Loving this, oh yes. Photo by Ian Keating via

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Just like most people, most dates are unremarkable. 95 percent of those $15 cocktails and kisses under restaurants awnings will float from our consciousnesses in the inevitable flotsam and jetsam of our escaping youth, as we march on towards long-term partnerships, marriage, children, and death.

But there are some dates that will stick with you. Those dates where the person did something so inexplicably strange or horrible or surprising that instantly, in one crystallized moment of divine illumination, you knew that you were never going to see that person again. We asked people about those moments, in honor of the official end of summer romance season.

"Maybe he had diarrhea?"

The night before one date this guy sent me a reaaaally long, sexually explicit poem. Like, 13 stanzas worth of kinda hot, but also super weird stuff about "suckling my sweet pearl."

What I was met with was a guy sitting with his hood up in a dingy corner of a bar in the middle of a beautiful day, looking miserable with his earphones in. He didn't come over to say hi and basically gave me the vibe that he really didn't want to be there.

What decided it, though, were the ten phone-calls and trips to the toilet that he seemed to make in one hour. It was surreal, and an old man watching the entire scenario from another table was just pissing himself laughing. It felt like he was feeding some kind of intense coke habit. Or maybe he had diarrhea? Either way, the last time he got up, I just ran off into the sunshine and cried to my ma on the phone down the road.

— Caroline, 23

"All that expectation, slashed in an instant"

It wasn't like there was a specific moment where I decided I never wanted to see her again, more like the other way around. We decided to meet up in a no-pressure environment, so she invited me to a house party she was having and I brought along a friend for moral support. We spent ages walking around trying to find this house, but when we finally got there her friend opened the door, looked at us, and said witheringly, 'Stephanie's all partied out I'm afraid.'

I could see through the window that the party definitely wasn't over, so I was like 'are you sure?...' But she just shook her head and closed the door on us. All that expectation slashed in an instant. We ended up going back to mine and playing Fifa and I never even got to meet her.

— Rob, 25

"He saw the people in drag and was like, 'what?'"

I found him on Tinder. He was unusual—hot but had a mystery about him. We bonded over a shared love of food. Initially, he seemed overly keen to meet me and for me to show him around London, because he was from Lincoln and hadn't been down much. I decided to take him to Pride as it was happening in Trafalgar Square. Little did I know, he was a raging homophobe!

He was initially confused and thought it was just some festival, then he saw the rainbow flags and people in drag and was like, "What's going on?" I explained what Pride is, and he was just looking around like, What the fuck has this girl taken me to? When he saw my brother, not knowing who he actually was, he turned round to me and said "Who's that batty boy?" I'm also bisexual, so it was an all round deal-breaker moment, because he just made me feel like I was wrong to celebrate something so amazing.

After that I said I had to go, I never messaged him again, and he deleted me from all social media.

— Katie, 23

"Oh, you ... brought your guitar? No, that's cool. Yeah, good stuff" Photo by Neil Odhia via

"She pushed her hand down my trousers in the middle of the pub"

Alarm bells went off pretty early when, at 7 PM, my date turned up at the pub already completely smashed and ordered us two tequilas each. After five minutes, she asked if I wanted to score some coke and go on an 'adventure.' I was like "No, It's a Tuesday." She shrugged, called me boring, then pushed her hand down my trousers in the middle of the heaving pub. I pulled her hand off my limp dick and made the wild suggestion of maybe getting to know each other a bit first.

While all that wasn't the best start, the epiphany moment for me was just after that, when she stepped backwards onto a guy's foot and then shouted at him being in her way. I hate rudeness far more than I do potential substance abuse problems, so I told her that it was kind of her fault. She just looked at me, said "I like your vibe," and bit my lip so hard it bled.

After ten more minutes, I made up an excuse. On the way to the tube she shouted, "I'm hungry! BRB!" and rushed into a corner shop. When she emerged she was holding a huge sausage roll, which she immediately dropped into the road.

"Oh man, that's a shame," I said to her.

"What's a shame?" She replied, as she picked up the visibly gritty pastry off the road and finished it in two huge bites. I literally ran to the tube.

— Cooper, 25

"The topic moved to deeper stuff like race and religion"

I was on the second date with a girl who was hot but lived alone with an indoor bunny. We were just shooting the shit for a while when the topic moved to deeper stuff like race and religion. She said, "I don't think I could ever date a black guy because of a clash of cultures and all. It would just be difficult for both of our families."

I thought it was just a hilariously stupid thing to say, and I decided it was done at that point. But because we were in the middle of eating, we finished the night and left with a weird kiss. Basically I just got candle-lit with a closet racist for a couple of hours.

— Michael, 21

"He kept making numerous abrupt toilet visits"

We met at a bar, and he asked to take me out. He was cute. On our first and only date we went to a Michelin-starred restaurant, which was nice. But when we sat down he ordered my drinks and food for me, without asking what I wanted.

I tried to enjoy myself anyway, but found that he was rarely there to talk to—he kept making numerous abrupt toilet visits. Following the 1 millionth bathroom visit, I clocked on. My date had been snorting cocaine, not weeing. Every time he'd return, he'd sniff and talk at me a million miles an hour. It was bizarre. Also, he never fucking offered me any, did he? After the longest dinner of my life, we left the restaurant.

Now, filled to the brim with crab and charlie, my date excitedly hailed us a tuk tuk. I pretended to look impressed and got in, as a jazz club and more toilet visits awaited! At the jazz club, the absolute worst moment was when my date angrily growled that that the sax player knew nothing. Then he leaned in for a horrible, shellfish-y kiss. I recoiled, felt a bit sick, and decided that it wasn't going to work. Later, when he protested that we should go find a lock-in, I made my excuses, broke his cokey heart, and went home.

— Daisy, 25

Photo of Sonny Liston fighting Muhammad Ali via Central Press/Stringer/Getty

In a bygone era of great fighters when heavyweights like Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, and George Foreman were king, Sonny Liston was viewed as the ultimate WWE-type heel, a villainous character of epic proportions who people considered the biggest thug on boxing's biggest stage. Liston was like Mike Tyson before there was a Mike Tyson—a scowling, menacing fighter with lights-out power, an intimidating ring presence, and a lengthy criminal background. Big, bold, and brash, he gravitated toward the sport of boxing in a Missouri penitentiary while serving time for a first degree robbery charge. After his release from prison, Liston turned pro in 1953 and won the heavyweight championship in 1962 by knocking out pugilist legend Floyd Patterson.

Amassing a career record of 50 wins and 4 losses with 39 knockouts, Liston was the quintessential anti-hero America loved to hate. The fighter, who some called the "Bad Negro," was also a barroom brawler with ties to the Lucchese crime family and over 20 arrests. After consecutive losses to Muhammad Ali in the mid-60s, his reign as a top heavyweight was effectively over. But Liston subsequently capitalized on his notoriety in Las Vegas, spending his days at the casinos shaking hands and doing public appearances. At night, however, Liston reverted to form. The one-time boxing talent would drive around the strip in his pink Cadillac, dealing drugs, womanizing, and working for the crime syndicates he'd known since his youth as a leg breaker. In 1971, he was found dead from an apparent heroin overdose, but no one believed his death was accidental.

In his new book, The Murder of Sonny Liston: Las Vegas, Heroin, and Heavyweights, out October 18, ESPN journalist Shaun Assael treats the boxer's death as a cold case and investigates the circumstances that led to Liston's early exit from life. As the story unfolds, readers get a light into not just the seedy underworld of professional boxing, but also 1970s Las Vegas—a world of glitz and glamor, grit and crime. Assael found that Liston straddled the line between two worlds, walking in the limelight with celebrities like Elvis, but at the same time consorting with criminals, big players in the mob, and dirty cops. VICE chatted with Assael to find out what happened to Sonny Liston, a man who many wanted to silence.

VICE: What was Sonny Liston's stature in boxing and the sports world when he died?
Shaun Assael: By the time Sonny died, he was a forgotten champion, in some respects. In the late 50s early and early 60s he was considered the meanest man on the planet, and during the middle 60s when the Civil Rights movement was tearing at America he was known as the baddest black man around. Lots of fighters were scared to fight him. But after two notorious losses to Muhammad Ali in 1964 and 1965, he was kind of a diminished figure. The book picks up when he moves to Las Vegas as that diminished figure after reaching such great heights.

Sonny was a country boy who came out of very, very poor circumstances in Arkansas, and he followed his mother to St. Louis where he really grew up on the streets, despite his mother's best intentions. He had a famous criminal record that followed him all the way up to his early fights, and by the time he was fighting Floyd Patterson for the title in 1962, President John F. Kennedy told Patterson he should find somebody of a higher moral fibers to fight. Sonny was just seen as a thug and a tool of the mob, and that reputation never quite left him. He was always seen as somebody who had organized crime lurking in his corner.

What led to your interest in Liston's story and why did you decide to investigate his death as a cold case murder?
I was actually writing a novel that was about a suspicious death, and the novel made me think, Man, I wish I could go back in time and reinvestigate this. It gave me the idea of going back and finding a cold case to write about and investigate within the sports world. Working for ESPN and having written about boxing in the past, it didn't take me long to reach Sonny . The idea of spending time in Las Vegas and recreating that era and then recreating the world that Sonny lived in was really appealing to me. It turned out to be fascinating because it was a trip into the past with Elvis Presley and Howard Hughes and all these larger-than-life mobsters and all these larger-than-life sports figures. Everybody in the book is larger-than-life... until they're dead.

Among the vast universe of people I talked to, nobody doubted that Sonny was killed. It was just a matter of who they were pointing the fingers at. It was ruled natural causes, although there were heroin metabolites in Sonny's blood that made the police speculate a heroin overdose. His body was so badly decomposed when the cops found it that there was really no way to rule out blunt force trauma or anything else. I firmly believe it was not an accident.

Sonny Liston fights Floyd Patterson for the heavyweight championship title in 1962. Photo via Getty/George Silk

What was the extent of Liston's mob connections and why was the former heavyweight champion selling drugs in Las Vegas?
In the 1950s and certainly well into the 60s, the mob ran boxing and one of the seminal figures in this was Frank Palermo who was a key crime figure in Philadelphia. His partner was a member of Murder, Inc. You couldn't get a big fight back then without the mob being involved. It was not so much that the fights were fixed, but you couldn't make a match without the mob blessing the match. By 1970 that was beginning to change. You had huge businessmen like Jack Kent Cooke, the owner of the Washington Redskins, and a Hollywood agent named Jerry Perenchio, who were making the Ali-Frazier fights. You were beginning to see the loosening of the mob's hold over boxing—not the elimination, but the loosening.

