with it."

The EB-5 program, for its part, is also perfectly legal—but a 2015 report by the US Government Accountability Office derided the program as poorly regulated and vulnerable to fraud. One of the most recent examples of abuse came to light in 2013, when Chicago real estate developer Anshoo Sethi fraudulently collected roughly $160 million from 290 Chinese nationals who were hoping to gain access to a visa, and then never built the hotels and convention center outlined in his investment plan. He pleaded guilty to wire fraud in January.

Congress renewed the EB-5 program for one year in December, but reform appears to be on the horizon. Aside from the threat of fraud, some lawmakers representing rural areas say the distribution of EB-5 projects unfairly favors big-city real estate developers. With only 10,000 visas available each year, covering both applicants and their immediate family members, "the pie gets very small, very quickly," according to Singer. "That's one of the complaints about these New York projects that are really huge and are soaking up a lot of the visas."

To secure EB-5 funding, Kushner and KABR Group worked with US Immigration Fund, a Florida-based company notable for steering such investments into high-profile New York real estate projects, including development at Brooklyn's Atlantic Yards and renovations to the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island. The company serves as a "regional center" for the EB-5 program—essentially a middleman that allows investors to pool funds for a commercial project, often revolving around real estate.

Nicholas Mastroianni III, senior vice president of US Immigration Fund, told me that 88 Kushner-KABR "ranks up there with one of our most confident projects that we've done. have a very long track record of success in building this kind of development." Risa Heller, a Kushner spokesperson, did not respond to my request for comment.

As Trump fuels his presidential run with promises to build a wall on the US-Mexico border and ban Muslim immigrants from entering the country, EB-5 offers a vision of what type of visa program might be more palatable to the real estate tycoon—in this case, one that supplies green cards to the super-wealthy, even if they come from China, which he's cited as a threat to American prosperity on numerous occasions.

Follow Ted Hesson on Twitter.

Image via 'We Watched London's Weed Fanatics Getting Arrested in Hyde Park for 4/20'

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Hey guys, guess what? Turns out that making an extremely sought-after commodity legal on the UK market—therefore creating new businesses and jobs around that commodity—would lead to billions of dollars in tax revenue! Why haven't we thought of this before?

A study carried out by an assortment of scientists, academics, and police has found that not only will legalizing cannabis raise a huge amount of tax money, pumping money into an economy that very much needs it, but also reduce harm among users.

"Drug policy to date has (almost) always been driven by political and ideological agendas that have ignored scientific, public health, and social policy norms," the report states. "We are fully aware of the health harms associated with cannabis use, but contend that a rational policy must pragmatically manage the reality of use as it currently exists, rather than attempt to eradicate it using punitive enforcement."

On the panel was Professor David Nutt, an ex-advisor to the government on drug policy, who once famously stated that horse riding was more dangerous than ecstasy. He was later fired by the government after stating that ecstasy and LSD are less dangerous than alcohol.

We at VICE came to a similar conclusion as the team behind the study almost two years ago, working out that regulation and taxation would lead to an estimated saving of $1.1 billion to British taxpayers every year, with an approximate total of $3.4 billion made in tax revenue every year from sales alone.

In Colorado, a year after weed was fully legalized, police said they hadn't noticed "much of a change of anything," with a report noting that the state had collected $59.8 million in tax revenue from sales of the drug, while incidents of impaired driving, property crime, violent crime, and teen drug use had all fallen.

Why the British government has always refused to listen to the specialists saying they're getting drug policy wrong—or pay any attention to successes in other countries—is beyond us. But hey, there you go: Here's another well-researched, unbiased, hugely profitable piece of expert advice to completely disregard.

This past weekend, civil rights advocates gathered in Selma, Alabama, to mark the 51st anniversary of the Bloody Sunday attack on civil rights activists who had taken to the city's Edmund-Pettus Bridge to protest myriad rules that had effectively disenfranchised black voters across the South. The assault on the peaceful demonstrators shocked the nation, and is largely credited with spurring Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a law that strengthened protections for minority voters and required states with troubled histories of restricting polling access to clear all new voting laws with the US Department of Justice.

In the decades following Bloody Sunday, it looked like voter vouchers and other stringent voter ID requirements were slowly becoming a forgotten remnant of life in the less-than-equal South. But in 2011, Republican lawmakers in the Alabama Legislature included a disquieting provision in an already controversial bill: Under the banner of preventing voter fraud, the state followed several others in introducing a voter ID law that would require residents to present certain forms of government-issued identification in order to cast a ballot. On top of this, the bill also stipulated that anyone could vote, regardless of whether he or she had an ID card, so long as two poll workers could vouch for his or her identity—a troubling echo of Jim Crow–era rules in Alabama counties requiring any would-be voter to obtain "vouchers" from two registered (read: white) voters confirming his or her identity.

Perhaps predictably, civil rights groups cried foul, alleging that Republican lawmakers were simply trying to make it more difficult for Democratic-leaning minority voters, who disproportionately lack the requisite identification, from the polls. A report from the Center for American Progress estimated that as many as 500,000 Alabama residents could be negatively impacted by the ID requirement.

Although the bill's Republican supporters said the new measures were simply aimed at stopping voter fraud, critics noted that the type of impersonation-based election crimes that voter ID requirements attempt to prevent are exceedingly rare. Unsatisfied with Alabama's explanation, the Justice Department asked the state for more information to explain why, aside from outright discrimination, it needed to place the new restrictions on voting. In May 2013, Alabama's attorney general responded, calling the federal agency's request an "unnecessary and inappropriate" burden and asserting that the state would provide no further information to ease the feds' apparent concerns.

