The Rhineland region of Germany is a major coal mining hub and is responsible for more carbon dioxide emissions than anywhere else in Europe. As a result, the area has gained the attention of climate activists, who recently staged the largest protest against coal extraction in the country's history.

In this episode of VICE INTL, VICE Germany heads to the Rhineland to find out why the world is still so dependent on the dirtiest form of energy. While there, the correspondents speak with residents, coal workers, and environmentalists about the country's climate goals, the benefits of alternative energy sources, and if we really can have a future without coal.

Black Moon

Japanese photographer Taku Onoda moved to New York in the late 90s, which seems like a long time ago now. The iconic Limelight club was still open; Wu-Tang Forever had just dropped. Onoda's gritty street style is a perfect complement to the raw, lyrical records coming out of the five boroughs at the time.

When I got these outtakes in my inbox, I was excited to hear where it all started, so I asked a couple questions about the collection of photographs he calls Let's Not Think About Tomorrow.
—Elizabeth Renstrom, VICE Photo Editor

VICE: How did you get involved in the hip-hop community?
Taku Onoda: I've been a longtime hip-hop fan and used to spin records. I would photograph shows that I went to and people that I met, and I ended up meeting people in the industry and was asked to do some press shots.

How did you get access?
I shot for American and French publications. Some of these are outtakes from my assignments. I became friends with some of my subjects, and they became a part of my life.

What photographers were you looking at back then versus now?
Back then, I liked Larry Clark and William Klien's street photographs, and these days, I like more conceptual photographers like Paul Graham and Vik Muniz.

What was the craziest show you saw?
In '99 or '00, Gang Starr and M.O.P at Limelight. It was like 100 degrees in there, but the show was epic.

What are you shooting these days?
Besides commercial assignments, my personal work is about abstraction. I put out a book called Nebulous in 2014, still graphic and strong and in your face.

All photographs taken by Taku Onoda. You can follow his work here.

Translation: Girls, what do you offer? It's a new TV stand. I live near Tlalpan, close to Xola subway station.

This article originally appeared on VICE Mexico.

Alejandra* is not a sex worker. She doesn't have sex with strangers in exchange for money, and she doesn't stand on a street corner at night waiting for clients. But she did recently spend half an hour having sex in exchange for free internet. The thing is, her salary doesn't cover certain things she wants—like a marble coffee table, bottles of whiskey, a washing machine, or WiFi. Alejandra also loves having sex—as long as she gets to choose her partner, of course. She, and a growing number of Mexicans, combine the two by trading goods and services for sex.

Screenshot via ofrezcoacambio.com.

Translation: I fix stuff in exchange for sex. I can fix electric equipment, clear computers from viruses and spyware, and help with the set up, etc.
For: sex. I fix your stuff in exchange for sex without commitment.
Exchange rate: electronics and informatics

Bartering might be an ancient form of transaction predating the concept of money, but these days, if you want a driving lesson from someone in exchange for half an hour with your body, you can just go online. It's something that happens everywhere in the world, but it is a more common occurrence in developing countries—like my home country of Mexico.

I wanted to know what is being bartered for what exactly, and what kind of people are into it, so using the name "Pancho" I created a fake account on Mexican Craigslist pages, Facebook, and the Spanish bartering website ofrezcoacambio.com. Craigslist is not a particularly wild place as far as sex bartering websites go—but during my research, I did come across a woman who wanted to exchange sex for a conversation about literature. She described herself as a "lonely soul who won't look down on other people" and "a writer struggling to make a name for herself." Her ad wasn't explicitly bartering sex, but it was featured on the personal section of Craigslist, just under the "Woman Looking for Man" and "Casual Encounters" tabs.

Screenshot via ofrezcoacambio.com.

Translation: Free!!! Unemployed gardener... Free!! Gardening for sex. If you are discreet, contact me......gardener offering his services to women between 18 and 50 years old in exchange for sex. I can clean your garden and prune your trees for free, barter, economic aid, whatever you wanna call it. Discretion. Age: 40

The second most important barter network in Mexico is ofrezcoacambio.com. Even if most of its users seem to be from Spain, there is no shortage of Mexican ads. Here, you will mostly find horny gardeners, computer nerds, and plumbers offering to fix your garden, your tablet, or your pipes in exchange for a little affection. You'll find them simply by typing the word "sex" in the search bar.

But the best place to get something in exchange for sex in Mexico is Facebook. A couple of years ago, a guy named Alex* created a closed group for that purpose. The description reads: "NO MONEY... only stuff or services for sex. Anyone offering to pay with money will be banned. We're nice, respectful people. It's up to each member to decide whether the deal is fair or not, and if he or she is willing to accept it. No inbox stalking! If you do that, you will be deleted and banned from the group. People under 18 are not allowed. If you find a member who is not serious or fails to pay, please report him/her."

This is where I met Alejandra, a 26-year-old girl whose apartment is filled with stuff she got in exchange for sex, from her bed to the WiFi she's connected to while chatting with me. A young man was able to hack her neighbor's network and charged her for 30 minutes of sex in return. "I don't consider my self a sex worker. I don't charge. People just give me stuff for sleeping with whomever I want," she messaged me.

My interaction with the group was cut off when one of the members found out my profile was fake and decided to ban me, only three days after I was accepted.

Translation: I offer half an hour for any service.

Most people who offer sex for services in Mexico are in a deeply vulnerable situation. Many women living in extreme poverty do it to cover their basic needs, according to a paper published by the National Institute of Public Health, titled "Compensated Sex: A practice at the heart of young Mexican women's vulnerabilities (STI/HIV/AIDS)."

"In the study conducted in the state of Guadalajara, a focus group noted the following situations in which sex for services occurred: 'young, heterosexual men having sex with men in exchange for gifts,' 'unpaid prostitutes—young women having sex in exchange for goods or services,' or 'young women willing to have sex in exchange for a dose of any drug,'" reads the report.

Another factor that adds to the vulnerability of the men and women who offer sex on these terms is the social stigma. "Culturally, it's quite hard for young women in Mexico to accept they had sex outside the traditional framework, let alone to accept —even for themselves— that they had sex in exchange for something. They risk the social stigma from they outside world, like being called 'gold diggers' or 'whores'—two terms used by the young men within our focus groups," the report reads.

In one interview cited by the report, a woman says: "There's always the fear of being left with nothing. There aren't many jobs at all, and the ones that are there are usually pretty terrible. So when an opportunity comes, sometimes you just have to accept it ."

The line between barter sex as a coercive and a noncoercive act is thin. Most studies into sex transactions without a monetary exchange show that the act itself is deeply rooted in the combination of poverty, Western consumerism, and the glaring economic gap between men and women.

"Internet service costs at least $28, and this guy hacked a password for me so I could use my neighbor's WiFi in exchange for sex. It's the best investment I've made in my life," says Alejandra.

*Names have been changed.

Follow Luis Chaparro on Twitter.

Legendary Grammy Award–winning producer Sir George Martin—the "fifth Beatle" who helped sculpt four guys from Liverpool into the fucking Beatles—has died of natural causes at the age of 90.

Martin produced the majority of the Beatles' music, famously experimenting with them in the studio and bringing his great eye for arranging to their songs. Throughout his career, Martin produced 30 number-one hit singles in the UK and 23 in the United States, including Elton John's "Candle in the Wind," and worked with big names like Kate Bush, Cheap Trick, and America.

Martin was nominated for an Oscar for his score in A Hard Day's Night, was knighted in 1996, and joined the American Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1999.

Both surviving Beatles took to the internet to express their sadness for the loss of their long-time collaborator and friend. Late Tuesday night, Ringo Starr tweeted a confirmation of Martin's death and thanked him for all his "love and kindness."

Paul McCartney paid tribute to Martin and his influence on the Beatles on his website, saying, " was a true gentleman and like a second father to me. He guided the career of the Beatles with such skill and good humor that he became a true friend to me and my family.

"If anyone earned the title of the fifth Beatle, it was George," he wrote.

Thumbnail image via WikiCommons

All photos by the author

It's 8 PM on a Saturday near the end of February. It's cool out, but not cold. I'm standing outside Blythwood Baptist Church with a hot cup of coffee in my hand, courtesy of the Out of the Cold (OOTC) shelter program running in the basement below. To my right, half-illuminated by a dirty industrial light bolted to the building, a cloud of cigarette smoke escapes from Brian DuBourdieu's lips. He had begun telling me about the time someone dropped him off at this same church a few years ago—drunk, homeless, and nearly frozen.

"They found me in a ditch," he tells me while packing away his carton of discount cigarettes. DuBourdieu, 59, says he uses the term "they" because he never actually met the people who saved him five years ago. He only knows some vague details from his own recollection and what his friends have told him: One night in the winter of 2010, people in a vehicle found him passed out in a snowy ditch. The occupants picked him up, tossed him in the car, brought him to the church, and left before he woke up. I asked him if it was strange that people who saved his life didn't want to meet him. Unfazed, he laughed at the idea.

"They were taking a huge risk taking me in with them. They didn't know me. I could have been anybody. I could have been somebody who might've attacked them for being woken up like that. It was just a very nice thing to do, and a very rare thing to do."

DuBourdieu was born in Newfoundland and grew up like many people do—erratically and full of angst. Although he made it through high school and into a solid university program, he flunked out in his second year while battling the bottle. His alcoholism would plague him for years to come as he had trouble finding a steady job in a struggling Newfoundland economy. Wanting to get away and get paid, he followed in his father's footsteps and joined the Canadian Navy. He stayed there until the 80s before joining the Canadian Coast Guard. Cheap booze and a hard drinking culture came with the job.