Sonny never really got paid 100 percent of his contracts—not that any fighter does, but he especially didn't. As one friend once remarked, he was carved up pretty well. And so by the time he's in Vegas and we see him in 1970, having lost a fight that would have given him that one last payday, he was left hustling money. He was paid $13,000 for his last fight and he had to fly to the Jersey City Armory in New Jersey to do it. Sonny needed money and hustling drugs was the way he knew how to get it.

When you were researching the story, what did you find out about 1970s Las Vegas that surprised you the most?
One of the most surprising things for me was just knowing about the glittering strip, how racially segregated Las Vegas was, how mean the police force was, and how little opportunity black people had in Las Vegas. The closer I was able to look at that the more I was stunned about how Sonny may have actually been the only celebrity who was able to transcend those two worlds. He lived in a largely-white suburb filled with actors and casino executives. He spent his nights driving this pink Cadillac all the way to the heart of the ghetto. It's that duality that fascinated me about Sonny. He had this public personality that made people want to come up to him in casinos and shake his hand, and he had this soul that kept him dealing drugs, working for crime syndicates, and doing a little bit of muscle enforcement even after he had been in four title fights.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

I always thought I wrote best when I was depressed. A lot of writers say the same thing. There's just something about feeling sad, anxious, angry. It makes sense. You're not sitting in a dingy room, listening to some droning song by The National, writing gloomy poetry when you're loving life. Happiness isn't something you question.

Depression forces us to reflect on every bad moment and find reason in it. Or at least find somebody to blame, usually ourselves.

Four years after being diagnosed with clinical depression, I just got sick of constantly fighting it. At 22, I'd tried every natural remedy available—meditation, yoga, adult coloring books—and felt out of options. I needed a quick fix. Each day meant increasingly intense panic attacks and it was slowly killing me.

So I went on Lexapro. I took 20mg every day for 11 months without missing a single dose—unless you count that time I accidentally double dropped on NYE last year. As it turns out, Lexapro is also Kanye West's drug of choice—he mentions it on "FML" when he says, "You ain't never seen nothing crazier than this n***a when he off his Lexapro."

I never considered the side effects of antidepressants before taking them, I thought it was simple, take a pill, everyday, and be alright again. I didn't think it was going to kill the one thing I loved to do, which was writing.

At first, I was certain my regular habit for procrastination had just dialed up a notch. But I started to notice a trend. I stopped crying. I had to go to my grandpa's funeral and, even though I was shattered, I was the only person there who wasn't tearing up. I got so paranoid people were judging me that I ducked away to the bathroom, frantically dabbing water under my eyes to give the impression I was crying.

Lexapro turned me into a zombie, riding through the motions of life without feeling. Things that made me angry became irrelevant. There was no twinge of sadness watching Tom Hanks in Philadelphia. If you're wondering whether something is off, that's a sure sign. Whenever I picked up a pen to write, I had nothing. I couldn't even write about the damn rain. If you're a creative writer who can't poetically describe the rain, you're in trouble.

The dulling of emotions by Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) is known as emotional blunting. For most people this means antidepressants will stop them feeling depressed, which is great. But for others, SSRIs can kill all emotions, whether you like it or not.

It's a catch-22. You take SSRIs to stop being depressed, and that works, but then you're depressed because you can't feel anymore. Lose-lose. But I wasn't crying myself to sleep or getting anxious every time I entered a room. Wasn't that what I wanted? I should have been happy, but I wasn't.

I wish someone would've warned me before I started antidepressants. Of course, doctors tell you how much your life will change when you start taking SSRIs. There was no mention though of the emotional toll that not feeling would take. I could handle the brain zaps, constant dizziness, and sleep problems. But losing your emotions feels like dying.

Creativity is subjective, which makes it difficult to measure with any accuracy. But googling around I found researchers have tried to understand the link between feeling bad and feeling creative. And Columbia University social psychologist Modupe Akinola found a correlation between the two.

Working with Harvard University's Wendy Berry Mendes, Akinola asked students to write down their career aspirations. Then they were given feedback that was either positive or dream crushing. After this, the students had to create an artistic collage. As it happens, participants who got negative feedback—and felt shitty because of what the researchers termed "social rejection"—made collages that were more creative than those who were unaffected.

I decided to stop Lexapro around six weeks ago. It wasn't really a case of "going off your meds." After weighing up the pros and cons, I just decided it was time for me to let go. The drugs worked too well. Some people definitely want to feel emotionally numbed, but I wasn't cut out for that life. I missed being creative.

Within two days, the emotions I craved raced back. But I spent a month going through intense withdrawals. There was the extreme fatigue, random electric shocks, and mood swings. It was challenging, but I don't regret stopping.

I haven't recovered from depression, I'm not sure I ever will. But I do feel like I'm in a much better place than I was a year ago. All of those negative emotions that used to overwhelm me, I've gotten better at channelling them creatively. I guess I learned my artist self and human self aren't two separate things—you can't ignore one for fear of losing the other. There has to be balance.

If you are struggling with depression or suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.

Follow Amy on Twitter

All photos by Masatoshi Naito, courtesy of Super Labo

Masatoshi Naito is an acclaimed Japanese photographer whose work has been exhibited internationally since the 60s at places like the MoMA and the Barbican. While he's often known for Ba Ba Bakuhatsu (Grandma Explosion) , a project documenting Japanese asceticism, rites, and folklore practiced in the mountain region Tohoku, his documentation of Japanese street scenes from 1970 through 1985 reveal another subculture, of sorts, in Japan.

Published in 1985 and reissued this year by Super Labo, Tokyo: A Vision of Its Other Side imagines the metropolis as a "huge life form," and the images within unearth a less common side of the organism, so to speak. Naito documented the disenfranchised population of Tokyo, such as the homeless, sex workers, and alcoholics—"those who dwell in the darkest and innermost areas of the city."

Masatoshi Naito wrote the following about the photo book:

It was from 1970 to 1985 when I intensively photographed Tokyo. Japan was radically changing as rapid economical growth was underway. Old houses and buildings were being destroyed and replaced by new ones including modern skyscrapers. Even today, Tokyo is still expanding.

Nowadays, I see crowds of people flooding all over the Tokyo city area from morning to night. The crowds are always there, from the first train to the last train of the Yamanote Line, the Chuo Line, subways and various private railways. However, when the last trains are gone, along with the businessmen and women, students, and the workers of restaurants and bars, Tokyo is deserted, and the 'other face of Tokyo' emerges.

Somebody gathers food dumped by bars and restaurants. Another one picks up cardboard boxes and cans that may sell. There are people sleeping on the street. Some of them are drinking alcohol. Homeless people begin to act lively. Exactly, Tokyo as a 'huge life form' reveals itself.

Tokyo: A Vision of Its Other Side is out now through Super Labo. It can also be purchased at Printed Matter. See more photos from the book below.

The following excerpt from Taschen's monograph on the late H.R. Giger is by Andreas J. Hirsch, a photographer and writer who's curated multiple exhibitions on H.R. Giger's work. All images courtesy of Taschen.

In the spring of 1978, having just turned 38 years old, the Swiss artist H.R. Giger jotted these lines in his diary:

May 18, 1978. Work on the film is in full swing. The construction of the spaceship is almost finished. It looks good. Small models of the landscape and the entrance area of the spacecraft were made. The people who built these have no clue about my architecture. I said that they should get bones and build a model with plasticine...

At that time, H.R. Giger was already a successful painter whose bleak visions in a style that he termed biomechanics were widely distributed: in the form of popular poster editions that appeared in the late 1960s; in the large-format illustrated book Necronomicon, which he designed himself; and on album covers such as Emerson, Lake & Palmer's 1973 release Brain Salad Surgery. But the project he was now working on would make him both a worldwide cult figure and an Oscar winner. Director Ridley Scott had hired Giger to create the monster in the movie Alien. So the artist went to the Shepperton Film Studios near London to realize his designs for the world of the Alien with his own hand.

Necronom IV (1976)

It was a painting in Giger's Necronomicon that had immediately convinced Scott to get him involved in shaping the alien creature: Necronom IV (1976), one of the key works in the artist's oeuvre. It shows in profile the upper body of a being with only remotely humanoid traits. Its skull is extremely elongated, and its face is almost exclusively reduced to bared teeth and huge insect-like eyes. Hoses extend from its neck, and its back is dominated by tubular extensions and reptilian tails. The male sexual organ is significantly extended and curved upwards over the head. It opens out into a transparent bulge in which a skeletonized being is visible like a little saint resting in a glass coffin.

The entire body appears to be under a tension that is maintained with ease. Only the powerful arms are still close to the human form, although wires and mechanical tracks are visible under their translucent skin and their material is less reminiscent of tissue than of the grain of medieval woodcarvings. The position of the hands in the top right corner of the image is also noteworthy: they appear to have been taken from the iconography of medieval altarpieces. The elegantly slender fingers contrast sharply with the creature's merciless mien. The hands seem in the process of taking something that is out of sight, as if trying out a grip or magically manipulating something far off.

As a matter of course, the figure takes up the entire picture plane and allows but a little glimpse at the organic background, which is dominated by slimy forms and without any spatial depth. Although there is no indication as to where the creature may be in space and time, it is still obvious that it cannot come from the world as we know it.

Erotomechanics VII (Mia und Judith, first state), 1979

In order to turn this painted creature into a monster for a movie, the artist had to submit it to a complex transformation. The original painting fascinated Ridley Scott so much that he had Giger develop a complete "natural history" based on Dan O'Bannon's screenplay, which ultimately produced the final monster of the film. The creature's latent deadliness, which was already perceptible in the painting, turns into a sort of applied lethality that it acts out through dynamic motion in the film. Between these two stages stood the creative and artistic process of designing and producing the necessary figures, which Giger did primarily by himself. The process results in that mixture of fascination and disgust with which we encounter the Necronom and—with an even greater sense of dread—the Alien. Giger's monster represents a turning point in science fiction and horror movies, to which Alien brought a deadly life form from space that had never been seen before.

NY CITY II (1980)

The myriad traces that Giger's work has left in so many different areas—painting and film, album covers, and tattoo culture, as well as in the genres of science fiction and fantasy—make it like a "Rosetta Stone," combining several "languages" that still have to be decrypted. Giger's work today appears like a code that has been far from fully broken.

Seen in art-historical terms, we have an artist whose work, although inspired by Surrealism and Symbolism, was highly autonomous and ultimately difficult to classify. He had already made a distinctive contribution to the fantastic art of the 20th century with his work before Alien. His biomechanical ideas are still developed independently in disciplines like media art and bio art, less as an aesthetic influence than as ideas influencing a conceptual approach.

Cthulhu (Genius) III (1967)

Then there is the reading of Giger's work focusing on mythology and psychology, examining the role of individual and collective fears in his approach, which is not merely figurative and narrative but can also be understood in a modern way as the creation of a mythology. A work so densely populated with archetypes and beings from a post-human future, which is well beyond accepted notions of reality and which is so rich in symbols, shapes, and themes from occult traditions, also calls for a reading that includes interpretations from the fields of alchemy, astrology, and magic.