The following month, Alabama got its way. In June 2013, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Shelby County v Holder, effectively disabling Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which gave the Justice Department authority to block discriminatory voting laws before they went into affect in nine, mostly Southern states, including Alabama. Freed from federal oversight, Alabama immediately announced that its long-stalled ID law and voucher rule would take effect. Numerous other jurisdictions across the South quickly followed suit, implementing a variety of new restrictions on voting.

For civil rights activists across the South, the Shelby ruling amounted to a historic setback. Without federal "preclearance," new barriers to voting can often only be challenged after they are implemented, making the fight against such laws far more difficult.

"When Section 5 was still around, states could not enact new voting laws without proving to the Department of Justice that they wouldn't make minority voters worse off," said Richard Hasen, a professor of law and political science at University of California, Irvine. "Now this burden is on plaintiffs, and they have a much higher threshold they have to overcome."

The recent proliferation of new restrictions has inflected the celebrations in Selma this week with worries of a resurgent era of voter suppression—concerns that have taken on new urgency ahead of the first presidential election since the landmark Shelby decision. And Alabama provides a striking example of post-Shelby uncertainty among civil rights activists.

In the nearly three years since the Shelby decision, the state's implementation of the voter ID law has been something of a saga. In September 2015, for instance, following a budget cut by the Alabama Legislature, the state ordered the closure of 31 of the Department of Motor Vehicle's part-time satellite offices, many of which served poor, rural regions. Given that unequal access to state-issued identification cards was their primary argument against the state's voter ID law, civil rights groups were outraged by the closures, and claimed the move would further limit minority voters' access to Alabama's polls.

" people out every day to drives leading up to our largest primary the state has seen." Farnon claimed that, nonetheless, the state had its highest-ever turnout for its Super Tuesday primary votes this year.

Apparently unsatisfied with the mobile unit's ability to fix the problem, the Obama administration announced in December that it was launching an investigation into Alabama's DMV closures. "Today, the US Department of Transportation is making it clear that Title VI is not optional," US Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said in a statement, referring to a provision in the 1964 Civil Rights Act that governs equal access to programs receiving federal assistance. That same month, the NAACP also filed a lengthy civil rights suit against the state of Alabama for its voter ID law.

Scott Douglas, the executive director of the Greater Birmingham Ministries, a community organization that signed onto the lawsuit, says the voucher system included in Alabama's new voter ID law has caused problems around the state, especially in gentrifying neighborhoods where new residents sign up to administer polling places. In an interview, Douglas cited two cases in which "elderly people who had been voting for decades could not be vouched for by the new people who had moved to the neighborhood and were working the polls."

The voucher requirement fits into a galaxy of issues relating to the passage and implementation of the law that Douglas says has increased his sense of frustration with his state's government. "Is it corruption or is it incompetence?" he asked. "I see both."

A major problem with the law's implementation, Douglas added, has been the state government's failure to educate Alabama residents about the new law. "People are still not clear on this law," he said. "Confusion downsizes the vote, it downsizes participation." The burden for educating the public about voting procedures, he added, has now fallen squarely on the shoulders of his organization and the handful of others like it scattered around the state.

"We are doing all we can," Douglas said, "but we're a very small finger in a big hole in the dike."

Follow Spencer Woodman on Twitter.

One morning last October, Bill Bratton, the commissioner of the New York Police Department, bumped into a young woman smoking a joint in Lower Manhattan.

"I come up to one side, tap her on the shoulder, and she looked over," Bratton later recalled to a giggly audience at the New York Law School. "And I wish I had a photograph of that face, because she instantly recognized me." The commissioner added that he and a security officer "politely removed the marijuana" and threw it in the sewer.

The goofy anecdote shows how New York City's once-harsh stance toward pot has evolved. Previously defined by what critics called "the marijuana arrest crusade," NYC law enforcement seems to be adopting a softer tone: Even if smoking in public is still illegal, since November 2014, a new era in weed policy has come to New York where Bratton's boys often look to issue a ticket or warning first, instead of cuffing people in droves. As of this month, the same softer approach applies to drinking, pissing, and littering in Manhattan, too.

But exactly what happens to you for possessing pot still depends an awful lot on where you live.

As VICE reported a few days after Bratton's joint story made headlines, weed is basically legal for New Yorkers with white skin—which is to say enforcement varies widely on, for instance, opposite sides of Prospect Park. Out of all New Yorkers arrested for misdemeanor pot possessions from January to September 2015, whites made up 8 percent.

Blacks and Hispanics? 88 percent.

In that sense, Bratton's reaction to a student stoner in the Financial District reflects how people generally get treated in that rich, white area of the city. In 2014, it was one of the neighborhoods with the lowest marijuana arrest rates in New York, according to a study conducted by the Drug Policy Alliance.

That said, while the commissioner and smoker-turned-mayor Bill de Blasio continue to laud the plummeting rates of marijuana arrests in this city, low-income communities of color are still getting arrested in high numbers for weed. Now the changes in policing—or how New Yorkers are treated for the same crime—has created two worlds: one where the commissioner will politely dump out your roach, and another where the boys in blue bag you.

