Having been to my fair share of protests, I'm used to their often volatile energy. But believe me when I say that none I've ever witnessed have been as anarchic as what went down in Hackney early last Friday evening, when a crowd of nursery age and primary school kids descended on London Fields to demand action on climate change from "stupid adults".

"The climate is in danger because of us polluting it, and I don’t want to pollute it. I did a protest to stop it," five-year-old Sunday – the ringleader – told me, once she'd finished her second interview of the day with the BBC. Behind me, a toddler covered in glitter was hitting another child with his placard over and over again; another was crying, loudly. It was total carnage. But Sunday refused to be distracted. Having learned about the environment at school, Sunday had told her dad what she wanted to do next: she joined the Extinction Rebellion protests and read up about the Suffragettes, before deciding it was time she and her classmates made a stand.

"Now, there's loads of other people who I don’t know who are also protesting," she said, grinning. "Look how many people are protesting! It’s exactly what I wanted."

Climate change, Sunday informed me, is bad because it's melting the ice her favourite animals live on, and the human race faces extinction as well. "Listen, I don’t want to die out when I'm this age, so I’m protesting to get people to act quicker, not slowly," she concluded, before marching off to her next interview. 'What I want to say to all the politicians is: save the environment. And pick up your litter!"

It was inspiring to hear so many kids speak so passionately about climate change, but also: hearing the words "because we’re all going to die" directly from the mouths of so many children was a sad reminder of how urgently their demands need to be heard.

EVIE, THREE (BUT FOUR IN A FEW WEEKS)

Evie

VICE: Why do you care about climate change?
Evie: We’ve got to save the planet, else it's going to be dangerous. HAHA!

What’s dangerous about climate change?
FIRE!!!! And there’ll be no water. There should be no fires in the park, else all the grass is going to burn and that is not very nice.

Yeah, you’re probably right.
If the planet gets too hot then the continents will be full of fire.

Is that why you’re protesting?
I’m going to secretly tell Stan [Evie's friend] why.

Can you tell me?
We are all going to save the planet because we’re going to stop buying plastics. Also, we can’t let robots come in the park because they’re ginormous and they’ll eat people. I’ve finished now – I want to talk to Stan.

ODIN, NINE

Odin

Hey Odin, what’s going on?
VICE: We’re here to stop climate change. I know it’s bad for the planet and factories are doing it. Take the polar bears on the ice. The ice is melting so they’re going to lose their homes and die. We need to stop using cars – they’re pointless. People should cycle and walk more.

What other ideas have you got?
If something comes in a packet, then recycle the packet. Take the packet off and put it in the recycling, or do what I do: take the packaging and use it for a school project, and then when that school project is finished I keep it because it’s cool, instead of throwing it in the bin. I don't want everyone to die.

MOON, SIX

Moon

What are you doing in the park?
Moon: I’m here to protest to save the world so we don’t make the world bad for the animals. We’re protesting and bringing signs. People keep using bad things for us, like smoke from aeroplanes and cars, and throwing litter on the floor and not using bins.

And what’s going to happen to the planet if we keep doing that?
It might get smaller. Well, smaller air. And the litter on the floor makes the soil bad. And that’s bad because I like the planet. It’s nice and colourful and it’s where we live and there’s loads of my friends here. If there’s too much climate change it’ll get foggier and there won’t be trees or plants or colour. Are you famous?

ELSIE, SIX

Elsie

Are you worried about climate change?
Elsie: Yes, otherwise we will be destroyed and we won’t have anywhere to live. Right now, climate change because of pollution is very bad; most of the trees are getting chopped down for paper.

Have you got a message for the politicians not doing enough about climate change?
You should stop doing it – you’re making your home badder and also for us. I don’t want to say anything else to you.

FLORA, NINE

Flora

What’s up, Flora?
Flora: I’m protesting because I know that we just won’t survive unless we do something. We’re protesting climate change and all the waste in the oceans. It’s just going to kill us one day. If we don’t start now then it’s just going to go [fart noise] in a few years. The thing is, all the air will be really polluted; we will choke and die. We will breathe in the air and we will choke and die. People with asthma will definitely die, probably quicker.

That’s really grim, isn’t it?
Yes, but there’s this girl called Greta Thunberg – she made a big change. She was just an ordinary schoolgirl, so we can be like her.

What would you say to the politicians in charge?
They suck for not doing enough about climate change. We know what we have to do, but they’re not doing it. And they’re all probably going to die soon. We’re still young and fresh – it’s our future they’re ruining, not theirs. Still, they say to us we have to alter the future, but we aren’t the ones killing the planet. It’s them. We can’t even drive!

BLANCHE, SEVEN

Blanche

Hey Blanche. How come you’re here today?
Blamche: I think it’s not fair on all the animals who live on Earth. They’re going to die and it’s not their fault. We’ve destroyed their home and future, and it’s not fair, so we have to change it now.

How do you feel when you think about that?
Sad, very sad. We need to not leave the lights on. If we want to go the shops, don’t get a plastic bag. My dad doesn’t recycle anything, which is silly! Politicians need to stop thinking about stupid things and think about the animals out there instead.

SOPHIA, SIX

Sophia

Why are you here, Sophia?
Sophia: We’re here to protest about the trees and the planet. Right now, they’re falling down because of climate change and how much we use. If it gets worse we are all going to die.