The diversity of the readings of these archetypal themes sketched out above, of dream and trauma, birth and death, means that one could easily fill a whole library— a "bibliotheca gigeriana," albeit fictitious for the time being—on the draftsman, painter, sculptor, filmmaker, and designer H.R. Giger.

The Spell II (1974)

Andreas J. Hirsch is a photographer, writer, and curator based in Vienna, Austria, where he has curated exhibits on H.R. Giger's work, as well as Pablo Picasso and Friedensreich Hundertwasser.

Taschen's publishing history with H.R. Giger goes back to the mid-1980s and includes the limited editions of 'Hologramm' and www.hrgiger.com. Project work for this SUMO-sized monograph dates back ten years and included close curatorial and design collaboration with Giger, as well as new photography of leading artworks held in private collections all over the globe. Due to his untimely death in 2014, Giger was unable to witness the final printing and binding of his opus magnum, but it stands in his memory as testimony to his prolific output and extraordinary vision.

The limited-edition monograph of H.R. Giger is available to pre-order on Taschen's website now.

See more images from the text below.

Biomechanoid 75 (1975)

Gebärmaschine (1967)

Alien III (Front view II), 1978

Hommage à Böcklin, 1977

Photos via Flickr user PhotoAtelier

Drugs feel like they've have become a near-constant news item recently. With opioid epidemics raging in many states, conversations about drug overdoses and prescription pills have become a regular feature of nightly newscasts. At the same time, conversations about the drug and medical industry itself have entered the mainstream. Between pharma executive loudmouth (and alleged crook) Martin Shkreli, the high-profile implosion of Theranos, and controversy over the pricing of EpiPen, Americans seem to be talking about drugs more than ever.

But what are we talking about when we talk about drugs? Are opioids good or bad, or both? When people talk about prescription drug pricing, are they entering uncharted territory for public discourse? Danya Glabau is a New York-based medical anthropologist who is teaching a class in those very topics. Called Drugs and Society, the class will be at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research starting October 19 and will attempt to get at some fundamental questions about drugs, including defining what a "drug" is and how we conceive of "good drugs" versus "bad drugs." Glabau spoke with VICE about her course.

VICE: How'd the idea of this class came about?
Danya Glabau: My dissertation looked at allergy activism in the US, trying to understand the the culture of food allergies. A big part of looking at any medical condition, or community united by medical condition, is thinking about the different kinds of pharmaceutical interventions that they use. I've been studying the different interactions among communities and drugs for six years, since I started graduate school. This class comes out of that work, in large part.

Can we define what we talk about when we talk about drugs? What even are drugs?
That's a really good question. In this class, in particular, I am trying to look at both the pharmaceutical side, what we think of as "good drugs" in our society, as well as the illicit side. In the tradition of Western medicine, there is this play on how we think of the pharmacon—that's a Greek word that describes substances that can both heal and harm you. That's deeply embedded in Western thinking—that medicine and drugs are both healing and harming. You can see this with, again, drugs like prescription opioids, where they can be really essential to helping people with injuries and they also have this dark side of addiction. You can see that in other classes of drugs, too. For example, chemotherapy drugs: They're very powerful drugs. Some of them have done a lot in extending the lives of people with cancer, but they really come with very serious side effects. What we view as helpful, versus harmful.

I think often, when we talk about drugs, especially outside of scholarly conversations, there is this split between, are we talking about prescription drugs, prescription medications, and the political economy of healthcare in our country, or in our society? Are we talking about bad, dirty drug users, who belong in jail? There is often a much harder split, I think, in public conversation about drugs.

Do you think that Americans have a hard time talking about drugs, or conceptualizing a framework for how to even talk about drugs? It seems to me that there are so many people on various drugs—whether it is antidepressants, or anti-anxiety pills, smoking weed, or whatever it might be—but it's still a not polite conversation to have, though.
I think because pharmaceutical drugs, in particular, are used to treat bodily dysfunction, bodily ills, illness, disease, whatever you want to call it, there is a big taboo about talking about that, in American society in particular. In my research, I was struck after reading about how in Europe there is much less of a taboo around talking about illness. I think the taboo around that in the US is is a big part of it. I mean, I also think it is difficult to think about drugs as a monolithic class.

But there's a real shift in how we are thinking about drugs and disease. It feels like we are making progress, having conversations about what we need to do to care for people with mental illness, or with food allergies, or whatever. There is more conversation to be had. With food allergies, the example recently is the conversation about the pricing of Epinephrine auto-injector, where the community was really united around helping companies expand access to them. Many activists got involved in lobbying their local, or state, governments to loosen restrictions on who could use them, in order to provide Epinephrine in places like schools. Then, all of a sudden, there is this pricing debate, which dovetails with some concerns of people who are already working on the activist side, about the rising cost of the drug. Now, there is skepticism about, Well, was it really, actually, a good idea to work so hard to expand access to this, potentially life-saving drug? I think most the activists say yes, but we should think more carefully about who our allies are, moving forward.

There was that controversy, and then the controversy about Martin Shkreli. Why do drugs seem so controversial this year?

Portraits by Renata Raksha

This article appeared in the October issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.

It's easy to forget that legends are people too—that they wake up with stale breath and crust in the corners of their eyes, drop their iPhones and crack the screens, forget to pick up cream at the market. It's not that we don't think of them as human. It's that we just don't imagine them enduring the daily indignities of being human. We imagine them as ads in the 1950s imagined women: They never sweat or shit.

But when I called her in early September for our interview, Kim Gordon, guitarist, vocalist, and co-founder of Sonic Youth—one of the most iconic and influential noise rock bands of the past 30-plus years—was having a very mundane problem. Her hotel phone was broken.

Brnnng. Brnnng. Brnnng. The staccato buzzing of her publicist's phone tickled my ear and distracted me from the nervous flips my stomach was doing. Phone interviews are how you know God hates journalists—it's like having a long distance blind date. A click. I inhaled, smiled, and prepared to make small talk with one of the Coolest Women Alive. And then the line died. Her publicist rang me again. "Uh, so her phone broke," she said. "Hotel maintenance is coming up. Maybe it'll just be 20 minutes?"

Comforted as I was to know that Gordon doesn't have some superhuman ability to avoid the daily annoyances that swerve into our lives, there was still an ocean between us, literally: We'd scheduled the less-than-ideal phone interview because the 63-year-old artist was in Australia for a series of shows and speaking engagements about "rock, rebellion, and resilience." It might read a little glib, but it's a pretty accurate summation of her career. After forming Sonic Youth with Thurston Moore in 1981, Gordon and the band put out their first studio album, Confusion Is Sex, two years later. While Sonic Youth released a total of 16 records before it broke up in 2011, and is often heralded as the blueprint for many alt-rocks bands (with Gordon herself being tagged the "godmother of grunge"), the group always preferred to experiment with unconventional tunings and custom-made instruments than to court mainstream success.

Gordon cut a path of her own, too, writing for Artforum, curating exhibits, and showing her own artwork; debuting as a producer, at Courtney Love's request, on Hole's critically acclaimed first album, Pretty on the Inside; working on a fashion line; and making guest appearances on everything from a Gus Van Sant film to an episode of Girls. Along the way, she became a feminist icon, praised for her impact, even though she told me "sometimes I just entertainment, you know? It doesn't actually affect things in a larger picture." She bucked the stereotypes of being a "girl in a band" and, last year, subverted the tired old question she has heard too many times by titling her memoir—what else?—Girl in a Band. Since the dissolution of both Sonic Youth and her decades-long marriage to Moore, Gordon makes music with Bill Nace as Body/Head. And she recently checked off yet another first—releasing a single, "Murdered Out," as simply Kim Gordon.

But as intimidating as her résumé is, Gordon does not want you to feel that way. She sweats. She shits. She likes Rihanna's "Work." She doesn't really want to stand out, and she shrugs off even the mere suggestion that she's a legend.

"I don't wanna think that I'm influential or an icon or blah blah blah blah," she said. Her words rushed out, then stopped, and then started again, abruptly. "Ultimately, I feel most confident when I'm just working. Thinking about ideas. That's how I'm most comfortable. Or performing in a group situation." She laughed. "I feel connected to myself, but I can't actually tell you what that is. I mean, I could tell you what my astrologer says I am!"

Gordon was born in Rochester, New York, but when she was five years old, her father accepted a position at UCLA, and the family packed up their station wagon and moved to Los Angeles. An academic instead of showbiz family, they lived in a normal middle-class neighborhood, removed from the celebrity studded canyons, which meant Gordon daydreamed about the glamorous lives of musicians like Buffalo Springfield and Neil Young as much as a kid in Kansas. Her father, a sociologist who was the first to identify and name high school archetypes like jocks, freaks, preps, and theater geeks, proved the absent-minded professor stereotype—he once put her into the bath with her socks on—and her mother, who ran both a seamstress business and the household, was no nonsense and unsentimental in the way that many who lived through the Great Depression were. Their influence, along with her older brother's merciless teasing, caused Gordon to suppress her inner rebel. She became a teenager who listened to jazz and Joni Mitchell, smoked pot and painted, and only flirted with trouble.

"I feel like I can have more fun with it now. I don't care as much. It's just very freeing. I feel like everything I've done has been leading up to this in a way."—Kim Gordon

"Sometimes I think we know on some level the person we're going to be in our life, that if we pay attention, we can piece out that information," Gordon writes in her book. That process was easy for her. Though she cringes at the cliché, she says that she knew she would be an artist since she was a child. Graduating high school just as she turned 17, she bounced from Santa Monica College to Toronto's York University. She started a band with friends as a project and realized she liked performing. She went back to LA, attended Otis Art Institute, and then moved to New York, where she met Moore, started Sonic Youth, and became a legend.

But recently, LA beckoned, and she decided to return to her roots. "I think I've always carried a bit of LA and LA aesthetics," she told me. "One of the things I like most about Los Angeles is driving around and looking at the contrasting houses—one could be a completely different aesthetic. On the other hand, it's kinda scarily existential, 'cause you don't have that pulse of the city that you feel in New York. Even if you aren't doing anything in New York, you feel like you are. 'Cause there's so much activity around you. In LA, you really have to kinda make your own energy in a way."

Gordon never needed much outside stimulus to create, though she seems to have found at least bits of it in her hometown. She certainly never took her cues from conventional sources. "Not that I'm not drawn to some conventional things, but what I'm comfortable expressing is usually something that isn't the most straight, mainstream version of it," she said, as if it were something her legions of fans didn't already know. "I have very unconventional tastes. It's just what I'm drawn to."