To find out how the system really works, VICE spoke with men of color—who statistics show are targeted most aggressively—from each of the five boroughs about getting hassled for pot in today's New York City.

Brooklyn

Before the NYPD recalibrated its pot policy across the city in November 2014, it was Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson who first gestured toward change. "In 2012, over 12,000 people in Brooklyn were arrested for possessing small amounts of marijuana, mostly young, black men," he told the crowd at his 2014 inauguration.

The prosecutor swore he would stop going after these low-level offenses, as black men in Brooklyn were nine times more likely than their white counterparts to get busted for bud.

Perhaps no neighborhood's enforcement disparity is more glaring than Brownsville.

The high-crime spot is notorious for police crackdowns, particularly over weed: According to data provided by the NYC Department of Criminal Justice Services, there were 326 arrests for marijuana possession in the 73rd Precinct (Brownsville) last year, 278 of which were for black men.

36-year-old Germaine Windley was one of them.

In June 2015, Windley remembers inviting a man up to his apartment after he repeatedly asked if Windley had weed outside of a bodega down the block. As the two waited for a dealer to arrive, Windley says he sparked up a blunt, and offered it to the man, not knowing he was an undercover NYPD detective. The guy refused, saying he didn't smoke, which sounded suspicious. But Windley didn't pay it any mind.

Later, after the dealer arrived, the undercover officer left with two bags of weed. "I'm talking with my dealer for a little, talking about if I knew the guy," Windley recalls. "I said I met him at the store, and he wanted weed. But before I could've even finish that sentence, cops rushed in my house and arrested me."

As they led Windley out, one officer asked if his heating pack on the stove was drugs—Windley told the cops he had a herniated disc, he says, but they checked anyway. Before heading back to the precinct, he adds, "they drove us around for a while, to see if they could snag anyone else up." Windley was later charged with possession of marijuana with the intent to distribute.

In Brooklyn Criminal Court, a judge dismissed the charges and made Windley and his dealer each pay $120 fines for disorderly conduct. "The judge just said we're gonna pay the fine, dismiss the case, that as long as we pay the fine and stay out of trouble for six months, we should be OK," Windley says.

In Brownsville, where the man still lives, arrests like these are a daily occurrence. Windley scoffs when I mention the city's move from arrests toward summonses: "They don't give out summons. They still arrest them," he says, arguing it's the same at housing projects in Bed-Stuy. The cops are everywhere, he maintains, "hounding people for weed."

Except when he goes to Manhattan. "I walk around there, you don't even see police out there," Windley tells me. "People are smoking blunts in the streets!"

"It's a backwards system, man," he adds, suggesting he lost a sure-thing job offer because of the arrest. "I'm starting to feel like it's gonna hold me back, every job I get now."

Manhattan

Around the same time Commissioner Bratton announced he was easing up on weed citywide, the advocacy group Drug Policy Alliance released a study showing the 25th Precinct of Manhattan—a.k.a. East Harlem—had the highest rate of marijuana arrests in the city: a startling 1,128 out of every 100,000 residents. (In East Harlem, 88 percent of residents are black or Hispanic.)

On Thanksgiving of that year, just days after the new policy on ticketing was announced, a young Hispanic college student, who requested anonymity and we'll call "Jamie," was riding down Second Avenue in the 25th precinct. His mother and brother were in the car, which Jamie had recently leased out, he says, and the windows were foggy from the cold. Then red lights flashed.

"The officer said he pulled me over for a broken taillight," Jamie tells me. "Even though I had just bought the car and had it fixed up."

After he opened his window, the officer said he smelled marijuana, and told Jamie, his mother, and his brother to step out of the car, he recalls. His brother began recording the interaction on his phone. According to Jamie, the officers searched the car and his belongings. In Jamie's pockets, the cops found an eighth of weed.

"So I spent Thanksgiving night in jail," Jamie tells me.

In the end, Jamie says he wasn't ticketed for having a broken taillight—instead, he was reprimanded for having marijuana on him and driving while impaired, and ordered to attend a months-long program for chronic smokers. In an act of civil forfeiture, he adds, his car was confiscated, and he was forced to pay $150 for a drug test. (Jamie's case is ongoing, which is why he declines to give his name.)

Illustrations by Ella Strickland de Souza

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

"Get ready for a white-knuckle ride," deadpans Guy Toyn, a court reporter and the director of Court News UK, as he leads me into the press room in the bowels of the Old Bailey, the central criminal court of the UK. A couple of old police constables sit at empty desks. At another, a man in a suit waves politely. It's a windowless space that could easily double as the set of the IT Crowd. "It used to be packed down here," says Toyn. "Back then you could smoke in here, too. I was on 40 Bensons a day."

I've never been to the Old Bailey before, which is amazing really. Not because of my relentless criminal activity, but because I've lived in London for almost ten years and never thought to pay a visit to what is, arguably, the most famous court in the world. Toyn isn't surprised.

"I don't think people even know they can view trials," he says. "The whole concept of open justice and why it's important is lost on most people. There used to be queues around the block to come and see certain trials; not any more. Sometimes you see the odd little queue and a few students. The interest in some trials used to be absolutely enormous. I suppose that's been steadily decreasing since the abolition of the death penalty."

Maybe it's the fleece he's wearing, but Toyn has an air about him: He seems to be a man who has seen a lot. And, frankly, he has. For much of the past 20 years, Toyn's working life has been spent inside the Old Bailey's walls, watching, listening, and reporting on the cases—the macabre, the weird, the dull—that come through the courts every day.