In the 90s, DuBourdieu moved to Toronto, where he framed and roofed houses. A few years in, he suffered a knee injury on the job that made it tough for him to keep up. All the while, the seduction of liquor pulled him further away from work and deeper into a depressive rut. Before long, things had fallen apart. DuBourdieu was homeless, and he'd stay like that for over a decade. Performing the daily grind of hopping from shelter to shelter, staying in hostels when he could afford it, and getting drunk to pass the time when he couldn't.

Nowadays, DuBourdieu works as a volunteer with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP). After finding a place in veterans' housing around four years ago, he's cleaned up his life. He spends much of his time now working within outreach community and interacting with the homeless. While he knows firsthand how helpful the system can be, he's also aware that—as it is now—the need for affordable housing in Toronto is at a critical mass.

"They wouldn't do this to cats and dogs," DuBourdieu tells me, waving in the direction of the dozens of beds crammed beside each other in Blythwood's basement. "We need housing. Right now, not later. This is not humane by any stretch of the imagination."

According to a recent report from OCAP, there are currently more than 95,000 spots on the waitlist for affordable housing in Toronto. An astounding number by itself, the average wait time before getting into a home is similarly shocking: five years for those who are homeless or struggling with mental illness, and ten years for those who aren't.

There are roughly 5,200 people who are homeless in Toronto, although that doesn't mean all of them are on the street. Many have found some sort of temporary emergency housing through the city's Streets to Homes program, while others may crash at friend's apartment or a family member's place. It's not living like most of us do, but they have a home.

Of the few hundred or so who roam the streets every night, however, most rely partly or entirely on private nonprofits like OOTC—a program that is run by a rotating collective of the city's churches. With that said, charity only goes so far: According to OCAP, around 81 percent of Toronto's homeless will be denied shelter at OOTC centers due to overcrowding, leaving most of them to spend their night in the streets.

"Justice would be the opening of more real shelters and a phasing out of the Out of the Cold program with real shelters. Real shelters would be properly staffed, accessible, with a harm-reduction approach, and be culturally sensitive," Cathy Crowe, a Ryerson University professor and outreach worker, told me when asked about the state of the shelter system.

To Crowe—who's been a prolific figure in Toronto's at-risk community for two decades—homelessness in Toronto is at a crisis level. Crowe's thesis is clear: Current housing is in Toronto is unaffordable, and the Toronto Community Housing program is billions of dollars behind in repairs. The catalyst, in her mind, was the end of the National Affordable Housing Program (axed in 1993 by the Chretien government), but she has hope the Trudeau government will revive it in the face of a national housing crisis.

DuBourdieu has seen the change firsthand. As we left Blythwood, he told me about the cheap hostels and homeless-friendly hotels that populated downtown before gentrification hit the city in places like Parkdale, Kensington Market, and Queen Street East. Now, as an older man, DuBourdieu says that "he wouldn't dare" sleep in one of the city's hostels due to the amount of money they cost when compared to the amount of danger they pose.

"I can't defend myself like I used to be," he tells me, opening his palms to show the tough creases that have formed across them. "If I were younger, I'd take the risk of getting beat up or robbed. Why bother nowadays?"

DuBourdieu and I went down to Margaret's that night, one of the two warming centers in the city. Margaret's sits on the corner of Dundas and Sherbourne—a notoriously low-income, crime ridden section of the city and a place that's easily forgotten. Being how mild the weather was, we weren't expecting much of a crowd. DuBourdieu told me most people would be taking advantage of the break in cold by using it to panhandle into the early part of the next day.

"Of course, some people just like a good place to take a nap," he told me as we opened the wooden doors to the church Margaret's is housed in. Before they closed, a woman outside, jittering from the buzz of a cigarette, laughed at our conversation.

"Just wait until it's cold," she said.

Thanks to protests last year after two men died by freezing to death, places like Margaret's—normally only open when extreme cold weather alerts are put into effect—are now open January through February. On March 1, the very day warming centers were set to close for the season, a snow storm rolled through Toronto. This time, without DuBourdieu, I marched down Dundas's frozen corridor. High winds and an unending hail of snow blanketed everything in sight. Yet when I arrived at the warming center, it was emptier than before.

"Most people don't even know it's open," one man outside told me. "They'll probably be pissed when they find out they could have stayed here for the night."

Miscommunication in the streets is frequent, and it's one of things DuBourdieu says is the most maddening part of being homeless. The cycle of waking up every day, taking the single transit token rationed out alongside breakfast at programs like OOTC, heading to the next shelter, sleeping (most of the times in the streets), and doing it all over again becomes routine. But when that routine becomes interrupted—either by personal issues or by losing track of who will be where and what center is open that night—the process becomes abrasive.

"It's the kind of thing that will drive you to drink, to smoke, to do other . There is no hope for many people, no end. It's just one place to the next, the same goddamn routine every single day. You have to have a place where you can just have peace and quiet and sleep without worrying about tomorrow. A lot of these people don't have that, and it's so, so wrong."

That's what DuBourdieu told me the day after the storm. As we sat on the steps of Margaret's with our legs outstretched in the sun, two men panhandled on the corner. They asked some people passing by for some change, each of them extending a ballcap clutched in their hands. Most declined. The men said thank you anyway. Drifting between our conversation and watching the men, DuBourdieu took deep drags from his cigarette and grimaced at the sight. The sun may have rose and the snow may have melted, but this situation was bigger than one night in the cold.

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter.

An eight-second video was released last week showing a Baltimore school police officer attacking an unarmed student while another cop stood by and watched. The clip went viral and spurred national outrage, as well as calls for a federal investigation. The two officers, Anthony Spence and Saverna Bias, turned themselves in Tuesday night to face second-degree assault and misconduct in office charges—Spence is also charged with second-degree child abuse—and had posted bail by early Wednesday. But with criminal trials still pending for the six cops charged over the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray last year, the footage has stoked an already strained conversation around policing in Baltimore.

After the clip's release, politicians and advocates quickly began to criticize the city's ill-defined school police policies, pointing out that there are no public arrest statistics, including who gets busted, why, and whether those incidents might have been handled outside the criminal justice system. There's also little or no oversight of the school police budget and officers' use of force. All of which is especially alarming given that policing aside, Maryland actually has some of the most progressive school discipline policies in the country—at least on paper.

Still, a lack of leadership and a persistent culture of criminalization within public schools have the city suspending, expelling, and arresting students too often—and in discriminatory fashion.

Baltimore's unique place in America's school discipline hierarchy emerged over the past decade. In 2004, the city's school issued more than 26,000 suspensions in a school district of 88,000. Alarmed city advocates began speaking out, forming networks to push for disciplinary alternatives, and fighting for district leaders to reckon with the glaring suspension data. Research has long shown that excessive suspensions and expulsions are tied to higher rates of school absence, school dropouts, and academic failure. Suspended students often sit around at home, or in low-quality alternative programs, falling further behind on their studies. There's also evidence that school suspensions lead to higher rates of arrest and juvenile detentions, fueling what is commonly referred to as the "school to prison pipeline."

In 2007, Baltimore hired a new school CEO, Andres Alonso, who began overhauling the district's school discipline policies. He worked to scale back the scope of offenses that could warrant an out-of-school suspension, and he expanded the number of restorative alternatives to keep kids in class and on top of their school work.

The results were dramatic. During the 2009–2010 school year, the district issued fewer than 10,000 suspensions, a decrease of more than 50 percent from 2004. The suspensions were also significantly shorter, and graduation rates went up, particularly for young black men.

"One of the things that really sets us apart from other school districts is that students can no longer be suspended for low-level and ambiguous infractions, such as disrespect," explained Karen Webber, director of the Education and Youth Development at the Open Society Institute-Baltimore, a local think tank and advocacy group. "Before, a child might say something edgy, and if an administrator didn't appreciate what was said or how it was stated, that child could be sent home for five days."

Advocates around the state began to push for similar reforms, and in 2014, the State Board of Education approved new regulations to reduce the numbers of suspensions and expulsions across Maryland. The new policies encouraged teachers and principals to keep students in the classroom whenever possible and to promote alternative disciplinary measures. And the feds took notice: In light of Baltimore's substantial drop in suspensions, and the statewide work done around discipline reform, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Attorney General Eric Holder came to Baltimore in 2014 to unveil the first set of national school discipline guidelines.

But even as suspensions have plummeted, critics point to a series of disturbing school police scandals and argue that Baltimore still hasn't implemented many of the progressive policies passed statewide two years ago. The district hired a new CEO that year, Dr. Gregory Thornton, who has made less of a fuss about school discipline reform.

"You can have the most promising policies on the books, but rules are only as good as their implementation," said Monique Dixon, deputy director of policy at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

"While there's been great work done to write these policies, those changes have not been filtered down to the staff level—nobody has been retrained," adds Jenny Egan, a juvenile public defender in Baltimore.

For example, some suspended Baltimore students languish for months outside of school just because the district failed to make a final decision about their punishment. Neeta Pal, a legal fellow at the Maryland public defender's office, says that when the district leaves students in this bureaucratic limbo—indefinitely suspended—it violates both state law and the US Constitution.

One such student was 15-year-old Kuran Johnson, a ninth grader with a disability who was suspended this past October. Johnson spent four months in an alternative program, and he was only allowed to return back to a traditional public school a few weeks ago after Nicole Joseph, an attorney with the Maryland Disability Law Center, threatened to sue. "This is their way to get rid of kids," Sabrina Newby, Johnson's grandmother, told me over the phone. "They feel these kids are so easy to suspend, and then they wonder why kids end up dropping out or wind up in juvenile facilities."

Following the standoff between students and police back during the April 2015 Freddie Gray protests, Karl Perry, a Baltimore high school principal, penned a memo in which he attributed the local uprising in part to their "soft code of conduct." He promised a "return to zero-tolerance enforcement," and within two months, he was hired to be the district's chief supports officer—overseeing, among other things, suspensions and school police.