Her new single, "Murdered Out," is a funked-out, inspired-by-lowriders tune that features her processed vocals over frayed drums. It was inspired by LA car culture—an ode to dark tints and a black-on-black matte aesthetic that she said is like the "ultimate expression" of "purging the soul."

She laughed when I asked how she developed such unusual receptors. "When I walk around and I'm on tour and exposed to a lot of music, whether it's in a taxi or walking into a store or a restaurant, there's all this music that nobody's listening to, and it is, in a sense, noise," she said. Noise music "is almost like starting at ground zero. When I'm playing it, something about electricity that I find really calming. Being surrounded, it's like a bath of sound or something."

It will be interesting to see how Los Angeles, with its wide-open blue skies and black underbelly, will affect and inspire the other art Gordon will make. "Murdered Out" shows that she's still experimenting, and LA seems to be giving her the freedom to do so.

"I like that you don't have the sense of ambition pounding at your door. I like the idea that you can get lost here. Things are not in such a fish bowl. Maybe things can develop more eccentrically or something," she mused. "I think to some extent I feel like I can have more fun with it now. I don't care as much. It's just very freeing. I feel like everything I've done has been leading up to this in a way. It feels right, basically." Gordon's daughter Coco, a painter who just graduated from art school in Chicago, also recently relocated to LA.

Gordon would like to transition and make visual art her main focus as well, but it's difficult; too many people keep pulling her back to music and performing. There's a reason for that. "After 30 years of playing in a band, it sounds sort of stupid to say, 'I'm not a musician.' But for most of my life, I've never seen myself as one," she writes in Girl in a Band. But maybe that's exactly who she is—a musician. The girl in a band.

"I spent a good deal of my life evading labels," she told me. "Mostly I don't wanna think about who I am."

This article appeared in the October issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

February 21, 2016, started as a routine day for Victor Alvarez. He went to work at Krispy Kreme, expecting his dad to pick him up when he finished his shift. But at 10:30 PM, Victor looked out the window and saw that his father, Jose, had been pulled over by the police right in front of the store, for what he later learned was a broken headlight.

The situation quickly deteriorated. Jose had a criminal record—a nonviolent drug charge from over 20 years ago, for which he had been deported, along with the crime of reentering the country shortly thereafter to be reunited with his young children. That didn't matter to the police officer, who quickly notified ICE that it had Jose Alvarez in custody.

In just a few short hours, Victor's whole life changed. By the early hours of the morning, his father had been deported to Mexico.

Throughout this presidential election season, Democrats have been pushed to acknowledge the central role the party played in contributing to mass incarceration and the criminalization of communities of color. Activists and scholars have specifically focused on a series of "tough on crime" bills passed during the 1990s, including the 1996 welfare reform act (known as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act) and the 1994 crime bill (known as the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act).

But there was also another crucial bill passed during the 1990s—the one responsible for Jose Alvarez's deportation. Twenty years ago this September, President Bill Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibly Act (IIRIRA) into law. Now immigrant activists are campaigning to bring Jose Alvarez back home, and to raise awareness about the impact of IIRIRA on thousands of families across the country.

Like most immigration stories, this one begins with the hope of a better life. Jose Alvarez came to the United States in 1979, in search of job opportunities. He was undocumented, but got a green card under the 1986 immigration reform law. Several years later, in 1995—after he was already married with children—Jose was arrested and convicted on two drug charges for possessing meth. He spent more than three years in prison. When Jose was released in 1999, his green card was revoked, and he was deported.

If not for IIRIRA, Jose might still be in the United States. Both IIRIRA and another bill passed in 1996, the Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), vastly expanded the number of people who were eligible for detention and deportation. Relatively minor, nonviolent crimes—like burglary, tax evasion, and a broad number of drug offenses—were now considered "aggravated felonies" in the administrative immigration context, even if those same crimes did not constitute felonies, aggravated or otherwise, under criminal law.

Importantly, IIRIRA has been applied retroactively, meaning Jose and others convicted of crimes prior to 1996 can still be deported under the law. IIRIRA and AEDPA also made detention and deportation mandatory for a vast number of criminal offenses, so immigration judges cannot provide relief based on circumstances of individual cases.

Jose Alvarez. Photo courtesy of the Alvarez family

Shortly after he was deported for the first time, Jose crossed back into the US to be reunited with his kids and wife. He rebuilt a peaceful and productive life in Long Beach—buying a home, raising six kids, even sending one son into the Marines—until his recent, fateful run-in with the police.

Jose's story is a classic example of how IIRIRA has operated, according to Daniel Hernández, an assistant professor of Spanish, Latina/o, and Latin American Studies at Mount Holyoke College and an expert in immigration policy. "Instead of catching people who arrived recently—like deported people who got caught along the border— created a whole era of interior enforcement," he told me.

In the late 90s, as a result of IIRIRA and AEDPA, detention tripled and became the fastest growing form of incarceration, said Hernández. Deportations also increased rapidly.

"Obama—and Bush before him—couldn't have become the deporter in chief without these laws," Hernández told me.

Watch: What Alabama's Harsh Anti-Immigration Laws Look Like

During this election season, Black Lives Matter and other activists have insisted Hillary Clinton take responsibility (with limited success) in pushing for the passage of welfare reform and the crime bill. But the impact of our flawed criminal justice system on non-citizens remains largely unacknowledged by Democrats and poorly understood by the American public.

"The immigration detention system is obscure—nobody really sees it, even though it's directly related to the criminal justice system in a sequential way," explained Hernández, the Mount Holyoke professor.

Indeed, Obama's policy—deporting "felons not families"—and broader Democratic approaches to immigration reform have mostly reinforced the core idea behind IIRIRA: that the "good" citizens are noncriminals, and the "bad" ones must leave.

Lina Newton, an associate professor of political science at Hunter College, told me that it wasn't just the "tough on crime" approach that linked IIRIRA, the crime bill, and the welfare bill. Over the 1980s and 1990s, according to Newton, there was a growing "division in public mind between taxpayers and the people who live off them." This logic shifted toward immigration, which manifested most overtly in the overwhelming 1994 passage of California's Proposition 187, which denied all but emergency medical care to undocumented people and their children (although it was never enforced).

The 1990s represented a "turning point for immigration becoming linked into the welfare reform discourse," which combined with existing understandings of the immigrant-as-criminal. In that sense, IIRIRA was shaped both by an increasing "tough on crime" rhetoric and an aggressive push to punish those perceived as "freeloaders."

For Victor Alvarez and his family, whatever the reasons for its passage, the impact of IIRIRA could not be more real. His father is now living with relatives in Tijuana, and although Victor, his mother, and his siblings often visit on the weekends, being divided by a border has taken an emotional toll on everyone.

" says he's OK, but I can tell he's not OK—we all can tell," Victor told me. "He just puts on a strong face, so we won't be worried about him."

With the main breadwinner in the family now gone from the United States, the deportation has also cost the family financially. Victor recently dropped out of college to help support his siblings and mothers.

Last month, on the 20th anniversary of the bill being signed into law, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) and a range of advocacy groups sent a letter to former President Bill Clinton, asking him to sign a petition to bring Jose Alvarez back home. (There's also a petition circulating to support that demand.)

"Everybody in the community knows that '96 was bad," Salvador Sarmiento, the national campaign coordinator for NDLON, told me. "But nobody knows where to start the conversation. And that's why the specific ask to bring Jose back is important."

Although Hillary Clinton has publicly agreed to repeal one provision of IIRIRA if elected—the three and ten years bans on reentry for people who had overstayed their visas or entered the US without authorization—she has said little about whether she would seek to rollback other facets of the legislation.

Asked what NDLON says to Secretary Clinton if it could speak to her campaign directly, Sarmiento was clear. "Her party is responsible for this terrible law that is keeping this family apart and many thousands of families like them. We would ask, would she take a stand and join the effort to bring Jose back?"

Neither the Clinton Foundation nor Hillary Clinton's campaign team responded to comment requests from VICE about whether they would support the petition.

When I asked Victor Alvarez to share his thoughts about the future, and whether he thought the campaign to bring his father back would be successful, he didn't hesitate.

"You have to be hopeful," he told me. "There's a chance."

Follow Aviva Stahl on Twitter.

In theory, a group of mascots competing for the "Gold Fluffy" award at the World Mascot Association Championships is primed for the Christopher Guest mockumentary treatment. Like the subjects of Guest's other comedies, mascots make up a strange little subculture with lots of opportunities for quirk and conflict. Unsurprisingly, Mascots is most reminiscent of Guest's earlier film Best in Show, yet it doesn't feel quite as memorable or funny. These are familiar beats; there aren't really any jokes in Mascots that you can't already find in Guest's filmography, though if you liked them there, you'll still probably like them here.

Mascots, for the most part, is just a gentle rehashing of Guest's best works: the exploration of a strange pocket in the world, the immense earnestness that often leads to sadness, the competitive nature (and the ridiculousness of watching people compete for something that means nothing), the usual cast (Jane Lynch, Parker Posey, Fred Willard, Ed Begley Jr., Christopher Guest reprising his role as Corky St. Clair, etc.), and the semi-improvisational nature. This makes Mascots easily watchable for Guest fans—and I assume the majority of audiences checking it out on Netflix will already be established Guest fans—though it will likely be a bit of disappointment, almost as though something's missing.

The central plot, as it were, of Mascots concerns a select group of mascots (both solo and duos) as they prepare for the eighth annual competition. Among those are an aging dancer looking for one last shot at glory as Alvin the Armadillo (Parker Posey); a bickering married couple (Sarah Baker and Zach Woods, the newcomer who most effortlessly fits into Guest's mockumentary world) whose personal issues seep into their mascot performances; and Tommy "Zook" Zucarello (Chris O'Dowd, who headed up Guest's mostly disappointing HBO series Family Tree), an overly aggro man performing as an overly aggro giant fist. Fans and judges fit into the world, too, but it's the mascots who are the prime focus. In fact, this creates an interesting—and welcome—contrast with the "real" world of mascots, the people who are normally hidden behind large costumes, who perform for little fanfare or accolades, and then shuffle away without us ever knowing how their names are now front and center in Mascots. (In a way, Mascots can be seen as the fictional, exaggerated version of Hulu's Behind the Mask docuseries.) Mascots enthusiastically showcases these people, alternating between celebrating and pitying them, but mostly focused on the often sad reasons why these mascots are mascots.