"All human life is laid bare within these walls," Toyn tells me, sitting at a huge mahogany table outside one of the courtrooms. "It's not only about the horrible things that happen, but also the bravery that people show. Every court case is a magnificent piece of theater—the barristers you see working are some of the most intelligent people you'll ever come across. And it's a privilege to work in this place itself, which is obviously a building of tremendous history."

Indeed, the Central Criminal Court—known as the Old Bailey after the road on which it stands—has been open in its current state since 1907. It has existed, though, in one form or another, since 1673. The Krays, Ruth Ellis, Peter Sutcliffe: These are just some of the infamous names to have been tried there, and whose trials would have filled the pages of the newspapers of the day.

But gone are the days of numerous reporters sitting in court every day of a trial. Court News UK—the digital arm of news agency Central News—is the only specialist courts and tribunals agency operating within the UK, and as traditional journalism continues in its decline, more and more news outlets are relying on Toyn and his team to supply them with stories.

"When I first came to cover the Old Bailey, there were about four or five agencies here. Now, there's basically us and Press Association," says Toyn. "And it used to have four reporters, now it has one. You don't see national newspaper reporters turn up for many trials now at all. At the end of the Hatton Garden trial, for example, there wasn't one national newspaper reporter present when they were convicted. The Soham murders was probably the last massive trial. It really has changed absolutely."

Of course, national papers do still carry major crime and court stories, albeit perhaps in a reduced number. But the decline of the UK's local press has meant many serious stories go unheard, which, argues Toyn, "is not only a dreadful shame because people aren't being informed, but a tragedy for the democratic process as a whole.

"Court reporting does take a long time, and a local newspaper can't really sit around day-in and day-out and do it any more," he says. "That's why agency reporters are so valuable. But what we've ended up with is a situation where so many court cases just don't get covered in local papers at all. We recently had a very interesting case where a guy carried out five serious sexual assaults in Poplar, East London. Those sexual assaults were never covered in the local newspaper—his arrest was never covered. Nor was the opening of his trial, his conviction, his sentence. You have to really ask yourself: What is the function of these local newspapers if they can't keep people properly informed?"

Clearly, the lack of court reports is not down to a diminished appetite for such stories—you only need to look at our current obsession with true crime to know that people will never tire of reading or hearing about sordid, unlawful doings. But, says Toyn, this "isn't about whether people want to read these stories or not. We're talking about a central, civic function of newspapers. If they can't keep people informed when a man has gone out on bail and raped someone, we have to ask ourselves: Is there any point in them existing at all?"

And that's perhaps where a site such as Court News UK can step in. Toyn and his team are currently working on a relaunch that will see the site collate all the material they publish, with the aim of providing people better access to what's going on in their area of London. In the meantime, Toyn helps keep people in the know with the site's attached Twitter feed, which—with 53,000 followers and counting—has become something of a cult account online. Nowhere will you find a better insight into London's life of crime, as well as the lesser seen workings of the judiciary, than @CourtNewsUK.

Stories of stolen underwear sit alongside tales of brutal murder. There are Carry On–esque misdemeanors and then horrific stories of rape. Stylists smacking people with champagne flutes, next to cases of alleged child abuse.

This is what the underbelly of Britain looks like, in 140 characters.

"People are very interested in the bizarre, the surreal, and the outlandish, and to a certain extent, the Twitter feed reflects that—although we try to put as much of what you might describe as normative news on there as well," says Toyn.

"When you consider people's defenses—one which sticks in my mind is the Saudi Arabian millionaire accused of rape—some of their explanations are utterly bizarre," says Toyn. "And because they're utterly bizarre, sometimes they're richly comic. I've been told off a number of times in court for having a right old laugh. It's not against the law; it happens. The judge is there to try to make sure the proceedings carry on and people take it seriously, and people must take it seriously. People's lives are on the line, and there are victims, which should never be forgotten. But sometimes things happen that are absolutely, utterly bloody hilarious."

Really, though, a good crime story is a murder story, Toyn tells me. "'If it bleeds, it leads' is an old American newspaper adage, and I think it still holds true today," he says. But they're hard to come across now. Toyn should know: "I think I've covered more murder cases than anyone in the UK living at the moment," he says.

Related: Watch 'Wolf of the West End', our documentary about the infamous socialite and fraudster Eddie Davenport.

Toyn describes a "good murder case" as if reciting off a favorite recipe. "When we're looking at a tasty murder case, what we really need is people who have jobs, professions. If we can throw in a bit of sex or romantic interest, that's fantastic. And then we need a little bit of cash," he says. "Unfortunately, the people who have all those things are perhaps unlikely to commit murders nowadays because they know they're going to get caught. As you know, murdering someone is easy, but it's the disposing of the body that always causes the problems."

After 20 years in court, is there anything that could shock you now?

"No," Toyn replies without hesitation. "I'm not numb to it all—I avoid going into cases involving offenses against children, as I find them upsetting. But I've basically heard enough of the truly horrific and the truly bizarre . I can't repeat some of the stuff I've heard in this building. The most extreme stuff can be really, really grotty. Body disposal, cannibalism—I've heard it all.

"I always think to myself, if I'd have kept a diary from the start, it would have been astonishing. Every single case. The balls ups made by barristers and some of the ridiculous judges we've had over the years. There have been some loose canons that made you wonder how they were allowed to keep practicing."