Joseph wrote an op-ed in the Baltimore Sun criticizing Perry's remarks, arguing that zero-tolerance policies "feed the school-to-prison pipeline" and increase the likelihood at-risk students will be excluded from school. She called for reforms like increasing the number of mental health providers, promoting positive behavior interventions, and increasing engaging curriculum and job skills training.

She pointed out that in Baltimore, despite all the changes and national attention, black students and those with disabilities are still suspended at higher rates than the general student population.

"Yes, suspension numbers have gone down, in almost every district across the state, but the disproportionately is not going down," Joseph said in an interview. "Both by race, and also for students with disabilities, these minority groups are not experiencing the same reduction in harsh discipline that non-disabled and white kids are."

Officials with the Baltimore city public schools did not return repeated requests for comment on Perry's remarks, on students left in suspension limbo, and on whether the district feels it has adequately implemented the state's discipline regulations. Meanwhile, critics see the suspensions, expulsions, arrests and abuse cases as part of the same problem—a school culture that tries to kick students out rather than engage them where they are, as they are.

"We know so many of our kids have serious challenges, and one of the goals of our schools should be to address them, to help them, and not to punish them," Egan said. "We have to change the culture so that schools actually take kids as they come. We can't just pass the buck."

Follow Rachel M. Cohen on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Quinn Dombrowski

Tanya Adrusieczko, a former master's student at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, hoped to apply for the a scholarship to attend the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Her grades were superb, and she'd already been admitted to the renowned school. But she lacked one significant criteria to be eligible for the Benjamin J. Sanderson award: She didn't have a dick.

"Scholarships should be considering how systemic oppression operates in university. My objection with the Sanderson is that it continues to privilege men in a field where feminist analysis has long been marginalized, and masculine political behavior is treated as universal."

Angela Gallo during labor. Photo courtesy of Lacey Barratt Photography

Ask most women about their birthing stories, and sexual pleasure doesn't come into play. Childbirth is messy, painful, and decidedly unsexy. So when Angela Gallo, a Melbourne-based doula and birth photographer, wrote a blog post extolling the benefits of touching herself during labor, the reactions were pretty predictable: Tabloid articles soon proliferated, followed by shocked and appalled commenters.

Gallo, for her part, said she's just grateful to have delivered her second child on her own terms—and touching herself was just one piece of the puzzle.

"In my first birth, I didn't understand my body on a physiological level, and that's where I really sabotaged myself," she told me. She described her first hospital birth as a "cascade of interventions," beginning with 20 hours of labor, followed by contraction-inducing Pitocin and an epidural, then three hours of fruitless pushing that culminated in a vacuum-assisted delivery of a healthy baby girl.

For her second birth, she opted to do the bulk of laboring at home, assisted by her husband and a doula.

"As I neared transition, near the end of labor, I was feeling very vulnerable and stressed-out; I went into the shower to find some relief, and my husband asked if I would like to have sex. I said no, but it reminded me I could self-stimulate," she told me. "The second I started using clitoral stimulation, the resting period between contractions was more pleasurable and I could use more force to meet the climax of the contractions." Gallo described the sensation as "taking the edge off" the pain more than sexual gratification.

"The hormones in birth and sex are identical." —Kate Dimpfl

Beyond conception, the connection between sex and birth is rarely discussed or even validated. What most of us know about giving birth is that it's usually a) painful and b) humiliating (see: spontaneous bowel evacuation). Simply put, in the United States, where nearly 99 percent of births take place in a hospital or clinical setting, there's no space for sexuality in the delivery room.

And yet, "what gets the baby in gets the baby out" has become a growing refrain espoused by people like Kate Dimpfl, founder of Holistic Childbirth.

"The hormones in birth and sex are identical," explained Dimpfl in her TEDx talk, "We Must Put the Sex Back into Birth," pointing to the hormone oxytocin, which was literally named after the Greek term for "swift birth." Oxytocin is released during sexual arousal and orgasm, but also during childbirth, skin-to-skin contact with a newborn, and breast-feeding. With oxytocin comes a rise of endorphins, which can naturally reduce pain.

Synthetic drugs—like pitocin, the drug most commonly administered in hospitals to speed up labor—mimic oxytocin, creating stronger, more frequent contractions than the natural hormone, often leading to a numbing epidural. As adrenaline increases during labor, it can inhibit oxytocin production and redirect blood flow away from the uterus—essentially preparing your body for "fight or flight" and ultimately stalling labor. This may lead to assisted delivery using tools like a vacuum or forceps, or an emergency Cesarean section.

"Almost all women are underserved when it comes to birth because we're pretty ignorant about our own bodies," Dimpfl told me. "Birth is simply your body recycling systems and putting them in place to push out a baby."

Watch: The United States is failing its mothers by not providing paid maternity leave. Broadly travels to Sweden, where parents get 480 days of paid leave, to investigate a better system.

So can bringing sexuality into the process make childbirth pleasurable instead of painful? Maybe not, but there's plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest it's possible.

"I had sex and self-stimulated in labor, and I orgasmed," said Laura Kaplan Shanley, author of Unassisted Childbirth. "As we free ourselves from the shame surrounding birth and embrace our sexuality, our births go better and are safer."

Shanley's website is full of stories like this—women kissing their partners by candlelight, having leisurely sexual encounters, and orgasming in the birthing tub at home. And while you'll be hard-pressed to find many experts who support unassisted births—as in, at home, without the presence of a physician or midwife—the core of Shanley's philosophy stems from a concept that has existed for millennia but has been diminished in the past century: The majority of births are "normal" and don't require medical intervention.

Proponents of natural birth like Ina May Gaskin, often called "the mother of modern midwifery," aim to take the fear out of childbirth, promote low-intervention births, and address the pain of labor through techniques like breath, kissing, massage, nipple stimulation, and other types of touch.

Dimpfl acknowledged long-accepted facts about using sexuality as a childbirth tool—for example, sex itself can produce a surge of oxytocin and semen can actually soften the cervix. But she also stressed the importance of bringing sexuality into the birthing process for more pervasive reasons: "If we look at birth as a sexual act, a care provider who is invited into that space is going to behave differently, such as asking permission to touch."

For more women in a hospital childbirth setting, things like privacy and consent are no longer a factor after your obstetrician checks your cervix the millionth time or decides it's time to "sweep" the membrane of your amniotic sac to jumpstart labor.

Gallo added that it's "very easy to fall into a system," comparing her first "highly medicalized" birth to her second. "I feel if you understand where your body is coming from, you're much more likely to have a great experience and outcome."

By not viewing childbirth as a part of the sexual spectrum in which women have agency over their own bodies, Dimpfl argued, the entire process is being taken out of their hands. "A third of the nation reports having had a traumatic birth experience," she said. "To ignore the sexuality creates a tremendous amount of harm for women."

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Watch the trailer for the upcoming series 'HUANG'S WORLD' above

After two long painstaking years traveling the globe, we're back you fucking mouth breathers! Sorry for the wait, but making a TV show isn't as easy as we thought it would be. It's not actually just a really long YouTube video with more white people and Bosley commercials. No, TV is much more than that. There are now six acts to the show, 45 minutes to fill, and industry standards and practices to comply with. We had to embrace all of these things as well as our shiny new cameras and wardrobe budget, which I spent primarily on Iceberg cut-off tees.

The show launches on VICELAND on April 28 at 10 PM, and every Thursday, starting March 17, we're going to be giving you a first look through deleted scenes and blooper reels. These are scenes that didn't make the final cut due to time, themes, or consistency of storytelling. Think of them as tapas... actually, I fucking hate tapas. DON'T THINK ABOUT TAPAS. NEVER EVEN MENTION TAPAS.

Think of the deleted scenes and bloopers as foreplay or crab rangoon or anything that signifies that something bigger and greater and fully baked is coming. Think of it like this: We're running to your apartment together up five flights of stairs, and each flight is basically a deleted scene, and then on April 28, we're going to run into your apartment and take a big hot dump on your television with the world premiere of HUANG'S WORLD ON VICELAND in Jamaica!!! JAH BLESS!

But for real, we dug deeper and peeled back more layers than we ever have this season. We explored neocolonialism and the International Monetary Fund through jerk chicken and Pan-African food in Jamaica. We turned the tables on cultural appropriation when we ate at a Chinese gastropub called Deli Burger. In Sicily, we explored the North African origins of arancini and identified the inconsistencies of the far right's anti-immigration stance in the country. Also, we almost crashed into a power line flying around in a hot air balloon in Cappadocia.

The girls and guys who work on this show gave up their lives for two years, missing holidays and family milestones to dedicate every second of their lives on the road not just to this show, but to the ideas and perspectives of the people we met. There's a lot that we don't understand out there; we're just beginning to eat our way through it. SO FUCK WITH US. FUCK WITH HUANG'S WORLD.

Photos by Johnson Crosby and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office

Currently, the EU referendum debate looks more like a dick swinging contest than the measured, grown-up discussion it's supposed to be. David Cameron and London Mayor Boris Johnson are in the midst of a civil war. Conservative Iain Duncan Smith, the real firecracker in the debate, has called Cameron "desperate" and accused the government's "In" campaign of being a load of "spin and smear" tactics. On the other side, in the political bromance of the year, Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party, and George Galloway have put aside their political differences to talk on platforms together.

It seemed that, until the queen was outed as an "outer" by theSun (an accusation that's since been denied), no high profile women had expressed any opinion on the subject whatsoever. Former T4 presenter June Sarpong has been campaigning for women to speak up through the pressure group Women In, and Conservative MP Priti Patel has also been vocal, but as Trades Union Congress General Secretary Frances O'Grady pointed out, "This referendum debate has thus far been dominated by men in suits. We've not heard from ordinary workers—and we've barely heard from any women at all."