Predictably for a Guest mockumentary, the best and funniest moments are when the characters reveal just a bit too much about themselves, when they try to say something upbeat but a hint of sadness or confusion bleeds through. As always, Guest treats this subculture with a form of care: It's clear that there's a lot to laugh at, but they are still humans, trying to make something out of an occupation that is never thought of. But, of course, there are still plenty of funny sequences. Some that stand out include Ed Begley Jr.'s deadpan delivery when discussing his micropenis (ahem, "phallically challenged"), and a mascot showing up to a performance only to realize he is supposed to entertain an auditorium full of blind children. The easiest laughs come from fully costumed mascots performing ordinary tasks: using the bathroom, or dealing with a police officer. But all of this is broad, and sometimes phoned-in, as if there were better takes out there we could have gotten.

Yet Mascots coasts along on the strength of its actors (Bob Balaban, Jennifer Coolidge, and John Michael Higgins all show up) and the charm that is a mainstay of all Guest mockumentaries, regardless of quality. When it starts to sag in the second act, Mascots pumps back up the energy with the actual mascot competition. The choreography is a lot more stunning than you'd expect from oversize costumes, and it's actually a fascinating watch—and surprisingly tense at times. Yet none of the characters have been fully fleshed-out and explored enough to find us rooting for a particular one at the end. The mascots are fun but fleeting; the competition is enjoyable but ultimately not one you're likely to watch again.

Follow Pilot Viruet on Twitter.

Mascots is currently streaming on Netflix.

For two years, I've traveled the globe collecting dreams for my World Dream Atlas photography project. Below is an assortment of the most intense nightmares I've encountered this year. I had plenty I could choose.

Recently, I spent time in Iraqi Kurdistan on the front lines reporting on the war against ISIS. Not surprisingly, the Kurds there had particularly vivid nightmares. Despite talking with many people, I don't think I collected one pleasant dream the entire time I was there. In Iraq, as in other Muslim countries, good dreams are believed to be messages from Allah, while nightmares come from the devil. That perspective, enshrined in the Qur'an itself, leads many Muslims to pay close attention to their nocturnal visions and regularly seek interpretation from companions or religious leaders.

In rural Morocco, a craftsman recounted recurring nightmares of the devil attempting to enter his front door. Asked for advice, I suggested that before he fell asleep that night, the man should rehearse confronting the devil at the door and casting him away. It was a technique I had learned from a PTSD specialist in California. The following morning, the Moroccan man mournfully informed me that he had done as I instructed, and that the devil had simply changed tactics. He was now trying to come in through the back window. That is exactly how it is with our darkest fears. We can cast them off all we like, but they will always find a way back in.

Follow Morin's project collecting dreams at World Dream Atlas.

"I saw a father with his two sons. The youngest son was cowering on the ground as the father kicked him repeatedly, treating him like trash. Then the father instructed the older son to hammer nails into the younger son's back, which he did. Watching all of this, I made a sound of disapproval at the man. He turned to me and said, 'If you don't like it, you can come and take his place.'"

- Erbil, Iraq

"I was picked on pretty often as a kid. Whenever someone was particularly mean to me, I remember just feeling this intense hatred. If I was particularly angry or upset, I would have dreams of being burned alive in my house. I would just stand there, trapped—looking out the window to safety, as the flames closed in."

- New York, USA

"Sometimes I see the faces of the men I've killed. Killing a person is not like killing an insect."

- Horlivka, Ukraine

"In the dream, I was washing this severed head. I was very calm and methodical about it. I didn't see the face ever. I could just see the lateral cross-section of the spine, and these bloody chunks, and there was this beautiful blond hair attached. I remember wanting the hair for myself. I think I wanted to wear it, but I had to wash off all the blood and bits first. When I was younger, I wanted different hair very badly. I would cut my hair off and hide it under my bed. I always thought that it would grow back in a different way."

- New York, USA

"I saw my brother killed by a car in front of me. Sometimes I dream that I die the same way as him. Maybe it's a premonition. Every night, I fill a glass with water and place it under my bed. It quells the spirits that bring bad dreams."

- Havana, Cuba

"I have a recurring dream where I'm in bed as the roof collapses in on me. The first time I had it, I was 30 years old. The next morning, I found out that my uncle had died. More recently, the dream came just before the death of my cousin, and then again just before the death of my neighbor."

- Ben Haddou, Morocco

"I'm an observer of my own dead body. I watch my corpse bloat and then rot, as these birds arrive and eat my flesh very efficiently. Then, the insects come. When they're finished, they leave these clean white bones. I pick up these bones in my arms and present them to members of my family, my friends, and my lovers standing nearby. They're not interested. My body is only important to me."

- New York, USA

"In the dream, I get impregnated without actual sex happening, and this little baby slithers out of me. It's edamame-size—translucent and teardrop shaped, without a face. I know it's a demon baby, and that it's going to grow up to be pure evil. I know it's going to become a monster and cause the end of the world and me along with it, but I want to protect it. I flood my entire house up to my neck, so that my demon baby can swim around and grow bigger. When I talk about evil, I'm talking about the kind of evil you see in comic books. I don't really believe in evil. I think mostly people are just misunderstood. Even Hitler was just a real misunderstood motherfucker. That dude just wanted to be an artist. I think we can all relate. I'm a dominatrix, so I advertise myself as a bad girl. Do I seem like a bad girl? My job is essentially to hurt men. I hurt them, yet I also nurture them in ways they don't even understand themselves."

- Black Rock City, USA

"I lay on my bed in a boundless expanse—motionless as a menacing black cloud with three nodes approached. The cloud brushed my cheek as it passed. The next day, I was in a terrible motorcycle crash, fracturing my arm, ribs, and skull."

- Ben Haddou, Morocco

"I dreamed that I was in a forest, and everything was burning. I had to keep going on the path, even though the heat was extremely painful. I saw other people leave the path, fall down, and burst into flames. It took all of my strength and will to continue. By the end of it, my hair and skin had burned away. But when I reached the edge of the forest, I received a new skin—one that could make me invisible and hide me from my enemies."

- Berlin, Germany

"I was locked in a washroom with a knife in my hand. People came single file, one by one, begging for me to slash their throats in an act of mercy. They were smiling. The terror of what was happening was so awful. I knew that I was doing what they wanted me to do, but I kept thinking, There must be a better way. There must be a solution, before so many people die at my hands. I awoke and could feel the sensation of slashing throats for most of the day. There was this fear of myself—this sickening feeling that somehow I desired this thing to be lived out."

- Edmonton, Canada

"You hear stories like that all the time—like when terrorists came to the house of the Fogel family in Itamar and killed everybody except one girl. They even killed a baby. In my dreams, terrorists come to my house and kill my whole family. There is a funeral, and I am the only one left. I wake up with tears covering my face."

- Neve Daniel, West Bank

"There was a group of three faces—a man and two women. I tried to block them, but once they established eye contact, I couldn't shake them. I could sense them trying to psychically operate on my brain. They wanted to disable me. I felt a pulsation inside my skull—it was like a tiny helicopter taking off and a shard of egg shell falling away. I begged the helicopter to stay. I was afraid it was one of my souls—and once it left, it would be lost forever."

- Ljubljana, Slovenia

"I was a musician in America once: New York, Chicago, San Francisco. Several years ago, they deported me, and now I live in this park. The bench is my living room. Behind the statue is my bedroom. I can sleep well here, unless the children throw rocks at me. Mostly, I dream about my past, my family. My father—rest in peace—was my best friend. I was 18 when he died. He tried to escape Cuba on a raft in 1968, and he drowned in the sea. I dreamed once that I was with him when the raft began to sink. He tried to save me. We died together."

- Havana, Cuba

"When I was about four years old, I had a dream about a witch entering our home. She came to take my mother away. My family background is Iraqi Jewish, so witchcraft mixed in with the bible was part of our culture. My mother specifically practiced a lot of folkloric magic when I was young. I remember ancient Hebrew benedictions being written out on thin pieces of paper and having to drink them in a tea. My mother was a witch, but she was a good witch. She did it to protect us."

- Tiberius, Israel

"I had a recurring dream of a tiger. He would come into my home. The first time it happened, I grabbed the tiger's head and broke his neck, because I was afraid. I thought he wanted to kill me. I had that same dream for years, and every time I killed the tiger. One night, though, the tiger came again, and I was tired of killing, and in that moment, I said, 'OK, I'm going to let it happen. I'm going to let him eat me.' The tiger stood on his hind legs. He reached out his claws and tore open my chest. He opened my heart. In that moment, his strength became mine—a strength that I had only gained because I let him kill me. The power of the tiger is surrender. Fear had made me weak—but finally, I stopped fighting a force within myself and let it consume me. I never dreamed of the tiger again."

- Black Rock City, USA

Follow Roc Morin on Twitter.

On this episode of Daily VICE, we sit down with Atlanta rap legend Jeezy to talk about growing up, his friendship with T.I., and the influence his music had on the 2008 presidential race.

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

This article originally appeared on VICE Greece.

No one really knew what was up with the new nightclub LOHAN, besides the fact it was supposed to open on October 15 in the Gazi neighborhood of Athens. The club was set up in less than a week and aggressively promoted during the two days before its opening. Lindsay Lohan seemed to be involved in some way, but it was unclear how exactly or why—if she was an investor, like it was rumored—she was getting involved with a nightclub in Greece.

And then there it was: a huge sign reading "LOHAN" on the façade of a club on Iera Odou Street. Shortly after midnight on Friday, outrageously expensive cars arrived outside, valets were running around, and a line of club-goers formed in front of LOHAN's doors. But the assembled photographers and camera crews were mostly waiting to see if Lindsay Lohan herself would show up.

Which she did, shortly after 1 AM. She confirmed to the press that she had invested in the club and elaborated on the entertainment industry, the refugee crisis, Greece, xenophobia, and how having fun is a way to "take a bad situation and make it good."

She told the crowd of reporters that her club is a way to thank Greece. "Greece has welcomed so many refugees from Syria, and this is something to celebrate," she said. "I want LOHAN to be a celebration of people coming together." Her aim was to create a space where people from anywhere can have a great time. Even people who don't drink—"We've got hookah," she added. She also told the crowd that some of the club's proceeds will go toward charities for refugee children.

Then she went back inside, and the photographers' attention returned to the arrival of more fancy cars and more dressed-to-the-nines Greek D-listers.

See more pictures below.