Toyn leads me into a courtroom, and I sit and listen to a murder trial. A young man takes the witness stand, and a group of aging male barristers in wigs enunciate at him very slowly. I realize I know very little about the judicial process. The trial is a strange mix of the everyday and extraordinary. As much as I try to take in the enormity of what I am viewing, my mind still wanders to lunch. Outside the court, the witness sits on a bench with his head in my hands while I look up the details of the case he's involved in. It's not pleasant. A gaggle of people exit another court for coffee and cigarette. A barrister plays a game on an iPad. All human life is laid bare.

What's the future for the court reporter?

"I think it's limited, to be quite honest with you," says Toyn. "People talk about televising the courts, and I'm afraid they're talking absolute nonsense. It's just ridiculous and would be no benefit whatsoever. The BBC and Sky have their cameras up at the High Court, but I think they're more interested in the drama of the criminal trial than they are in justice. Journalism is in very real crisis, and it means the bottom line is this: We're all going to be under-informed. And no one's up in arms about it."

Follow Olivia on Twitter.

Bernie Sanders. Photo by Todd Church via Flickr.

US News

Surprise Victory for Sanders in Michigan
Bernie Sanders defied the polls and pulled off a shock win in Michigan last night, but Hillary Clinton managed to increase her overall delegate lead, winning a big victory in Mississippi. Trump, current Republican frontrunner, won three more states—Michigan, Mississippi, and Hawaii—while Ted Cruz won in Idaho. —NBC News

Pastor Shooting Suspect Arrested at White House
A former Marine suspected of shooting and wounding a prominent pastor in Idaho has been arrested outside the White House. The Secret Service said Kyle Odom, 30, threw "unknown material over the south fence line" before he was captured. —The Washington Post

Another Chipotle Closes for 'Full Sanitization'
A Chipotle restaurant in Massachusetts has closed to undergo a "full sanitization" after four employees became ill, possibly with the norovirus. No customers have been reported sick. It follows multiple outbreaks of E.coli and norovirus at branches across the country last year. —ABC News

FBI Agents Face Probe Into Oregon Shooting
Federal officials are investigating FBI agents present at the shooting of LaVoy Finicum, one of the Oregon wildlife refuge occupiers, for not disclosing that they fired shots. State investigators concluded Oregon police officers acted properly when they shot and killed Finicum. —The New York Times

International News

Iran Tests Missiles With 'Israel Must be Wiped Out' Slogan
Iran has test-fired ballistic missiles with the phrase "Israel must be wiped out" written on them, according to state media pictures. US officials said that if reports were confirmed, they would raise the matter at the UN Security Council, since the tests defy international sanctions. —AP

UN Says EU-Turkey Deal Is Illegal
A plan to send back refugees en masse from the European Union to Turkey would contravene their right to claim asylum, said the UN's refugee agency, the UNHCR. The agency insists a blanket return of foreigners would not be consistent with international law.—Al Jazeera

Three Dead After Car Bomb Attack in Somalia
A car bomb set off near a police building in the Somali capital of Mogadishu has killed at least three police officers. The Islamist militant group al Shabaab claimed responsibility. Dozens have now been killed in four separate bomb attacks in the country in the past two weeks.—Reuters

Palestinian Kills US Student in Israel
An American student has been killed, and several other people hurt in a stabbing attack near Tel Aviv. Taylor Force, 29, a student at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, was one of ten people stabbed in Jaffa by a Palestinian attacker, who was then shot dead by police. —BBC News

George Martin working with the Beatles in 1964. Photo via Wikimedia.

Everything Else

Tributes Pour in for Fifth Beatle
Sir George Martin, the record producer known as the "fifth Beatle," has died at the age of 90. Ringo Starr led the tributes, saying, "Thank you for all your love and kindness George." British Prime Minister David Cameron called Martin "a giant of music." —The Guardian

Matrix Director Comes Out as Transgender Woman
The director of the Matrix, Lilly Waschowski, formerly Andy, has come out as a transgender woman in a statement titled "Sex change shocker – Wachowski brothers now sisters!!!" Her sister Lana Wachowski is also a transgender woman. —Rolling Stone

Taxing Weed Could Make UK Billions
A major study of British academics and police agencies has found that legalizing cannabis will not only raise a huge amount of tax revenue for the UK government, it would also reduce harm among users.—VICE

Binge-Watching Makes Us Depressed
A University of Toledo study has found binge-watchers reported higher levels of stress, anxiety, and depression than people who eke out their episodes. FYI: Four episodes of House of Cards classifies as binge-watching.—VICE

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

"I think Burning Man suffers from an image problem, in that many people's idea of it revolves solely around the most titillating stories," says Fred Fellowes, founder of the UK's Secret Garden Party festival and a proud Burning Man acolyte. "Most people have an array of fairly common myths in their heads—the social freedoms, the other freedoms it offers—and it really isn't what a lot of people think it is. I think it would surprise a lot of people; it's more of a sober affair, much more capable, than those myths might suggest."

Fellowes has been to Burning Man "eight of nine times" since first attending in 2006. He's run a theme camp on the event's open playa, with a bar and a small disco, and is happy to say that it's had a "huge influence" on the development of his own 22,500-person event. So he's well placed to comment on why Burning Man culture is booming worldwide, and how the week-long celebration of art, love, freedom, and self-expression is helping to change the way we experience festivals.