We decided to take to the streets on Tuesday—International Women's Day—to ask women if they thought the EU debate really is just an assortment of angry men shouting at each other.

Isabel, 25, Market Researcher

VICE: Do you think the debate is just a load of angry men shouting?
Isabel: That's not something that I've noticed, but thinking through the key players in the debate, I can't think of a high profile woman in either camp.

Should there be more women voicing their opinions in the EU debate?
I think in general there should be more women in political debate, but I don't think the EU debate is something where it's particularly necessary to have a woman's opinion—you just need an informed opinion, regardless of gender.

Laila, 41, PHD Student

Do you think the media coverage of the EU referendum has been especially male-dominated?
Laila: It's ironic, because before I came to the UK from Egypt, there was always this media propaganda that women in the Middle East don't participate in politics and decision-making, but when I came here, I noticed the same thing. The strong representation of women who I imagined within the political system here doesn't exist. I came here to find out that women are also not as well paid as men and that the top management positions are still male-dominated.

If there were more female politicians in the EU debate, would you feel more involved in the discussion?
Yes, I think so, because women are more involved in the details of everyday life, like bringing up kids, studying, and also working a job. In that sense, women can add perspective at least to the decision. It doesn't help to only have men in white collars and suits making decisions for the average person on the street.

Lucy, 23, model

Do you think there's been an equal amount of male and female voices in the political debate so far?
Lucy: I've picked up on the fact the only politicians voicing their opinions are men. Women should speak up more on the issue and get more involved.

Would you like there to be more female voices included in the EU debate?
Yeah, because I think women don't bullshit as much. Right now in politics, things aren't said the way they should be. The kind of rhetoric politicians are using is not attracting the right crowd. It's all got a bit childish, and there's a lack of respect for one another. If women were more vocal, the approach and the rhetoric used would improve.

Antonia, 24, project manager

Do you think the majority of the public are informed about the EU referendum?
Antonia: No. My sister is backing Boris because of the political figure that he is—she likes his personality. I think a lot of other people will be picking a side by the same merit, and I'm not sure that's the way to go. The media today is going to point you in one direction, and if you don't know where to look, you will get fed information that isn't necessarily true.

Is the EU debate just a lot of angry men shouting?
From what I've seen on the news, it is.

Would you be more likely to feel involved in the debate if more women were included in the discussion?
No, I'm not biased in that way, but it would be nice to have more balanced arguments in general, not just on the topic of the EU.

Alice, 28, Receptionist

Do you think the debate so far has just been an assortment of shouty, angry men?
Alice: Thinking of the main players, I think politics in general feels like a lot of shouty, angry men.

Would the debate be more appealing to you if it included more female voices?
No. I would be more interested in hearing people I had more in common with in terms of age range or economic background—not necessarily sex. In terms of who's got the biggest opinions and shouting the loudest, it seems like I can only hear white, middle-class men.

Maria, 48, CEO

Have you been keeping up with the EU referendum debate?
Maria: Yes, because in my line of work, I'm very concerned about workers' rights and their impact on people in the UK.

Do you think the debate so far is just an assortment of angry men shouting?
Being on public transport, you constantly see men's faces next to a headline on the EU. But I tend not to look at the papers. All my information comes from the NGO sector, such as War on Want and 38 degrees. Still, it makes no difference whether you are in the Commons or part of an NGO—the debate is still male-dominated.

Do you think there should be more women speaking up in the EU debate?
I'm very lucky because I work in a very female-dominated environment, so I'm surrounded by opinionated women. The EU debate is concerned with workers' rights and how people are treated—issues that directly affect women. For example, at the moment, the EU governs policies on maternity leave. So it's crucial that women as well as men are involved in the debate.

Follow Amelia on Twitter.

Illustration via 'This Is How You Dominate Men with Money'

Spend any time reading about sex online, and you'll come across Girl on the Net. Every month, 100,000 people visit her blog for takes on topics like strap-on double-penetration; why tall women won't date short men; the idea of porn addiction; first time anal sex; fashion in tits; and knife play.

GOTN has built her career around telling stories about the many varied ways in which humans can fuck, but as her anonymous online persona grew, life changed behind the scenes. She fell in love, suffered a mental health breakdown, and had to re-examine who she really was, behind the mask of GOTN.

It's this side of life that GOTN explores in her new book, How a Bad Girl Fell in Love. We caught up for a chat.

VICE: A strong theme in your writing is your rebuttal of society's ideas about how sexuality is gendered—the idea that men like sex and women like cuddles, or that enjoying sex makes you a slut. Lots of these stereotypes are internalized. How much of our sexual preferences do you think we learn through social conditioning?
GOTN: I think the interesting thing is that, at the moment, we don't really know. So much of what we're educated to believe feeds back into the things we want to study. So we might study attitudes to the ideal partner, but so much of that research—and how we interpret the results—will be grounded in what we think we know already. People who start from an evolutionary standpoint will say, "Research tells us that men want this, and women want that." But do we really understand how much of that is nature, and how much is nurture?

If we agree that at least some of our sexual habits and preferences are learned, does that mean there's scope to consciously expand and change?
That's a really difficult one. I don't want to stray into the territory of saying you can actively shape your sexual desire, because if you go too far down that line, you end up with people thinking gay conversion therapy is a legitimate thing. But what I do think is that not only can we explore why we have a particular fetish or kink, but we have a responsibility to examine it.

I'm really into BDSM and being submissive, and before I started the blog, I would have just said, "Well, my cunt wants what my cunt wants." Now I'd be more likely to say, "Yes, this is a thing I'm sexually drawn to, and I'm not going to be ashamed of that, but I can ask why." There are probably lots of societal and cultural things that play into why I find these particular things hot—early influences, things I saw when I was young that triggered them in my mind. I wouldn't say that everybody can and should shape their own desires, but we can all explore our own desires, and it makes things far more interesting.

Read on Broadly: How Incest Porn Is Making a Comeback

You write honestly about how it's possible to have great sex with someone you don't like. It's not true that being in love always equals great sex. But even outside religious circles, this idea upsets people. We still think of sex as sacred, don't we?
Yes. It's this idea that sex is either a cementing of love or spark toward love. It's all wrapped up in this belief that love is the ultimate goal—that hetero, monogamous love is this shining bubble, the ideal we should all be reaching for.

I agree. Hence people's deep unease about commercial sex.
There's a knee-jerk reaction. As soon as sex comes into a conversation, people are nervous of it. I think sex work in particular challenges people. The idea that sex work is work is so radical because we've been taught ever since we're born that our genitals are precious. Men probably not so much, but for women, it's all tied up in notions or purity and virginity, which are in turn tied up in control.

You seem very patient with the endless stream of dick pics you're sent, but from your book, what seemed more alarming was men not getting their scariness. The guy who messaged you, "LOL I'm not a rapist," and then, "Don't make me send you flowers." Would you say you've had a chilling insight into the cis male psyche?
I might not use the word "chilling," but before I started the blog, I would have said there are lots of guys who don't really understand feminism, but when we tell them, they'll get it. But actually, there are so many men who are, I would say, the good guys—they're on our side and genuinely give a shit about the issues, but they're so unwilling to see themselves as potentially "bad." One of the things that struck me is that nobody thinks he or she is the bad guy.

I mean, I don't think that I'm the bad guy! I've done some things and said some things on my blog that I look back on now and think, That was awful. But at the time, I didn't know I was the bad guy. With more extreme stuff I get sent, though, the really aggressive stuff, that is just really shitty behavior. As a general rule, I try not to talk about it too much. I feel like the more I talk about it, the more I'll get.

Related: Watch our film , 'The Digital Love Industry'

Your blog's intimate, but your book is revealing in a different way. What were the hardest parts to write?
Any time I talk about mental health stuff, it's really difficult because I want to convey the horror—I've genuinely had moments when I don't want to be alive any longer—but at same time not leave people with that. I don't want to just drop that in people's laps. I want to be able to say, "This is shit, but here are positives that came out of it," and that's really difficult to do, particularly if I'm in a shitty place.

Do you think the tide of bad sex advice is turning, or are there as many dodgy "sexperts" as ever?
I want to be super positive about this because, in my circle, there are so many brilliant sex experts, but every now and then, I stumble across an article written in a popular UK newspaper and think, Shit, I really live in a bubble of sex positivity and good advice, the kind of advice that understands people have very different experiences and sexuality. You still get, "Five things not to do during a threesome," or those really prescriptive things in the mainstream press, but I think we're getting better because our experience is getting broader and, as our world gets bigger, we have more information to reject those kinds of articles.

Girl on the Net: How a Bad Girl Fell in Love is out March 10 through Blink Publishing.

Follow Frankie Mullin on Twitter.

In the newest episode of Viceland's Weediquette series, host Krishna Andavolu follows a group of US combat veterans as they travel to Washington, DC, to advocate for research into medical marijuana as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Specifically, they want the federal government to begin supplying cannabis to an FDA-approved phase II clinical trial headed by Dr. Sue Sisley, who says she was abruptly fired in 2014 from a faculty position at the University of Arizona—where she also earned her medical degree—when the study became a political hot button among local politicians.