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

Photo by Sarah Rice/Getty Images

US News

Trump and His Friends Say Election Is Already Rigged
Donald Trump and surrogates over the weekend stepped up claims the election is being "rigged" by media bias and Democratic Party voter fraud. Trump tweeted Sunday that the election is "absolutely being rigged" by the media and "at many polling places." His cheerleader, former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani, said that "dead people generally vote for Democrats," while former GOP House speaker Newt Gingrich singled out Philadelphia—which can tilt potentially decisive electoral college vote prize Pennsylvania—as ground zero for vote-rigging. —Bloomberg

Three Arrested After Tyson Gay's Daughter Killed in Shooting
US sprinter Tyson Gay's 15-year-old daughter was killed in a shooting in Lexington, Kentucky. Trinity Gay was shot in the neck during an exchange of fire between two vehicles in a restaurant parking lot early Sunday. Police have charged Dvonta Middlebrooks, 21, Chazerae Taylor, 38, and D'markeo Taylor, 19, with wanton endangerment. —WKYT

FBI Investigates Firebombing of GOP HQ in North Carolina
Police in North Carolina are investigating after a Republican Party office in the state was firebombed and another building tagged with graffiti warning "Nazi Republicans" to "leave town or else." The FBI is assisting local police in Hillsborough after the graffiti—swastika and all—was discovered Sunday morning. No one has been reported injured in the attack. —NBC News

WikiLeaks Dumps More Clinton Campaign Emails
WikiLeaks has released yet another cache of Hillary Clinton insider emails apparently hacked from the account of her campaign chairman, John Podesta. The release includes discussion of appealing to black voters and how the candidate can effectively apologize. —USA Today

International News

Iraqi Military Launches Operation to Retake Mosul from ISIS
The massive effort to retake the pivotal Iraqi city of Mosul from the Islamic State is officially underway. Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced the assault conducted by the Iraqi government and Kurdish Peshmerga, backed by a US-led coalition, on early Monday. The UN estimates up to 1 million people could be displaced from the city during the operation. —Al Jazeera

Prison Riot in Brazil Leaves 25 Dead
At least 25 inmates in a prison in Boa Vista, Brazil, died in fights over the weekend. Seven of the dead were reportedly beheaded and six others burned to death. —AFP

Thai General Election to Go Ahead in 2017
A general election will take place in Thailand late next year as planned, local media reported Monday, as Thais continue to grieve over the death of King Bhumibol Adulyadej. The head of Thailand's royal advisory council, Prem Tinsulanonda, will stand in as regent until Crown Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn formally succeeds the king. —Reuters

Nigerian Schoolgirls Reunite with Families
Twenty-one schoolgirls freed from captivity last week by Islamist group Boko Haram have been reunited with their families in the Nigerian capital of Abuja. A government official said talks were underway to free more girls kidnapped in Chibok in 2014. Of 276 girls kidnapped, 197 remain unaccounted for. —BBC News

Everything Else

'The Accountant' Debuts at No.1 at the Box Office
Ben Affleck's new movie The Accountant exceeded expectations by opening to $24.7 million this weekend and reaching No.1 at the box office despite mediocre reviews. Last week's No.1, The Girl on the Train, fell to third, taking just under $12 million. —The Wall Street Journal

Alec Baldwin Endorses Charlie Brown
The actor endorsed Charlie Brown in a promo video for Peanuts Rock the Vote, a website where people can register to vote, and also vote for their favorite Peanuts character. "Charlie Brown persevered, and so did I," says Baldwin. —The Huffington Post

European Probe Descends Toward Mars
A European Space Agency probe has left its mothership after a seven-month journey from Earth and is headed toward the surface of Mars. Schiaparelli is Europe's first attempt in almost 15 years to land an exploratory rover on Mars. —The Guardian

Killer Mike Is Open to Anti-Vax Movement
Rapper Killer Mike said he was "open" to the anti-vaccination movement. "I am very open to hear from anti-Vax'ers," he wrote on Twitter, before posting a picture of Andrew Wakefield's discredited 2016 documentary Vaxxed. —Noisey

Uber CEO and Pittsburg Mayor Discussed State Fines
When Pittsburgh mayor Bill Peduto wrote a letter to Pennsylvania's Public Utility Commission—which slapped Uber with a $11.4 million fine—pleading for leniency on behalf of the company, it was written at the behest of the ride-share giant, according to emails obtained by Motherboard. —Motherboard

Almost 200 Countries Agree to Phase Out Greenhouse Gas
Nearly 200 countries have agreed to the early phase out of a potent greenhouse gas that is projected to warm the planet 0.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. At a UN conference in Rwanda, negotiators agreed to phase out hydrofluorocarbons. —VICE News

A van at the Trump rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on Saturday. All photos by the author

For more than a week, the Trump campaign has been grappling with the now- infamous pussy-grabbing tape followed by the accusations that Donald Trump sexually harassed and assaulted women. Republican officials have been put in the awkward position of endorsing a scandal-ridden and erratic candidate or rejecting him and earning the ire of his supporters.

For hardcore Trump supporters, though, the real scandal is the way the media is hyping dubious, decades-old stories to tear down the one man who could rescue the country from doom.

Many of these supporters gathered this Saturday in a car-dealership parking lot in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, for a Trump rally. The usual signifiers were there: "Deplorable Me" and "Trump that Bitch" T-shirts, an overwhelmingly white and mostly middle-aged or older crowd. The attendees were mostly men, but there were plenty of women as well, none of whom seemed to have an iota of doubt about their candidate.

"The media, they're obsessed with sex, but the people are not," said Ellie Martin, a volunteer with the Trump campaign.

Martin said she's angry that media outlets are paying more attention to the women's stories than to emails from Hillary Clinton's campaign released by WikiLeaks. She's scared of what might happen in a world where Trump loses the election, worried that taking in more refugees would be devastating to a country that she believes is already drowning in debt. As a conservative living in hyper-liberal Vermont, she's been thrilled to see Trump bring voters like her out of the woodwork. And she's not happy with the Republicans who rapidly abandoned the Trump train in light of recent events.

"It's the same old, same old Republican Party," she said. "They shoot themselves in the foot every chance they get."

To Stacey Danforth, a Massachusetts real estate broker who was at the rally with her brother, Patrick Lundgren, the complaints against Trump look transparently political.

"My thought is it's pretty convenient," she said. "I think Bill Clinton's actions were worse than Donald Trump saying what he did."

Almost universally, the women I spoke with at the rally said that the complaints are exaggerated or completely invented, echoing what Trump and his surrogates have said about the allegations, including the charge that the women should have spoken up before now.

Sandy Gallan

"If I was a woman and I was on a plane 20-plus years ago, and someone did that to me, I would have said something immediately," said Sandy Gallan, a Vermont teacher wearing a hand-lettered "Deplorables for Trump" shirt, referring to allegations made by Jessica Leeds. "Why would you wait 20 or 30 years?"

Gallan said the important thing is to focus on issues like the deficit and Obamacare. She thinks a president Trump would restore a sense of cohesiveness and togetherness to the country.

"President Obama, when he was first elected, said that one of his goals was to end racial divisions in our country, and I think it has gotten much worse," she said.

A nurse wearing a flag scarf and a hat decorated with a Trump sticker ("It's an American look, something you will not see with Hillary") said there are bigger women's issues than the allegations against Trump, like the potential influx of Syrian refugees.

"We'll be wearing burkas if we have Hillary Clinton," said the woman, who declined to give her name.

She added that she's convinced Clinton has Parkinson's disease, was doped up for the debates, and is probably incontinent. She said she's noticed the outline of a catheter in Clinton pants. If Clinton gets elected, she said, the real president will be her longtime aide Huma Abedin—"the Muslim in the White House."

Among the Trump supporters I spoke to, the question of their candidate's bad behavior—the target of so many attacks from his opponents—was beside the point. Listening to Trump address the rapt crowd on this perfect fall day, it was easy to see why: Who cares about some creepy acts when America is about to fail? The country, Trump told his audience, is in rapid decline. Clinton ought to be in jail. She supports open borders, which threaten the very sovereignty of the nation. If Clinton wins, this could be the last competitive democratic election in the US. But if he wins, illegal immigration will disappear, crime will plummet, and no one will think Americans are a bunch of stupid people anymore.

Bobbie Files (left)

Beyond that bigger picture, some in the crowd thought the media focus on the sexual assault allegations reflected misplaced values. Bobbie Files, a Massachusetts real estate agent, agreed with other supporters that there's probably nothing to the allegations, and she said the focus on them risks depicting women as powerless victims. Working in a male-dominated environment, she said, she hears men say plenty of crude things about how they'd like to approach women.

"What I always say to the guys is, 'I dare you to go and do it,'" she said. "And if a female does let a guy grope her—that's permission."

Files said it bugged her that some Clinton supporters complained about Trump standing behind her during the second debate, comparing it to stalking. "Get your pussy off the pedestal," she said. "Would anybody be saying, 'He's stalking, he's threatening,' if Hillary was a guy?"

The only person I met at the rally who said she took the allegations against Trump seriously was Barbara St. Gelais. She and her husband, unlike many in the parking lot, aren't committed to voting for the GOP candidate. They came to the rally with her Trump-supporting sister and brother-in-law, Patricia and Wayne Tucker.

To the Tuckers, it was obvious that the women coming forward were politically motivated liars. Why else wouldn't they have spoken up before now? Why wouldn't they have gotten angry about the mistreatment they described? But St. Gelais disagreed. She said things have improved over the decades when it comes to what women have to endure, and that's changed our conversations for the better.

"I think it's wonderful that people are speaking up," she said. "They couldn't be angry then because there was nothing they could do."

The two couples obviously disagreed about this, but they were laughing and joking, showing no signs of letting the disagreement come between them. Maybe there's hope for the country after all?

For her part, St. Gelais said she wanted to keep an open mind about who to vote for. "I'm just waiting to see if anything else comes out," she said.

Follow Livia Gershon on Twitter.

As you've no doubt known for months, this past weekend was the 950th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings in 1066. England! But also: France! Yes, on October 14 all those years ago—as accepted history goes—King Harold was killed after he'd done a great job of beating a Viking army in Yorkshire.

When Duke William—i.e. William the Bastard, or William the Conquerer—took over, he brought in changes that have somehow led to the England we know today. The one where thousands of people, in 2016, pull on their chain link and mount their horses to reenact a really old battle.

After a group of reenactors followed in King Harold's hoofsteps from Yorkshire to East Sussex, Battle Abbey became home to loads of men and women facing off again on both Saturday and Sunday. We sent photographer Chris Bethell down to chat to some of the people there about just why they like getting all dressed up and play-fighting with massive swords.

Follow Chris Bethell on Twitter.

Time for "How Scared Should I Be?" the column that quantifies the scariness of everything under the sun and teaches you how to allocate that most precious of natural resources: your fear.

You can't not vote this year. The Washington Post editorial board has called Donald Trump a "unique threat to American democracy." Alex Jones has called Hillary Clinton an "abject, psychopathic demon from hell that as soon as she gets into power is going to try to destroy the planet." Basically, however you feel about the candidates, November 8, 2016, is going to be a consequential day in human history.

But here's an added wrinkle: Millions of voters are convinced—against all evidence—that fraud at the polls is going to be rampant this year, so Donald Trump has asked his supporters to become "Trump Election Observers" in order to help him "Stop Crooked Hillary from Rigging This Election!"