But first, a primer on what exactly Burning Man is: The first incarnation of the festival took place on the summer solstice in 1986, when friends Larry Harvey and Jerry James spontaneously decided to burn an eight-foot-tall wooden effigy of a man on Baker Beach, San Francisco. Some 35 people were there to watch. Over the next few years, the number of people attending the annual event grew steadily. But even then, surely no one in attendance could have envisaged that, 30 years later, the fire ceremony they were witnessing would mushroom into the 70,000 attendee-strong cultural behemoth it's become, attracting people from all over the world to its home for the past 25 years, Nevada's Black Rock Desert.

As well as the main Burning Man, there are now nearly 50 "Burns"—smaller events inspired by the spirit of Burning Man—held every year. Originally, these only took place in the US and Canada, but you'll now find them all over the planet, from AfrikaBurn in South Africa and Midburn in Israel, to Burning Seed in Australia, and the Borderland in Scandinavia, which this year takes place on a UNESCO World Heritage site on the Danish coast.

That now-global Burning Man spirit is underpinned by ten principles:

• Radical inclusion.
• Gifting.
• Decommodification.
• Radical self-reliance.
• Radical self expression.
• Communal effort.
• Civic responsibility.
• Leaving no trace.
• Participation.
• Immediacy.

Out of that list, the "gifting" one is probably the most radical and—to someone who's never been to a Burn before—the hardest to get your head around.

Essentially: Money is worth nothing. Everyone gives one another everything, and it's all in the spirit of gifting, not trading. Drink, drugs, food, hugs: The idea is that giving and receiving all of those things will make you love everyone around you. And, from my experience, that idea usually works out. When I went to Nowhere, a Burn in the Spanish bushland between Barcelona and Zaragoza, I thought the gifting principle wasn't really going to to be adhered to: That it was a neat marketing ploy, but that there would be a black market of cigarettes and shit drugs. There wasn't.

The Burning Man site. Photo by Matt via

However, considering most non-Burn events need to actually make some money, it makes sense that it's the principles of radical inclusion, radical self-expression, and participation that we're seeing most replicated elsewhere.

"Festivals in general have become more participatory, immersive, and interactive, with more of an emphasis on the overall experience as the selling point," says Paul Reed of the Association of Independent Festivals. "Our audience research supports this: In 2014, 58 percent of people surveyed said that the main reason for purchasing a festival ticket was the overall atmosphere and experience—less than 7 percent said headline acts. This is part of a wider cultural shift outside of just music festivals, with film events like Secret Cinema and theater production companies like Punchdrunk offering a sense of exploration and unpredictability."

Festivals offer the ultimate departure from reality, especially when they take place in a scorched desert, everyone's dressed like Mad Max characters, and people are literally handing you drugs for free.

Secret Garden Party. Photo by Angel Ganev via

Fellows, of Secret Garden Party, agrees that the immersive aspect of events inspired by Burning Man is a way of moving the festival game forward. "I think that one of the spaces that isn't so occupied by the bigger festivals with larger bands is the experiential," he says. "There is a desire to move from just being happy being a spectator to wanting more."

It's not enough to just be able to watch the action; you need to be the action—whether that means linking your nipple ring to someone else's and performing a tandem piece of interpretive dance, or just wearing a stupid outfit and getting your picture taken by a photographer there for that Sunday's supplement spreads.

Burning Man has been setting annual artistic themes since the 1990s—this year's is "Da Vinci's Workshop"—and, closer to home, Secret Garden Party and Bestival have followed tradition, applying a central theme each year that guides the respective festival's artistic direction and promotion. Last year, Rob Da Bank's Isle of Wight weekender asked attendees to come in outfits inspired by the Summer of Love; this year, it's the "Future".

I wonder if this focus on fancy dress has anything to do with the Instagram generation coming of age—the perfect opportunity for you and all your friends to dress up like Lichtenstein paintings and rack up those valuable likes. "Yeah, I reckon so," says Fellowes, whose SGP is following a futuristic "Gardeners Guide to the Galaxy" theme this year.

Jonathan Walsh from Shambhala—another festival that shares many Burning Man qualities—doesn't buy my theory. " all part of the participation, the alternate," he says, "leaving the grind behind and setting you free."

Walsh believes that more and more festivals are adopting the principles established by Burning Man because "a fulfilled, more purposeful existence is becoming more desirable in a world where people are realizing working harder and harder for greater accumulation isn't the answer."

Related: Watch 'Unicorns,' our documentary about a charismatic former-alcoholic named Shaft who has his life changed by Burning Man and realizes that he actually identifies as a unicorn.

One person who can certainly identify with this is Shofiqul Addin, a.k.a. Shaft, a.k.a. Shivacorn. You might recognize Shaft from the recent VICE documentary Unicorns, which documented the hedonistic micro-subculture he founded, where people who self-identify as unicorns cover themselves in glitter and sometimes have sex with each other.

Buoyed by his first trip to Burning Man in 2010, where he says he took acid and got "lost in the desert for three days," he came back, sold all his possessions—bar his bike, a bag of clothes, and a Mac (he works in advertising)—and started squatting. Over the next five years, he went to 25 Burns all over the world, and freely admits it totally changed his life.

"At Burning Man, I'm allowed to be myself, says Shaft. "It nurtures weirdos."