After losing her job, and the original home for her research, Sisley is now serving as one of two site principal investigators in a multi-site study sponsored by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) and funded by a $2.1 million grant from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. The money for the study comes directly from taxes collected on Colorado's thriving medical marijuana retail sales, but the state can only pony up the cash, not the cannabis. Only one facility in the country, on the campus of the University of Mississippi, can currently grow and process cannabis legally on the federal level, making it the sole source of "research material" for any FDA-approved study. And that sole supply can only be accessed with the express written consent of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

For years, Sisley and her allies at MAPS have been actively seeking to end this monopoly by suing the DEA to force the creation of additional federally licensed cultivation facilities, and calling for an end to a set of cumbersome review processes that make pot much harder to study than MDMA or LSD. In 2007, a DEA administrative law judge ruled that this marijuana monopoly was indeed harmful to the public interest and should end, but as a report called The DEA: Four Decades of Impeding and Rejecting Science chronicled in detail, the head of the DEA roundly rejected this ruling, maintaining the monopoly.

At the moment, despite all these obstacles, Sisley believes she's about to finally push through the last of the barriers and start signing up veterans for the study. She spoke with VICE on Monday, while attending a medical cannabis conference in Israel, to offer the latest word on her ongoing quest to prove whether or not cannabis works safely and effectively to treat PTSD.

VICE: What's the current status of the clinical trial?
Dr. Sue Sisley: Basically, we still need a DEA schedule one license, because without that, we can't purchase marijuana for the study, and without a study drug, we're not allowed to start screening patients. The DEA has inspected us a few times already, and there was a new problem each time. First, they wanted us to have a safe bolted to the ground with an alarm system to hold the cannabis. Then they said we needed to finish our build-out entirely before getting approval. Then they wanted us to have a freezer safe, not just a regular safe. So we had to order a special freezer from China.

We first submitted the study design to the FDA back in 2010, and here we are six years later still unable to enroll our first veteran.

Do you think the DEA has been moving the goalposts, coming up with new reasons not to approve the facility, or is the process just taking longer than you'd hoped?

In my opinion, the DEA doesn't want any research that might legitimize whole-plant marijuana as a medicine, so these delays are all small victories for them. The DEA director recently called medical marijuana a joke, meaning this attitude clearly starts at the top. They find our research study especially threatening because it would eventually be published in peer reviewed medical journals. Meanwhile, studies looking for marijuana's harmful side effects or addiction potential get green-lighted and move through the process rapidly.

We are going to win, though. I want to emphasize that. We will persevere, not only until we get our first veteran enrolled, but until the entire study is complete and all of the data enters the public record for everyone to examine. We will never give up, and I believe that has been a big source of frustration for the government.

How about at the Veterans Administration? As more and more vets come forward to support medical cannabis, have you seen any positive change in their attitude?

No, not at all. We've tried, and tried, and tried to reach out to Robert A. McDonald, the secretary of the VA, to speak with him about this study. But he doesn't want to know about it. He just keeps shutting us out.

The VA supplies individual veterans with an often staggering amount and array of painkillers, antipsychotics, and other potentially dangerous and addictive prescription drugs. Do you think the pharmaceutical industry could be influencing the government to put up blockades against medical marijuana research?
The vast influence of the pharmaceutical industry in this country is shocking, and they certainly must see cannabis as a huge threat to their business model. I can't tell you the number of veterans I have seen in my practice who have walked away from all of their prescription drugs in favor of using medical marijuana alone to treat their ailments, and Big Pharma would certainly rather they went back to getting pummeled with piles of prescriptions.

I definitely do not encourage vets to go off their meds, but I do work with them to see what meds might be redundant, or totally ineffective, or causing lots of side effects, and we try to eliminate them when we can. These vets are sick and tired of being treated like guinea pigs, and turned into zombies. They feel completely abandoned by the medical community and the VA, which basically tries to subdue them with mega-doses of pain meds and other drugs. The government will pay huge sums to keep them on all these different prescription drugs, but won't pay for legal medical cannabis. I think that is really an outrage, especially to disabled vets functioning on a shoestring budget, who can't afford to buy cannabis from a dispensary.

What role have veterans played in pushing for this research and making this a political issue?

We wouldn't be where we are today, finally on the cusp of implementing the study, without a lot of veterans choosing to get directly involved and fight for this research, including many who appear in the new Weediquette episode. They see a lot of their brothers and sisters with PTSD refusing to try cannabis because of the lack of scientific data about efficacy, or they're afraid of ramifications legally or with the VA, so they want to see this plant put through the FDA process. We now have troops of vets around the country committed to standing side-by-side with us as we struggle to move forward.

Follow David Bienenstock on Twitter.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Read: Silicon Valley Is Fuming at Donald Trump's Immigration Policies

Mark Zuckerberg's views on immigration are no secret: He's backed legislation that would bring more immigrants with technical degrees to the United States and campaigned to raise the cap on visas for highly skilled workers—a proposal that most tech companies support. In 2013, he co-founded a lobbying group called FWD, which has pooled millions of Silicon Valley dollars into immigration reform. Now that group has filed a court brief to persuade the Supreme Court to uphold policies that let undocumented immigrants stay in the United States.

"Instead of inviting the economic contributions of immigrants, our immigration enforcement policies have often inhibited the productivity of US companies and made it harder for them to compete in the global marketplace," reads the court brief, published yesterday. Along with Zuckerberg, the brief is signed by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Dropbox VP of Engineering Aditya Agarwal, and others.

Tech leaders have long been cheerleaders of immigration reform, mostly because their industry would grind to a halt without immigrants: About a quarter of the technology and engineering companies founded in the US have been spearheaded by immigrants, and research shows immigrants are nearly twice as likely to start their own businesses. Of the founders of Fortune 500 companies, more than 40 percent had immigrant parents or were immigrants themselves.

The court brief points all of this out, adding that it's not just the tech industry. All kinds of businesses "would benefit from politics that afford undocumented individuals—approximately 11 million of whom live in the United States—lawful opportunities to contribute to the American economy."

The Supreme Court is currently deciding whether Obama's executive actions on immigration reform from 2014, which allowed some undocumented immigrants to remain in the United States, were an overstep of presidential power. The policies—in particular, the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) and the expanded Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)—were challenged in Texas last year, and the case has now ascended to the country's top court. Oral arguments are scheduled to begin in April.

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

There's a new Hitman game out, and I love it. No, no—not that one. Besides, we can't talk about that one yet. (Embargoes and everything.) I mean Hitman GO—and, no doubt, you're about to tell me that it's not new. And you're right, sort of.

The original mobile puzzler—in which the franchise's Agent 47 moves on rails around a board to position himself for the hit, while every turn you take also allows enemies to move—came out in April 2014 for iOS before being ported to Android a few months later and Windows the following year. Its reception was fantastic—visually, its board game-like graphics and solid-feeling pieces impressed, and with each layout featuring a number of objectives to tick off, replaying previously seen stages was never dull. It was liked, loved in some quarters, and its place as one of the more uniquely compelling titles within the Hitman franchise was assured.

So, really, it made sense for its makers at Square Enix Montréal to produce a definitive edition of Hitman GO, which snuck out at the end of February for PlayStation 4 and Vita. I've been playing it at home, steadily checking objectives, meticulously counting moves so as to score maximum points. Unlike the "main" Hitman games, which I find fairly stressful, GO is more meditative—it only moves when you do, and instant restarts mean failures need never linger. I can't get enough of it, and it's definitely influencing my feelings on the new Hitman proper—while I can't comment on its qualities right now, I absolutely feel more attached to IO Interactive's episodic triple-A release since beginning GO than I did beforehand.

GO's Definitive Edition expands the single-payment package to 90 levels delivered in sharper detail. It looks gorgeous on the PS4, its subtle flair extending to the game-box level-select screen. I spoke to Square Enix Montréal's technical director, Antoine Routon, and brand manager, Gen St-Onge, about taking Agent 47 from the big to the small screen, and back again.

'Hitman GO: Definitive Edition,' launch trailer

VICE: So you have this famous stealth assassination franchise, covering several console generations, and you guys turn it into a digital board game. How does that conversation even begin?
Antoine Routon: So Square Enix Montréal was originally created to develop the new triple-A Hitman that's coming out. But then things changed around a bit, and the project switched to IO, in Denmark, and we were asked to focus on a mobile title. And when we started on what would become Hitman GO, we were literally just told to make a game within the Hitman universe that would work on mobile. We had all of this understanding of the franchise, as we'd been working on the bigger game for a year at that stage, so we knew what the game was about. At the same time, we had people in the team with experience of making mobile games, and they understood the constraints of the medium. So instead of going for a mobile copy of what you see on consoles, we knew we had to approach this differently. We had to preserve what we knew of Hitman, and transpose it in a different way.

Daniel Lutz, the creative director on Hitman GO, his initial impulse was to distill the Hitman experience, to bring its essence to mobile. And then we started to think: Maybe we can make this a puzzle game? Maybe this can be turn-based? And that would work well with the stealth gameplay—that can fit within a turn-based puzzle framework. Some people thought it was a crazy idea, but as we were toying with it, we saw that, actually, this could work. We began to see a way to translate each mechanic of Hitman to a turn-based system. You'll see some of these mechanics very early on in the game, like using stones and balls to distract enemies, hiding places, and the different enemy types with different patterns to learn. All of these things just worked. So that was the first step. As we were progressing with the production, another element that became really important was adding our own touch to the franchise. So you see the game's aesthetic, its architecture, the whole freeze-frame figurines, and everything—that's definitely not part of the franchise before our game. But we thought they were a great addition, and they've combined to form this fresh interpretation of what the franchise is.

So understanding the source material was massively important, and so was knowing that we needed to distill this down, so it would fit on the mobile platform. And then we needed to find our own interpretation of what made the franchise so appealing.