"So important that you watch other communities, because we don't want this election stolen from us," Trump said during a recent speech before a mostly white crowd in suburban Pittsburgh, implying that the fraud would be happening in Pennsylvania.

The racial implications of telling white crowds to watch out for "other communities" rigging the election are obvious. In an editorial, the Baltimore Sun linked Trump's comments to voter ID laws that critics have accused of making it harder for black people to vote. "Observing is one thing, harassment is another—and states are often ill-prepared to police the practice themselves," wrote the Sun.

And Trump himself did little to downplay the notion that he was inciting violence when he told a crowd on August 22, "and when say 'watch' you know what I'm talking about, right?"

Melted campaign signs are seen at the Orange County Republican Headquarters in Hillsborough, North Carolina, on Sunday, October 16, 2016. (AP Photo/Jonathan Drew)

A Republican Party office in Hillsborough, North Carolina, was firebombed overnight Saturday, the latest escalation of the 2016 presidential race into outright political violence. Vandals apparently tossed a bottle filled with a flammable substance into Orange County GOP headquarters, charring pro-Donald Trump signs and furniture. They also scrawled "Nazi Republicans leave town or else" and a swastika on a nearby wall in spray paint, embracing a cavalier historical analogy that has long been embraced against Republicans but especially against Trump this year.

No one was injured in the incident, which wasn't noticed until Sunday. Local police and the feds are investigating what North Carolina governor Pat McCrory has called "an attack on our democracy," the Charlotte Observer reports.

The attack came during an especially tense stretch in an often-heated campaign. Four days ago, during a speech in West Palm Beach, Florida, alleged billionaire Trump alluded to a "global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth, and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities."

So far, Trump has not explicitly targeted any group in his new shtick. But there's a long history of the candidate sending coded messages to racists and bigots of all kinds––like the infamous Star of David tweet from last July, which stoked fears among some Jewish Americans that a major contender for president was willing to appeal to white nationalists for votes. And the new globalist conspiracy line is in keeping with anti-Semitic tropes over the decades.

Trump supporters who identify as part of the alt-right movement have, in the past, appropriated the Pepe the Frog meme and decorated him with swastikas. The symbol has become so prominent that Hillary Clinton felt the need to explain it on her website last month.

For his part, North Carolina state GOP executive director Dallas Woodhouse told the Associated Press that this weekend's firebombing constitutes an act of "political terrorism" and that the bottle landed near couches where volunteers are known to nap after-hours.

Hillary Clinton tweeted that the attack was "horrific and unacceptable." Democrats then raised $13,000 to help rebuild the office, which was completely destroyed.

"Animals representing Hillary Clinton and Dems in North Carolina just firebombed our office in Orange County because we are winning," Trump tweeted out in his typical belicose style.

As of Monday morning, no suspects had been apprehended in connection with the attack.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Warning: Spoilers for episode three ahead.

There's nothing more fundamental to existence than change. We grow, we die. Everything that was cool becomes corny. You buy a new iPhone and suddenly your old charger won't work. And yet, change is also what we want and never seem to get, stuck as most of us are in our habits and routines. "I guess people like to read about what they want most and experience least," Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) says in the third episode episode, winking at the audience that tunes in each week to watch spectacular violence, adventure, and romance from the lazy comfort of their couches or beds.

But change is absolutely the theme of HBO's Westworld's third episode, "The Stray." This week, we see how recent events are disrupting the show's world as well as get new information that alters our perceptions of what has and will happen. Things are changing and getting stranger.

Alice's Adventures in Horrorland

We open with another creepy basement therapy session between Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and Bernard. He makes her read a passage from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland . "How queer everything is today," Alice says. Later, Dolores notes that this book is like every other one on her Robot Self-Actualization 101 Reading List: "It's about change."

But Dolores isn't falling into a wonderland—she's living in a land of horrors where she's the prey of monsters both human and programmed. What will happen when she falls down the hole into understanding her own reality?

One of the joys of Westworld is the way we get to see scenes play out multiple times with new twists thrown in. Back at home with her new fatherbot, Dolores finds the gun she dug up last episode, and it triggers memories of the Man in Black (Ed Harris) dragging her into the barn. This time, we see he pulls out a gigantic knife. Perhaps he didn't rape her but mutilated her like the croupier in his crazed maze hunt?

Back at HQ, Bernard gives her the red pill/blue pill option from The Matrix : Would she rather know the horrible truth of her reality or stay blissful and ignorant? She says she wants to stay in her loop, but she can't. She has changed. At the start of the episode, her programming wouldn't let her fire a gun, but by the end, she's murdered a would-be rapist robot and fled into the woods.

Photo by John P. Johnson/courtesy of HBO

Teddy Gets a New Past

While Dolores changes, Teddy (James Marsden) requires some reprogramming, Dr. Ford (Anthony Hopkins) needles Teddy about his role in life, and Teddy, booted in safe mode, vacillates between his corny programmed dialogue and his robotic self-analysis. (The actors are really having fun in these scenes, and it translates to the screen.)

When Teddy starts talking about his dark past, Ford pipes in: "Ah yes, your mysterious backstory... we never bothered to give you one. Just a formless guilt you'll never atone for." Then he uploads a new one about a "villain called Wyatt."

Back in the park, Teddy and the sheriff go off to hunt down Wyatt. We see some of the gory backstory, and Teddy's ominous descriptions of how Wyatt has gone crazy and makes his men wear the faces of the dead. (You have to admire how the show uses every cinematic trick to make us care about a storyline and characters that they literally told us are fictions created only moments ago.)

The posse finds a truly grisly scene of half-dead bodies strapped to trees, then all hell breaks loose. "I told you we should have done the riverboat thing!" one frightened guest yips.

Photo by John P. Johnson/courtesy of HBO

Who's Arnold?

Dr. Ford's own backstory gets a rewrite this episode. After Elsie (Shannon Woodward) notices that the malfunctioning robots have been speaking to an invisible person named Arnold, Bernard confronts him, and Ford admits that he didn't create the park alone. He had a partner named Arnold. While Ford wanted completely controllable robots, Arnold wanted to create actual consciousness. He thought he could "bootstrap" it by having the robots think of their code as the voice of God. It didn't work—or did it?

Caught in a Loop

I've said before that Westworld could use a bit of humor, and we're finally getting some this episode, including a great scene where a group of robots exchange insults and quips with one another around an unlit campfire. They freeze up, and we learn they are stuck in a loop because the woodcutter robot glitched out and fled into the woods. No one else was programmed to chop.

Elsie and Ashley (Luke Hemsworth) find mysterious woodcarvings, each of which has some kind of constellation carved into them. They discover the missing woodcutter stuck in a crevice, like a Roomba trapped beneath a piece of furniture. He smacks back-and-forth against the rock walls, then scrambles up the rope and smashes his head in with a boulder. Ouch.

Bang Bang

William (Jimmi Simpson) also changes, finally enjoying the pleasures of the park. He strolls around with a smile and gets mixed up in a classic Western showdown. He kills the killer, but not before he—and we—learn that the robots actually can shoot humans. While the Man in Black didn't flinch at any of the dozens of shots fired at him, William is knocked down with a big ol' bruise on his shoulder.

Do the guns in Westworld contain bullets, paintballs, and blanks, and switch what gets fired based on who the gun is pointed at? The actual rules of Westworld don't seem clear yet, and the bruise makes me wonder how the human guests are protected from other humans attacking and assaulting them with knifes or fists. Perhaps we'll learn soon.

William has a taste for the park now and convinces Logan (Ben Barnes) to go on a side quest with him. Logan is a little upset that they are paying "40K a day to jerk off, alone, in the woods, playing white hat," and then Dolores—veering entirely from her normal programming—runs into their campfire, collapsing.

Crazy Fan Theory Time

Part of the joy of TV in the post- Lost era is predicting what crazy twists we'll see. One interesting theory I've heard is that the storylines are not taking place at the same time. What if William and Logan are adventuring decades before (or after?) the Man in Black? Could William even be the Man in Black, long before he turns into a maze-hunting monster? If so, that might explain the inconsistencies with the guns...

The newly introduced Arnold also invites theorizing about existing storylines. Did Arnold create the mysterious maze? Did he program the robots to unlock their consciousness when the right Shakespeare quote was uttered?

When Elsie and Ashley are hunting the woodcutter, they joke a little about their programming. I'm not sure if those two are robots, but I am sure that you don't have a show about robots that are indistinguishable from humans without having a few of the supposed human characters turn out to be androids. Hell, maybe they all are. Robot labor comes cheap in Westworld, so why not have the robots program and service the other robots?

Follow Lincoln Michel on Twitter.

Photo by Nicolaus Czarnecki

The Science Behind Pixar Exhibition is the newest show at the California Science Center, a family-friendly science museum and aquarium in Los Angeles whose main claim to fame is that it houses the taxidermied corpse of the Space Shuttle Endeavour. The name "The Science Behind Pixar" may call to mind a bunch of cynical, vaguely educational displays about how the fish in Finding Nemo swim, and how high the house in Up would go in real life. But the good news is that this show somehow manages to be even nerdier than that, in a good way.

The unspoken question Pixar seems to be addressing here is, "Why are my teachers making me learn all this dumb math and science?" Answer: "So you can make the next Toy Story and Inside Out when you grow up." Surprisingly non-tedious displays allow kids of all ages to participate in the process Pixar uses to make its iconic movies. You can make shapes in three dimensions. You can animate characters' faces and limbs, and then you can add texture, lighting, and special effects, and it's all in the name of getting kids to be enthusiastic about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) jobs.

Thanks to new public incentives, more and more kids are being encouraged to go STEM. Sure, STEM degrees land recipients in uninspiring fields like petroleum geology and aviation metallurgy, but, it turns out, they can also make movies. Two such STEM majors at Pixar, Tom Porter, vice president of development, and Tony DeRose, a senior scientist at Pixar Research, were at the exhibition when I visited last week. They told me how the magic shop of wonders we call Pixar began as a place for STEM majors to tinker with computers in an effort to see if you could maybe think about making movies with them. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Photo by Michael Malyszko

VICE: I couldn't help but notice there's really no mention of movie directors or writers or actors or anything like that here. What's the deal?
Tom Porter: There's nothing about the creative side. This is much more focused on the science training, the math training that leads into the technical side of what gets done at Pixar. But you're right. This absolutely ignores what the story artists do, and what the designers do. This is all about sure these kids understand that what they're learning in sixth grade math and eleventh grade physics is actually relevant to something.

As someone with a science or math background, what's the difference between how you approach the creation of a Pixar character, and someone like a director?
Tony DeRose: Suppose you want to build a character like Lightning McQueen. You can think of building that character as kind of analogous to building a marionette in real life. You first have to create its basic shape—carve the wood or styrofoam or whatever. In digital form, that shape creation is called modeling. The next thing you need to do is kinda spray-paint the model. And how does light reflect off of that surface? Is it shiny? Is it dull? Is it bumpy? That's the texturing and surfacing stage. The texturing and surfacing area over there describes that...