That sentiment nails the appeal of the culture of Burning Man, and explains why so many festivals—not just SGP or Shambhala, but also the likes of Boomtown, Rainbow Serpent in Australia, and Meadows in the Mountains in Bulgaria—have adopted those ideals of radical inclusion, radical self-expression, and participation.

The internet opens up the world to anyone in possession of it. Whatever you're into—doomcore, acting like a unicorn, rice cakes, whatever—the web means you can almost instantly find someone else who's into the same thing as you, and suddenly it's not so strange any longer. Our minds, generally, are more open, and people need arenas in which to explore and express this openness. And doing that in a desert or an open field, surrounded by likeminded people, beats doing it in your suburban bedroom.

The internet has also helped Burning Man grow, and one of the main challenges it now faces is retaining its original ideals while growing bigger. Spend any time on the message boards of the "Burner" community, and you'll see a vast mixture of opinions regarding whether or not the festival should move forward into a brave new world.

I ask a guy called Steve Outtrim, who runs the popular Burners site burners.me, what he thought about Burning Man's increasing popularity, and whether or not he thought its increased visibility in the media could threaten everything it has come to be.

"Burning Man has gone mainstream, just like the Grateful Dead did," he says. "They should go on tour, just like the Grateful Dead did. It's a hit—run with it. Why not?"

Follow David on Twitter.

On today's episode of Daily VICE, dancer Martina Heimann explains why she left Germany's ballet recitals to dive headfirst into New York City's breakdancing scene. Then we head to Queens with MUNCHIES to see the inner workings of a true family-run Italian deli.

Watch Daily VICE in the VICE channel on go90. Head to go90.com to learn more and download the app.

All photos by VICE

Mental health is so underfunded in the UK that pills can be used as the quick-fix option. In 2014/15, 57.8 million prescriptions for antidepressants or selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs) were filled out in England alone. You can wait months on a waiting list for cognitive behavioral therapy or to see a psychiatrist, and as you wait, medication is a lifeline. In addition to this mess, pharma giants have stopped looking for the "next Prozac," cutting funding into new treatments by 70 percent in the last decade. The bottom line is clear: SSRIs, with all their pros and cons, are here to stay.

Obviously nobody is suggesting coming off your medication, and for many cases of depression and anxiety, a course of SSRIs and/or CBT can be life-saving. For me, during a period of bad anxiety, when I was torn between the idea of going back on antidepressants or not, I began searching for some sort of alternative aid online and soon came across a video of Jim Carrey. Carrey has struggled with depression for the majority of his adult life; he's a classic case of the sad clown. "I take... supplements," he tells Larry King in the clip I found. "Vitamins?" asks King. Not quite, but not far off either. A natural substance called 5-HTP. "It's a wonderful thing," Carrey smiles. "It's amazing." His description of how 5-HTP worked made it sound like a super-drug, a cure-all. All it would take for me would be an anonymous trip to a health food store and 15 bucks. Like every other young person, I knew it as a quick fix for MDMA comedowns, but never considered buying it as a medication replacement. Obviously for severe depression and anxiety, a serious course of SSRIs or cognitive behavioral therapy would be more appropriate. But at this point, I was ready for something to ease the transition.

I bought 200 mg "double strength" tablets off Amazon. Immediately after taking them, I felt slightly better. After a week of taking one of these with my breakfast, I could easily get through a working day without being too panicked to concentrate on a screen. I still woke up with "the fear," but it was lessened. Better yet, there seemed to be no notable side effects. I started recommending it to all my friends with mild depression or anxiety. I was in love.

In humans, 5-HTP is the nutrient precursor to the neurotransmitter serotonin—widely known as the "happy neurotransmitter"—meaning 5-HTP converts directly into serotonin in the brain. As well as being in our bodies, it's found naturally in the seeds of a woody shrub native to West Africa. By taking it as a supplement, in theory, you will end up with more serotonin in your brain. Serotonin deficiency is linked to depression, anxiety, and a whole host of physical and mental ailments. Raising its levels seems to help brain cells send and receive chemical messages, which in turn boosts mood.

In reality, SSRIs and 5-HTP aren't so different. Both affect serotonin. SSRIs work by blocking serotonin from being reabsorbed by nerve cells so more serotonin is available to help brain cells work efficiently. As a doctor would later tell me, 5-HTP, on the other hand, "provides your body with the tools to make more serotonin, as opposed to antidepressants, which are just working with the serotonin that you have already."

"I used to have an inner voice that was male and used to bully me during PMT time. Noises seemed too loud, even like somebody eating a bag of crisps. Topping up with 5-HTP has stopped all this."

People are using 5-HTP for absolutely everything from sleep disorders to OCD symptoms. After asking people in mental health Facebook groups whether they used it and why, I was inundated with responses. Sach Tennant, from London, takes it for her premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD). "I only take it when I feel low, and it only takes one hour to feel calm," she told me. "This month, I only needed one to feel better. I don't get the zombie antidepressant feeling—you still have your emotions. Sleep is good on it. I used to have an inner voice that was male and used to bully me during PMT time. Noises seemed too loud, even like somebody eating a bag of chips. Topping up with 5-HTP has stopped all this."

James Bates* who recently started taking it for panic attacks, said, "A friend who had anxiety recommended 5-HTP to me. I used to take beta-blockers and Valium, but the doctors have gotten funny about giving them to me. I needed an alternative and didn't fancy getting back on Prozac. I've only been taking the supplements for a month, but so far, it's helped a lot. I've only had two panic attacks, whereas usually I'd have four or five."