You mention the aesthetics of the game. It does look like a physical tabletop game, albeit split across several highly detailed boards. Did that come about because of you testing how it would play using actual game pieces?
There are many reasons why it ended up that way, and I can't really pinpoint when we ultimately decided to take that game in that visual direction. We knew we wanted the physicality of a board game. And the other thing is when we were working on the triple-A Hitman game, our art director at the time really wanted to emphasize the "manliness" of Agent 47, the game's masculinity. We were putting attention on the quality of his suits, the material of his guns. We were taking this almost James Bond–like approach to making Agent 47, and in a way, that translated to Hitman GO, albeit in a very different way. We were talking, early on, about the game needing to be made of these "nice" things, and when we translated that into this board game, we wanted it to look like an object that a guy might really want in his man cave, you know? We wanted it to look desirable.

Read on Motherboard: Play as a M17 Hacker in This Cyber Espionage Simulator

You say that some in the team thought GO was a crazy idea. But the game was massive on mobile, in the end. How did it feel, internally, to see that amazing reception for this game that could easily have been seen as a spin-off and little more?
Well, first of all I have to say that we got very lucky. We're thankful of that. And with hindsight, it's easy to see some of the ways in which we had an appealing game. GO is true to the Hitman franchise, and we'd worked so hard to capture that—so even though the gameplay was new, we felt fans wouldn't be alienated by it. They'll find that it is truly Hitman. So there are a lot of details in there, from the music to the mechanics, to many small things inspired by the previous Hitman games.

But what we did was also unexpected—and when you do things that people don't expect, but it's relevant, then that's compelling. There was no way to predict that we'd strike the right balance with the audience, but we had a hunch, and time told us that we weren't too wrong.

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch our interview with an actual assassin

I can see Hitman GO as a pretty great way into the franchise. I certainly know people who've tweeted that it's their favorite of any Hitman game. Do you think because it plays so differently than the "main" games, and is in many respects a lot more approachable—it's not terrifically violent, it doesn't have a load of buttons to learn, and so on—that it can be a gateway for newcomers to get into the other releases?
Yeah, we've seen it become a door for people to get into the franchise. We receive emails from people telling us that they'd never played a Hitman game before, but through GO, they've gotten into the universe. That's really rewarding. And we've totally seen people tweeting that it's their favorite of all the Hitman games, and that is really cool. But we had a rich universe to draw upon. In a way, it's the same thing you see in the Lego games, where they take something you know and twist it. And from a consumer perspective, that's always interesting.

The Definitive Edition of GO is the complete package, so to speak—all the levels, all at once, no in-game purchases, done. Is that really the point of the release, to round up everything in the game to this point and present it to both new and existing audiences?
There was no one, main reason to do it, but people had been asking us for it, and we figured that was as good a reason as any. We had Vita users wanting it, and if we were doing Vita, there was no reason not to do PS4 too. That gave us more screen space, so we could up the quality. So it made sense. It was really just: Why not? It was a cool thing to do. Because the game was made for mobile, we had to put a lot of extra time into making it work on console, so that it works with a controller.

Hitman GO has moved from mobile to console. Does that mean that we'll see another of your smartphone successes, Lara Croft GO, make the same transition?
It's too soon to say! Dot, dot, dot... connect the dots.

And in terms of adding content to GO that reflects the story of the new Hitman, is that something you're talking about?
We're not able to say, but I'll write this idea down now, and maybe use it later—you can take some of the credit. But I can't comment on that, right now.

Gen St-Onge: We're working with IO, and considering possibilities. We have a very close relationship with the other Hitman studios. Another of our games, Hitman: Sniper, will get some updates. But GO, right now, isn't, at least at this time.

Hitman GO: Definitive Edition is out now for PlayStation Vita and PlayStation 4. You can find more information at the game's official website.

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

Hello Comic Booklings,

I am Nick Gazin, and I review the comics. I am the decider! I know what is good and bad, and I can tell you! Now the truth can be told! Here are reviews of ten things.

I provide links for to buy the things, but as always, please patronize your local comic and book stores first.

#1. Weird Love: You Know You Want It
Edited by Clizia Gussoni and Craig Yoe (IDW/Yoe Books)

This is a great collection of unintentionally hilarious and bizarre romance comic stories from the 40s, 50s, and 60s. It's titled Weird Love. Isn't all love kind of weird, though? In Devo's song "Love Without Anger," it goes:

Why can't you have your cake and eat it too / Why believe in things that make it tough on you / Why scream and cry when you know it's through / Why fall in love when there's better things to do

This book is the best old-comics compilation Yoe Books has made yet. It's a nice size, and the design choices aren't too obnoxious, but they keep insisting on putting the page numbers inside a big colorful circle. Why do that? Why add unnecessary elements that distract from someone else's work?

The comics in here are incredible. There's "I Fell for a Commie," where a woman falls in love with a guy even though he's a communist. Don't worry, though. In the end, it turns out he's really an undercover FBI agent.

There's "Love of a Lunatic," about an unhinged woman who falls in love with a sane man.

There's "Taming of the Brute," where a lady believes she's whipped this jerk into submission. When they get married, he reveals it was just a ploy, and she's relieved he's still a real man as he spanks her for her insolence. Did I mention that these were originally for little kids?

There's "Mini Must Go," about how women are distracting dudes at work with their short skirts, riding on the mini-skirt craze.

There's "There's No Romance in Rock and Roll," which is about how terrible rock music is as well as the people who like it.

These teens seem awfully well-behaved considering this comic is about how awful rock 'n' roll music is.

There's "Love, Honor, and Swing, Baby," about hippies getting married.

The one that made the most sense to me was "Weep, Clown, Weep!" about a woman who can't understand why her boyfriend would degrade himself by being a clown. I think anyone in the arts knows that feeling.

Buy Weird Love.

#2. No Dogs on Beach
By Brad Elterman (Bywater Bros. Editions and Smoke Room)

Brad Elterman is one of maybe five good rock photographers. This little book collects photos of pretty and famous musicians in California from the 70s to now. Sparks, the Ramones, Tyler the Creator, and Debbie Harry, along with Steve Jones's dick in a speedo as he rises out of a swimming pool. All the musicians who are cool to photograph are in this cool book being cool and photographed.

Buy No Dogs on Beach.

#3. Common Side Effects
By Ed Templeton (Deadbeat Club)

Ed Templeton is the skateboard man who photographed his way into the world's heart. He makes a lot of photo zines, and this is definitely one of them. It's got lots of pix of beach scenes, including a cop catching a seal in a net.

Buy Common Side Effects.

#4. Hawd Tales #1
By Devin Flynn (Revival House Press)

This is a total rip-off/homage of Real Deal Comics, and you know what? I am fine with that.

Buy Hawd Tales.

#5. Lon Chaney Talks
By Pat Dorian

This is a fun little cartoony biographical comic about Lon Chaney, the man of a thousand faces. The art style is sort of like Seth's, and the story goes back and forth between actual testimonials and made-up stories. Fun stuff.

Buy Lon Chaney Talks.

#6. Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck "Return to Plain Awful" and Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck "The Son of the Sun"
By Don Rosa (Fantagraphics)

These books are hard for me to look at, like op art. They feel like a cheap imitation of Carl Barks. Carl Barks was a comic-book genius with a perfect line and economical mark-making. Don Rosa is imitating Barks as closely as he can, but it still feels off. It seems like drawing cartoon Disney ducks isn't his natural inclination. When he gets the chance, he draws all these extra lines and tries to add more detail than is consistent with Carl Barks. One side of him is struggling to imitate Barks, while another side of him is struggling to break free of the confines of working in another artist's style.

Buy Uncle Scrooge.

#7. DLTLPS
By Gabriel Corbera (Space Face Books)

There are some OK pages and textures occasionally, but ultimately, this is all style and no substance. Big nothing.

Buy DLTLPS.

#8. Mould Map 4: Eurozone Special

Why is it cool to draw bad on purpose? A lot of people claim to like this now. In five years, it will be forgotten and another new bad thing will be the bad thing everyone tries to pretend to love.

Buy Mould Map.

#9. Arts
Edited by Nate "Igor" Smith

This is a little zine collecting photos of artists that Nate "Igor" Smith took, along with pieces of art by the artists he photographed. My sister and I are in here, and we are the only good artists. Riffing on the "draw this turtle" ad has been done to death and is not an interesting idea. Don't buy this.

Buy Arts.

#10. Omaha Beach on D-Day
By Robert Capa, Jean-David Morvan, and Severine Trefouel (First Second)

The first half of this book is about the storming of Normandy from the point of view of Robert Capa, a photographer who documented it. The second half of the book are his photos of D-Day and some essays about him.

This book feels like it's trying to do too many things at once. Just because something could be a comic doesn't mean that it should be. The subject is interesting, the photos are good, the drawings are good, and the writing's OK.

I also think the computer-inserted dialogue balloons look cheap and outlandish on the organic-looking drawings.

Buy Omaha Beach on D-Day.

Follow Nick Gazin on Instagram and check back next week for more reviews.

None of these officers were involved in Tuesday's friendly fire incident. Photo via Flickr user Nick Gulotta

Once Detective Jon Gladstone saw his suspects hand heroin to an undercover officer, he went in for the arrest. It was around 6:15 PM on Tuesday evening in Bushwick when the 37-year-old New York City police officer and his partner moved their cop car in front of the alleged dealers's minivan and approached from either side of the vehicle.

The three suspects tried to back out after Gladstone reached inside, bumping into another police car in the process, as the Daily News reports. During the ensuing chaos, four shots were fired, and one of the bullets hit Gladstone's shoulder in an apparent case of friendly fire.

Police in the Greater New York have come under scrutiny for cop-on-cop shootings in the past. In 2008 and 2009, a set of racially charged incidents led to to the creation of a task force on the issue. The 2010 investigation revealed that out of 14 fatal mistaken-identity shootings of cops nationwide over the previous 15 years, ten were of non-white people.

Tuesday's shooting seems rather less complicated. And if what witnesses say is true, this was the third friendly fire incident of 2016, meaning half of all New York police officers who've taken a bullet this year were hit by their colleagues rather than perps.