Did Pixar start out like that? As a place that was full of science-minded people?
Porter: came in at the end of those Lucasfilm days, and he really focused on character animation. Up until John walked in, it was a bunch of people like me who had gotten their master's in computer science or math or something—all technical staff. Slowly over time, as Toy Story got going, artistic people, like storytellers and designers came in, and that was the major transition that happened.

Can you give me an example of a big piece of scientific work that you pioneered at Pixar?
DeRose: Personally, the biggest "aha" that I was involved in as a researcher directly was when Toy Story was originally done, if you go back and look at Buzz Lightyear for instance from This must be a Toy Story 2 or 3 Buzz. In the first Toy Story, there would be a hard crease right here because they just stuck the nose inside the face, and they just intersected each other, because we didn't know how to create really complicated smooth surfaces. So I was involved in some of the math and software to basically create any kind of smooth surface in a way that would be most efficient for computers and could be controlled by artists.

So being "senior scientist" really means applying the scientific method? Hypothesis, experimentation, conclusion, all that?
It's very much an iterative process. We build tools and test them with artists, and they'll give us feedback about what's working, and what's not. And then we'll take that feedback and try to improve our algorithm, software, and user interfaces, take it back to the artists, and eventually it becomes good enough to give them, and they can start using it in production. Sometimes they peter out, and we go, Alright, we learned we don't wanna do that. And then we back up and pick up some other thread.

I noticed there's an exhibit over there called "Computing Believable Surface Textures." Has it been tough trying to translate all this science jargon into something kids understand?
Porter: There was a lot of work done for this exhibit, which started with the Boston Museum of Science. There was probably two and a half years of work. Tony worked with them to solve that problem: How do you take the full complexity of 15 different departments—rigging, modeling, hair-simulation, and everything else—and somehow encapsulate it in an interactive kiosk, with (jostles some nearby knobs and dials somewhat violently) bulletproof sorta knobs and dials?

Aren't you worried some science-minded kid will see all this stuff, and get a job working for today's equivalent of George Lucas, and then come up with the next Pixar?
That's just how the world works! We have a certain way of doing things. Arguably, we have a certain look to our films. We have a certain way of telling stories, and bring it on! Come on! Let's see who has a brainy idea about the next wave of entertaining people in movie theaters. It could be one of these kids, right now! That's the beauty of things like this.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

It's difficult to place where Bethesda sits in the public consciousness. The RPG studio turned publisher has a great deal to be proud of—in recent years, it has bankrolled the beloved Dishonored franchise, overseen the resurrection of DOOM, and perhaps most impressively has built Fallout, a niche series largely thought deceased at the turn of the millennium, into a blockbuster property that makes a ridiculous amount of money across its mobile and triple-A iterations.

But if your only impression of the studio came from specialist forums, gaming Twitter, and the like, you'd be forgiven for thinking it maligned. Hated, even. Its games are subject to a number of recurring complaints—poor combat, dated tech, and bad writing among other grievances. Bethesda's self-developed RPG series, Fallout and The Elder Scrolls, occupy the same bizarre no man's land as the Call of Duty franchise: Apparently nobody likes it, and yet everyone does. The charts don't lie, and neither does Activision's bank balance.

Much of this dissonance can be explained by taking the temperature of the community's impression of Morrowind, the third Elder Scrolls game that set the template for both of its blockbuster RPG strands back in 2002. That game, and its sequels: 2006's Oblivion, which became a massive, studio-defining success for Bethesda during the early Xbox 360 era, and 2011's Skyrim, the soon-to-be-reissued (and remastered) last entry in the series to date (discounting The Elder Scrolls Online, of which the less said the better).

The differences between Morrowind and its immediate successor are vast. While Oblivion is recognizable as a sequel, it tossed out a lot of what made the series so appealing, much of what connected its predecessor with a passionate audience. The Eastern-inspired, alien world of exotic fauna and giant mushroom trees was cast aside in favor of a distinctly Tolkienian setting, with its European architecture, European wildlife, and European forests. This was a disappointment for many of the preceding game's admirers, and the differences were more than cosmetic. Oblivion's job was to be The Elder Scrolls but accessible, palatable to a wider, more general audience at a time when the big-budget cinematic adaptation of The Lord of the Rings still felt fresh. It didn't matter if some of the old magic was lost—it was all about bringing extra punters to the party. For the first time, Bethesda was genuinely gunning for the console market—however, these guys achieved it, they had to sell The Elder Scrolls to living rooms, not desktops.

And the gambit worked. The accessibility of Oblivion propelled The Elder Scrolls from a niche PC gaming pastime to a sat-on-the-sofa phenomenon. The game sold 1.7 million copies in a month, a figure that's since risen to closer to 10 million, and critical coverage was incredibly positive. Skyrim followed five years later and preserved that accessibility—and yet the fifth Elder Scrolls game proper also attempted to return the series to what made Morrowind special, pulling back where Oblivion had been so keen to push away. Because, despite being the least commercially successful of the 21st-century Elder Scrolls games—the original, Arena, and its sequel, Daggerfall, date from 1994 and 1996 respectively—Morrowind dominates the fanbase's discourse. Skyrim struggles with itself to invoke Morrowind, and emulate it, at every possible opportunity—but it's difficult to understand why unless one examines Bethesda's relationship with its "core" audience.

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch 'LARPing Saved My Life'

A considerable number among Bethesda's fan community consider Morrowind to be the pinnacle of the series, and this community has the company's collective ear. This relationship is evident throughout its games, which are littered with references to fan forum in-jokes, most blatantly via a recurring character, M'aiq the Liar, who routinely dispenses quips about the same forum's predilection for rumor and speculation, and has done in every game since Morrowind—making him, perhaps unwittingly, part of its creeping shadow. The developer knows its audience, and loves pandering to it.

One prevailing idea among this audience is that Oblivion's ambition to be accessible resulted in a "dumbed-down" version of Morrowind—and, frankly, that's something that rings true with a direct comparison. There are no Oblivion-style map markers in Morrowind. Every quest comes with written directions. Go north until you find a strange tree; head east until you lose the will to live; that kind of thing. Oblivion essentially gives you a GPS and tells you to go kill stuff. Skyrim keeps the GPS but makes traversing the land more difficult, with dangerous high-level zones, extreme weather, and a new emphasis on verticality.

Oblivion raised the bar in Elder Scrolls presentation but fudged much of the detail. Its denizens are conversationally stunted in comparison to Morrowind, where almost every character delivers a novella's worth of exposition via written text. Oblivion has full voice acting and, as a direct consequence, a lot less to say. Skyrim kept the actors, but gave them more lines of dialogue—around 23,000 more—and made sure that you'd have to play through the game more than once to hear them all.

'Skyrim' Special Edition Trailer

Morrowind forces the player to role-play. You can join the thieves' guild, but don't expect to be able to complete the fighters' guild, too—their quest lines cancel each other out. You can join one noble house, but not the others. Seeing all of the mission content Morrowind has to offer requires multiple playthroughs, varied character builds, and deep knowledge of the game's systems and branching points. It is built for nerds. Oblivion flattens the playing field, offering only one class of character: the player. They can join, rinse, and become the head of every guild and organization, regardless of skill set. There is very little thinking required to become, on paper, the most powerful resident of Cyrodiil, the president of every club. After a few dozen hours, it all becomes absurd.

Skyrim's quests intersect at points where the player is forced to make a decision between two warring camps, or whether or not to kill major characters. It's not quite the tangled web of branching narratives that Morrowind was, but it prevents players from seeing every possible outcome in one playthrough—something that drew fan ire when seen in Oblivion.

At the center of Morrowind's map stood the Red Mountain, a domineering volcano that belched ash into the sky, blighting the land with ruined crops, poor visibility, and terrible disease. At the center of Oblivion was an Elven tower, pulled straight out of those popular Peter Jackson movies. It was so drearily conventional when compared to the giant of slag and soot that rose from the third game's landscape. Elder Scrolls fans would lament the loss of Morrowind's varied biomes, its giant mushrooms, and monstrous wildlife.

'Morrowind' Trailer

Which may be why Oblivion's expansion DLC of 2007, Shivering Isles, signaled a reassertion of Morrowind's ethos, and its vegetation—fans would rejoice at the return of giant mushrooms and branching narratives with distinct choices. It's widely regarded as Oblivion's best content, and it's filled with direct references to Morrowind—in the form of creature types and returning characters. As an addendum to Oblivion, it's a massive shift in tone. As a love letter to Morrowind fans, it's dead on the mark.

Skyrim also featured plenty of callbacks to Morrowind—but these were bittersweet. The game's lore establishes that the landmass on which Morrowind occurred, the island of Vvardenfell, has been destroyed in a catastrophic volcanic eruption. In the intervening centuries, Red Mountain belched its last, destroying the very ground upon which so many adventures had taken place, wrecking any hope of a much requested return to the region—and it's difficult to imagine that this wasn't, quite directly, the point.

Despite some folkloric allusions to Morrowind, and a heavily touted continuity with the events of Oblivion, Skyrim's story and setting were vastly different. Soaked with Nordic mythology and featuring, for the first time, actual fucking dragons, it felt like a great culmination of everything Bethesda had learned from a solid decade of producing Fallout and Elder Scrolls titles. Players were given big choices, intuitive systems, expansive lore, and memorable characters. You could almost have sworn that they'd set a new bar, and would no longer need to remind their community of past glories to get them on side.

However, Skyrim would almost allow people to return to Morrowind in its final expansion, Dragonborn. Revisiting the island of Solstheim, the location of Morrowind's Bloodmoon expansion from a decade earlier, it gave fans a tour of old haunts, a chance to wander the ruins of places they once visited and—perhaps most significantly—a front-seat view of the smoldering remains of Vvardenfell.

It's tempting to think, as I do, that this was symbolic. Bethesda wants to move on from Morrowind. It wants its fans to move on from Morrowind. But you can only see the ruins of Vvardenfell from Solstheim. The journey comes full circle. The Elder Scrolls remains locked in a Morrowind-shaped prison, doomed to keep referencing itself for eternity. You can visit Morrowind in The Elder Scrolls Online. You can even run into M'aiq the Liar. For Bethesda, it's impossible to escape, and perilous to ignore.

Maybe it should remaster Morrowind.

The remastered "Special Edition" of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is released for Xbox One and PlayStation 4 on October 28.

Follow Jim Trinca on Twitter.

Illustration by Gavin Spence

Check out more gaming content on VICE, follow VICE Gaming on Twitter, and like us on Facebook.