There is one glaring problem, however: The supplements come with a disclaimer that recommends not taking them for more than three months. Most of the information out there on 5-HTP is anecdotal, and most of them are stories of it helping people, rather than hard facts about its scientific properties. I approached neurologists, psychologists, and experimental doctors about 5-HTP, and many responses were strange. Not many people were willing to speak about it, saying they weren't qualified or hadn't read the relevant material, but there isn't much material to speak of. The main source of legitimate scientific evidence came from the University of Maryland Medical Center website, which stated that 5-HTP may work as well as certain antidepressant drugs to treat people with mild-to-moderate depression. But all the studies that support that statement were done in the 1980s and 1990s. I wanted to know if 5-HTP was a realistic alternative to SSRIs. Could I stay on 5-HTP forever, basking in its natural glory?

Eventually, I found Dr. Kristaps Paddock, a naturopathic doctor and 5-HTP expert from Maryland in the US. He said one benefit 5-HTP has over SSRIs is that it kicks in quickly for those with anxiety and depression. "Serotonin has a short metabolic half-life, so it metabolizes very, very fast. It goes into the body and out at a great speed, unlike SSRIs, which take a while to take effect so a sufferer wouldn't be feeling good during that time, and in fact may be feeling more suicidal. SSRIs also then have to be weaned off slowly, whereas you can stop taking 5-HTP instantly." Another bonus, of course, is that it's natural rather than synthetic. "If you're seriously considering the supplement, you have to weigh the positives and negatives against each other. The toxicity with 5-HTP is lower than that of SSRIs, since it's natural. Also, because it's metabolized much quicker, it'd get out of your system more quickly if there were any problems. On the other hand, the research basis for 5-HTP is dramatically lower, so it's important to think of that."

There are a number of professionals out there who support its use. Dr. Nicole Rush, a neuropathic doctor based in Ontario, Canada, believes it should and could be a legitimate alternative to SSRIs in the future. "When used safely and at an adequate dose, it has promise for supporting mild to moderate depression, and doesn't carry the side effects."

Dr. Sohère Roked is a GP in the UK with a specialist interest in integrative medicine. She prescribes 5-HTP to patients with anxiety and depression, alongside vitamins and other natural supplements, and sees no problem with it being used for mild conditions. "With the patients I see, generally I've seen good results with it. Antidepressants do work for some people, so I'm not against them completely, but others don't want to go down that path straight away. This gives them another option."

But what about the three-month warning? Rush, while an advocate for the supplement, sees it as a short-term solution, and not something to rely on long-term, for good reason. "Technically taking 5-HTP alone can deplete important brain chemicals such as dopamine and adrenaline. While 5-HTP is aimed at increasing the amount of serotonin in the body, dopamine and adrenaline are also important for positive mental health states. In order to prevent the depletion of important brain chemicals, taking 5-HTP would need to be balanced with amino acids that support the production of dopamine and adrenaline." That's L-tyrosine, which you eat in soy, chicken, and beef, and can also be found in health food shops as a supplement.

The reality is that people are always going to self-medicate. Boots, Amazon, and H&B all sell 5-HTP with no enforced age limit, and in theory you could keep buying it and taking it for as long as you like.

Even if you did look after yourself adequately and monitor the amount of 5-HTP you were taking, it doesn't appear to be a permanent or lasting solution. A couple of the doctors talked about something that comes up time and time again with long-term SSRI use: a dissipating effect, meaning the pills can feel less and less effective over time. It seems that people may have the same problem with 5-HTP. "If you push on your biochemistry hard enough, it may downregulate," Paddock explained. "If you're taking SSRIs your body may downregulate the amount of serotonin it puts out, so you get waning effects over time. It's similar with 5-HTP. There may be a certain level of serotonin your body is keeping you at, and if you raise it or push it, your body then may say, 'OK, we're above the set point, let's then raise that point again.'"

Though it may be unlikely to form part of any official psychiatric program in the UK, Phil Cowen, professor of psychopharmacology at Oxford, admitted that there are various groups for whom it could be helpful. "About half of people with severe depression never see a doctor anyway, so it's reasonable to think it's fine for them to treat themselves with something like a supplement. Perhaps if you had mild symptoms, a smaller dose would be helpful. I'd also prefer to prescribe things like exercise or computer-based CBT if it's that stage, though. But depression and anxiety is very different between people. That's important to keep in mind. No treatment is the same for anyone."

The reality is that people are always going to self-medicate. CVS, Amazon, and Whole Foods all sell 5-HTP, and in theory, you could keep buying it and taking it for as long as you like. But it's important to know the facts. It shouldn't be used in conjunction with an SSRI, for example. In that situation, if the body is preventing serotonin breakdown while also getting extra serotonin, it will lead to seriously unhealthy levels of serotonin activity.

Until there are more clinical studies, I'll probably stay on 5-HTP along with Jim Carrey, albeit carefully, until I find better long-term solutions. But perhaps it isn't the wonder drug I thought it was. As usual, if something seems too good to be true, it always fucking is.

*Name has been changed at the request of the subject, who asked to remain anonymous.

Follow Hannah Ewens on Twitter.

If you are concerned about your mental health or that of someone you know, visit the Mental Health America website.