That surprising stat puts a dent in the idea that cops are under siege––one that proliferated after a man executed two officers in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn in late 2014. The shooting came amidst a wave of protests against police brutality, and some police defenders argued it was the tragic but logical conclusion to a wave of anti-cop sentiment.

The Bushwick shooting also highlights the extent of the danger officers routinely face for what seems like awful little reward. The cash value of the "American Dream" brand heroin purchased in the sting was $80, and besides the fact that Gladstone almost died during the bust, the NYPD is likely out thousands of dollars in damages to the police car, hospital bills, and sick leave for the injured cop. (Gladstone is expected to make a full recovery.)

Joseph Giacalone, a former NYPD detective sergeant and professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, says police work is inherently dangerous and that these small-time drug busts happen every day in the city—in hopes of catching a so-called big fish.

"Since heroin is the biggest problem every jurisdiction is fighting, this is the area that they should be concentrated on," he tells VICE. "There will be a lot more enforcement, and unfortunately, more incidents like yesterday if they go after it as hard as they should."

According to the NYPD, two suspects were taken into custody Tuesday evening and a third remained at large, possibly after committing a carjacking to escape.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Margarita outside her home in Austin, Texas. Photo by Meredith Hoffman

For years, Margarita's husband regularly threw her to the ground, kicking and punching her, and came home drunk and high on cocaine, yelling in front of their kids. But she didn't report the abuse for years. Even after her siblings watched him beat her on the sidewalk and called the police, Margarita refused to press charges, so he spent just one night in jail. She was afraid that, as an undocumented Mexican immigrant living in Austin, Texas, law enforcement would deport her if she reported the abuse.

"I didn't know what would happen to me since I was undocumented," said Margarita, who asked to be identified only by first name, for safety reasons. "I was afraid of the police."

Then one Sunday afternoon in 2004—after the couple had been married 17 years—Margarita says her husband banged her head with a telephone and continued to hit her, harder than he ever had before.

"I called the police, but when they arrived, my husband had scratches on him, so he said I had been violent. They arrested and handcuffed me first, and I insulted the cop," Margarita told me from the cramped two-bedroom apartment she now shares with her five children."I was upset so I said, 'Free me, gringo.' He took me in to jail, and then they sent me to immigrant detention in San Antonio for three weeks."

Margarita's arrest was the beginning of what would become a decade-long battle to escape from domestic violence—a struggle that leaves many undocumented individuals vulnerable to abuse and without legal recourse.

"We can never tell a kid, 'If you call the police your mom isn't going to get deported.'" — Jessica Nunan

According to study published this month in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence, undocumented immigrants are far less likely than legal immigrants to request help for domestic violence. Of the 2,000 immigrants surveyed for that research, 70 percent of those who were undocumented said they would not contact law enforcement if they were victims. Other studies have found nearly half of Latinos in the United States hesitate to report crimes for fear that law enforcement agents will report their immigration status, or the status of a loved one, to federal authorities.

"There are a lot of barriers for victims for domestic violence already, and when you add being undocumented, a whole other level exists. Unfortunately, the fear of deportation is one that is especially high," said Jessica Nunan, executive director of Caminar Latino, a Georgia-based non-profit aimed at helping Latino families overcome domestic violence. In the wake of January's deportation raids on the homes of many Central American migrants, Nunan said, immigrants have become increasingly reluctant to report abuse.

"Very recently we had raids occur with moms and children deported, so there was even more fear," Nunan said. "We had to say that, if they call the police, there is no guarantee they will be protected. We can never tell a kid, 'If you call the police, your mom isn't going to get deported.'"

As Margarita's case illustrates, when undocumented immigrants report domestic violence, abusers often manipulate the details to shift the blame back on the victim, taking advantage of their vulnerable legal status, said Lindsay Harris, a legal fellow with the American Immigration Council who has worked with immigrant domestic violence victims.

"This all goes back to power and control dynamics," Harris said. "Sometimes when a woman calls the police, her husband may have better command of English and can convince cops about his side of the story." She cited the case of a young client of hers, who had come to Baltimore from Cameroon and married a green-card holder.

"He continually abused her, so she called the police, but he convinced them she had come at him with a kitchen knife, so she was taken into immigrant detention," Harris said. "That's a classic example of when a user is able to manipulate a situation with law enforcement."

If law enforcement does arrest an individual on domestic violence charges, police can use their own discretion of how much information to share with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), said Wendy Feliz, the American Immigration Council's communications director. Federal immigration officials can tell local precincts to hold immigrants in jail until they can be transferred to detention centers, as happened to Margarita.

Upon her release, Margarita said, she felt her only recourse was to return to her abusive home life. "I stayed with my husband because I had three kids and didn't know what to do. I'd see a cop and feel fear, trauma, and like they were going to take me in, and I developed anxiety and couldn't sleep," she told me. "I had no more hope. I thought I'd be deported."

In 2005, Margarita's husband attacked her again. This time, she reacted by throwing a ketchup bottle at him, alerting the neighbors, who called the police. Margarita was arrested again and held in custody for a few weeks—but her husband was eventually convicted of assault and imprisoned for three years before being deported to Mexico in 2008. She was relieved, but she suddenly found herself with no one to help support her large family.

"The person doing the abuse will say, 'If you call police, I'll be on fast track for deportation,' and if that person is the main breadwinner, it's a problem," said immigration attorney Tracie Klinke, who works with domestic violence victims. "A mother has to ask herself if being beaten up once or twice a month is worth it to have shelter over her children's head."

Watch: VICE News investigates the high cost of deporting immigrant parents.

After reporting domestic violence, an immigrant has the opportunity to seek protected status to remain legally in the US, per the Violence Against Women Act. A victim can apply for a U visa—a special visa granted to foreigners who have suffered significant abuse and help authorities investigate or prosecute the crime—but the process of obtaining this status is both lengthy and difficult. US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) grants a maximum of 10,000 U visas each year, but the visas are in such high demand, it can take years for the agency to process an application. According to USCIS data, there were 63,762 applications pending in 2015, meaning most applications went on a wait list—and the list continues to grow each year.

"Presuming 10,000 people come off that list per year, it's a six-year wait for anyone who gets added now—and that's assuming the wait list doesn't grow, which is unrealistic," Klinke said. "Over the years, we've seen a significant increase of U-visas filed, so we've run up against a significant backlog. Then it takes one and a half to two years for a case to be reviewed and during this time a person has no ability to apply for a work card or anything."

In an email, USCIS spokesman Timothy Counts told VICE that many individuals on the wait list for U visas can apply to live and work temporarily in the US.

"Those individuals who are on the wait list and are in the United States are normally being granted deferred action, which allows the person to remain here and gives them the opportunity to apply for work authorization," Counts said. "USCIS will begin issuing the next 10,000 U visas on October 1, 2016, at the start of fiscal year 2017. Wait list cases still remaining after the FY2017 cap has been met will stay on the wait list until a new visa allotment becomes available."

In order to qualify for U visa in the first place, though, a victim must obtain a signature from law enforcement that confirms she or she has helped investigate or prosecute a crime. According to a 2014 report from researchers at DePaul University, certain police departments in the US have policies against signing these applications. The reasons for this are not clear, but police departments cited in the report maintained that they had "the right to deny or refuse any application."

"Not every law enforcement agency will sign applications, and they're the gatekeeper," Klinke said. "Two-thirds of the time I'm able to work with law enforcement and one-third of the time they won't cooperate. It's different agency by agency."

In his email, Counts confirmed that U visa applications require a signed certification from a law enforcement agency, and he said that the federal agency has "no role or authority as to whether a law enforcement agency signs a certification."

"Law enforcement has the discretion on whether to sign a certification, and the investigating and/or prosecuting law enforcement agency has the ultimate authority to make this decision," he wrote.

Margarita said that, fortunately, the Travis County Sheriff's Department did sign off on her U visa application, which USCIS approved, but she is still waiting for the actual document. (ICE and the Austin Police Department did not immediately return a request for comment about Margarita's case.) Still, she says she feels "very lucky" to finally live in peace.

Follow Meredith Hoffman on Twitter.

If you, or someone you know, is suffering abuse, visit the National Domestic Violence Hotline website or call the hotline at 1−800−799−7233 or TTY 1−800−787−3224.

Illustrations by Joel Benjamin

I've come to learn that no one outside of myself can fix me, and perhaps there is no psychological endpoint at which I will arrive and be totally repaired. The aspiration to be completely OK with the fact that I exist, or some other iteration of a perfectly whole human being, has only led me to self-delusion and further anxiety. This self-delusion occurs most profoundly in the times when I feel good, and wishfully make the assumption that I will never feel anxious again. My own perfectionism and the expectation that one must arrive at "perfection" or "wholeness" have probably caused me more anxiety than anything else. Perhaps true wholeness (if such a thing exists) is not when all is fixed within, but when there's an acceptance of one's broken parts.

All that being said, I believe that I may have recently achieved the anxiety disorder American dream. I finally found a great therapist who specializes in panic attacks and general anxiety, and takes my insurance.

This week, my new therapist and I did some detective work and stumbled upon something that in 15 years of panic attacks I had never discovered before. In looking closely at the three panic attacks I experienced the week prior, we found a commonality in each of them. All three—one in bed, one on the internet, and one in her office—had begun with a minor physical sensation in my body: a shift in how I was feeling. These minor shifts led directly into the physical symptoms of a panic attack: suffocating and choking sensations, tightness in the chest, racing heart, dizziness, and feelings of unreality. I always assumed that the physical symptoms of my panic attacks were preceded by a thought—usually one of the "I'm dying," "I'm not OK," or "I'm fucked" variety. I hadn't realized that it was the other way around.

What happened last week was that I had a cold. It wasn't a massive cold, just a minor sniffle. One night I was lying down, making a playlist, when I suddenly noticed that I couldn't breathe out of my nose very well. Immediately, my heart rate sped up, my breathing felt more shallow, and the room began to spin. I remember thinking my usual panic thoughts, Oh no, oh my god, something's wrong, I'm dying. In that moment, I completely ignored the fact that I had a cold, which was most likely the cause of my breathing obstruction. That's hypochondria 101. But my therapist pointed out that there was not even a second between the sensation of the stuffed nose and my physical response. There was no time for a thought. It was only after my body responded the way it did that my mind jumped in and attempted to explain those symptoms.

The order of this sequence is subtle but profound. If there is no time between a stuffed nose and a physical terror response, then it's the response that must be addressed and not just the thoughts. What's more, my therapist said she believes this involuntary reflex of entering an erroneous fight-or-flight mode indicates some type of trauma. I can continue to work on reframing my thoughts through cognitive behavioral therapy. But there might be a way to disconnect that erroneous fight-or-flight reaction before it even occurs.

When the therapist said "trauma," I cringed. I feel like the word "trauma" has become very trendy lately. I don't want my subconscious to be a form of clickbait. But the way my therapist described the role of trauma in linking my panic attacks to shifts in my physical body undeniably made sense to me. In a way, it reframed the history of my panic attacks as I've known them.

I've always had high levels of anxiety, dating back to hypochondria, nightmares, and fear of non-existent catastrophes as a child. But I always thought that my first panic attack occurred much later, around the time I had an abortion in my early 20s. The abortion was scarier than I thought it was going to be, and I remember being surprised by the way I felt after. I was not expecting to feel such nausea or dizziness. Since I hadn't anticipated these feelings, I assumed that something had gone very wrong. I thought I was dying. At the time, it didn't register as a panic attack, but as an adverse physical reaction to what had just occurred. But a few weeks later, I had the same exact physical sensations, and it's what I remember as my first panic attack.

Yet in talking to the therapist, I realized that my body has been having panic responses long before the abortion. I remembered jumping into a cold lake as a kid, and despite knowing how to swim, hyperventilating from the change in temperature. Immediately I knew I was dying. I remembered accidentally inhaling a little soda down the wrong pipe—not enough to cut off my breathing entirely, just enough to tickle my lungs. But my body went into panic mode, and I knew for sure that was the end.

I'm not sure exactly what this new phase of my psychological journey, entitled "trauma work," is going to entail. This week, I was asked to simply pay attention to what precedes my symptoms of panic. I now see that I experience it everywhere! Mild heartburn, minor fatigue, a mouth numbed by the dentist each led my body to react as if something was very, very wrong. This new realization is making it easier for me to then redirect my brain when it says, "I'm dying." Now I have a response. I can tell it, "Dude, your traumatized body is overreacting. This isn't death. It's heartburn."

I'm also not sure where this next phase of getting better will take me. The state of "better" is perhaps an illusive one—impermanent, nebulous—and not a final destination, in my experience. It seems the more I see my relationship to panic disorder as a journey, the better I do. It's helpful for me to try on different modalities as a series of experiments, rather than aiming for a final state of absolute OK-ness. Does absolute OK-ness exist for anyone? If I had my choice, I wouldn't have to continue growing. I would just chill out and be lazy for a while. But I've never been a chill person. And I guess sometimes our path chooses us.

So Sad Today: Personal Essays will be released March 15 from Grand Central Publishing. Pre-order it here.

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The fact that it took Ben Carson a solid ten minutes or so into his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference last weekend to finally, finally, announce the end of his stubbed-toe-on-Ambien presidential campaign seemed like a proper coda for a White House run that went on far longer than it should have, and that made very little sense in the first place. So much so, in fact, that on Tuesday night, as the Republican race rolled on without its lobotomized neurosurgeon, Stephen Colbert dedicated an entire segment of The Late Show to the whole affair, putting Carson back in online trends, likely for the last time.

The short-lived Carson boom of 2016 is now long forgotten—a bizarre footnote in what has been the most bizarre presidential election in modern history. To refresh your memory, Carson enjoyed a brief stint at the top of the polls at the end of the summer, an unlikely outsider in an outsider's election, one who's conservative celebrity was based mostly on the fact that he once attacked Obamacare in front of Barack Obama himself. But the former pediatric neurosurgeon slipped back quickly, overtaken first by Trump, and then by his own lunacy and that of his perpetually rotating campaign staff.

But while Carson's campaign had been over for weeks by the time he formally exited the race, his speech at CPAC had a certain symmetry to it, making his rambling exit in the same sterile Potomac ballroom where, just a few years earlier, he'd gotten his first taste of political success, taking the stage with people chanting, "Run, Ben, Run!"

Seated in the spillover room at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center last Friday, I was, for the first time this election cycle, desperate to hear the Good Doctor speak—partly because his appearance would end the Ted Cruz Comedy Hour dragging along on the main stage, but mostly because it was my last, best chance to see Carson in his political habitat, surrounded by the strange cross-section of starry-eyed conservatives who wanted this guy to be president.

David Stevenson, 66, a propane businessman from Tulsa, Oklahoma, was so dedicated to Carson and his super PACS, he told me, he logged over 10,000 miles driving a tour bus for the campaign. Still decked out in campaign swag, he joked that Carson's decision to drop out would save him $50 a month.

"I wanted to challenge the Christian community to be more assertive. That's what he should have done early on," Stevenson told me, turning serious. "Then he could've appealed to his base, and the fact remains we both believe in Jesus Christ as our personal savior. He should've addressed it, made it clear, and challenged them like a preacher: 'Next time you go in that voting booth vote like a Christian. Don't vote for abortion or gay rights or this other stuff.'"

In an election marred by mudslinging and schoolyard taunting, Carson's campaign was based on the perception that he was a "good, honest man," someone whose faith and work ethic could override a total lack of experience or substance. But while Carson's bootstraps conservatism and messianic gibberish galvanized evangelical voters for a while, Republicans weren't really looking for good and honest this election cycle.

"I'm still with Ben in spirit—I think he's a man of integrity, responsibility," said Jacklyn Tran, a 40-year-old Jamaica native who had come down from Connecticut to volunteer at CPAC's grassroots training sessions. "Unfortunately, for me, I don't see anyone else in the race right now who has that standard of character. I've never seen an America like this before. I honestly can't see any of the candidates pulling us out of it."

Tran attributed her candidate's poor primary performances to problems with Carson's staff members, specifically their lack of experience running a national campaign. "There was a lot of management issues from his team," Tran said. "The media played on that weakness, and the combo of the two turned a lot of Carson supporters away from voting for him." She added, "one guy, on Super Tuesday, told me 'I donated to Carson this morning, but I voted for Cruz.'"

David Stevenson, who claims to have driven Ben Carson's 2016 campaign bus 10,000 miles this election cycle, holds out until the bitter end. Photo by author

As Carson himself joked from the CPAC stage: "People like me, they just don't vote for me." It was an objectively accurate assessment, highlighting a key distinction that's become harder to make in a GOP primary that's been defined by forceful personality and a committed lack of policy substance. But there's no better place to find out where conservatives draw that line than their annual jamboree in the sterile gulag known as National Harbor, Maryland.

I figured that the roaming platoons of College Republicans—"millennials" as most of them referred to themselves frequently—crowding into endless "activist bootcamps" and happy hours around the Gaylord might be able to help me understand Carson's appeal. Or at least they might have some interesting ideas on what the fruit-salad mind reader could have done differently.

"I think he has a lot of beliefs and stances I agree with," Leah Van Eerdan, a 23-year-old from Greensboro, North Carolina, explained to me as we crowded into a dueling pianos bar for one of the weekend's cocktail events. "But as a young millennial, when I look at him and his opponents, I don't think he has the fire and aggressiveness. That's why he didn't have my support in the end."

Van Eerdan told me she's supporting Florida Senator Marco Rubio, before adding: "I agree with Trump on his hard stance on immigration. If Carson was on Trump's ticket, I'd be much more inclined to vote Trump."

Andrew Britt, a 25-year-old three-time CPAC attendee from upstate New York, echoed the sentiment. "The campaign was full of ideas, but lacked energy," Britt told me. "He had an organization that had a message, and he just couldn't spread it." As a candidate, he added sagely, Carson "broke the cookie cutter politician mold. He just never broke out. I think that's the biggest problem."

Wringing out the meaning from this boozy sludge of campaign-speak, I gathered that while these future Republican leaders found Carson appealing, and may have even admired him enough to click over a couple of bucks to his campaign, his soft-spoken brand of crazy just wasn't enough for them in 2016.

Conservative activists dance with a cardboard cutout of Ben Carson at CPAC. Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

"As conservatives, we're both blessed and cursed with a love of facts and logic," Alexandra Smith, of the College Republican National Committee, told a room of twenty-somethings in khakis, kicking off a panel on "Reaching the Female Youth Vote." The war on women, Smith informed her charges, was "invented" by liberals to beat back Republican gains in Congress and at the state level.

"As you resist the urge to fight the war on women, remember this is not a substantive fight," Smith declared. "It's a political game played by the left meant to trip up GOP candidates and get them to say something they don't mean." As she spoke, an image of Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, labeled "America's Sweetheart," appeared in a slide, prompting whooping giggles and hee-haws all around the room.

"It has to be fun," Jade Larson, a 19-year-old from South Dakota, explained to me later. Carson, she said, "could've been a lot more verbal. I do think he should have gone after people on different issues."

Trump, on the other hand, is "entertaining," Larson said. "He has the personality of a high school millennial." She added, as if to explain, "he gets in your face, says what he wants to."

Follow Dan McCarthy on Twitter.