Scary stuff.
We need to stop chopping trees down and stop trucks. We need to stop polluting and to put things in the recycling bin. We’re ruining the planet and it’s making all of us die. It’s making the animals die and trees die and children die. And trees are good because they make oxygen. Also, rockets make lots of smoke and smoking does too. And smoking is really sick for you – you really shouldn’t do it. So just stop polluting and smoking and this will all go away, and it’ll all be fine, like in the olden days.

@MikeSegalov / @christopherbethell

With a sharp snort, the brown-haired girl in a sequin top spoons a key of white powder into her nose. Above our heads, indeterminate techno pounds though the speakers of our coach, which is circling through the heart of Bulgaria's Rhodope mountains. We are en route to one of Europe's most secluded festivals, my bladder is fizzing with Kamenitza beer and things are starting to get loose.

I've always considered the journey a crucial facet of the festival experience: anticipation is unsullied by reality, with the hangover a faraway thought as you drink cans with old friends while rattling along a regional railway line. Not all journeys are equal, though, and whether it's a boat to Norway's Traena festival, the overnight Sziget Express to Budapest or a two-day bus to the heart of the Spanish dustlands for Nowhere, some are destined to transform – and possibly define –your festival.

But why does the party bus matter, and why are more festivals offering them?

In his book The Art of Travel, Alain De Botton writes: "The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to." The 20-hour Sziget Express train travels overnight from The Netherlands to Hungary’s Sziget festival, and is all about creating the communal mindset that most festivals are aiming for.

Guests on the Sziget Express. Screenshot via

"Traveling together for several hours creates a bond," says Tomas Loeffen of Festival.Travel, which organises the journey. The company facilitate this bond by organising activities, but unsurprisingly the real focus are the individual parties that shake the windows of every cabin until early morning. "You could compare it to a pub street," says Tomas, "where people go from party to party. It’s all about meeting other people."

It's one thing loving thy neighbour after 20 hours on a train, but would you after 40 hours on a coach? That's a question for the strange and courageous souls who take the coach from Manchester to Hideout Festival in Zrće Beach, Croatia – driving distance: 2,162km.

"The journey was too long," says 21-year-old Chris. "I'd say 40 percent of people were taking drugs, and it was carnage for a few hours, but everyone calmed down and then it was a struggle to get comfortable." More positive is 21-year-old Ellis, who, despite a number of coach-mates being sick on the bus, says it was a better experience than flying to the festival: "I thought it would have been full of weirdos, but I saw people from the coach during the festival and we’ve stayed friends with them. It was a laugh, with memories for life."

It’s a long way from Zrće Beach to Norway’s Traena, apparently the world’s most remote festival, which takes place on a tiny archipelago on the cusp of the Arctic Circle. In 2013, festival founder Erland Mogård-Larsen told VICE that "the travel, and the experience on the way here, is 50 percent of the festival experience". Derek Robertson, who reviewed Traena for Drowned In Sound in 2015, agrees: "Getting somewhere like Traena – that involved two flights and a long ferry ride – makes it seem like you’re visiting the end of the world. Plus, you can feel the anticipation in the air – people are excited and want to make the most of every minute, including the journey. There was a sense of camaraderie right from the beginning, a 'we're all in this madness together'."

Guests on the Sziget Express. Screenshot via

Secret Garden Party founder Freddie Fellowes went deep into the void in 2001, with a three-day bus from Cape Town to the Zambian desert for a festival to celebrate the solar eclipse. Despite the irritating presence of a bongo-playing Californian and "a lot of cultural misappropriation" onboard, he met people he’s still friends with 18 years later. "The act of journeying there – in the way as anyone that has done a hajj or a pilgrimage [will know] – is a huge part of it. It's primal and ancient: to travel in the company of strangers to something you’re all signed up to."

Of course, the majority of punters will embark on relatively humdrum festival journeys, whether it's the Big Green Coach to Boomtown or the train to Castle Cary for Glastonbury. But the natural chemicals swamping our brain are the same as we reach a fever pitch of collective anticipation regarding the weekend ahead.

"It shows us the power of creative visualisation. In our mind's eye we're seeing all of these things unfold and that’s creating dopamine," says Jonathan Hoban, counsellor, psychotherapist and author of Walk With Your Wolf. Dopamine is a reward chemical in the brain that gets released after pleasurable experiences, many of which we might associate with festivals: like seeing your favourite band, eating a deliciously dirty burger or taking certain drugs. "So there’s no band in front of you, but the anticipation of how that band makes you feel is creating dopamine. You’re talking about it. You can see all these things. You’re feeling it."

The beauty of this moment is that there's no fatigue. No Pigeon Detectives. No waking up hungover in a wet sleeping bag wondering if, in fact, this will be the hill on which you perish. In the space of eight railway stations and two Marks & Spencer gins, you've segued into a wristband-waving festival human without any of the downsides.

All this perhaps peaks with this year's NoBus, a collaborative project being organised for the first time by Luke Pinna to take 49 people from London to Nowhere. Nowhere abides by the same ten principles as Burning Man and takes place on an arid, deserted plain between Zaragoza and Lleida in the north-west of Spain.

Luke's NoBus will be both mobile extension and soft entry to the festival and culture that can be – for those unprepared – overwhelming. "It's akin to a pre-compression," says Luke. "Making sure everyone is as well prepared as they can be, physically and mentally, for the experience." He’s promising talks, workshops and performances around Burn and Nowhere culture. There will undoubtedly be beers. He’s even hoping to find a place where they can stay on the return journey, where the dusty passengers can offer to work, thus demonstrating the gifting principle that is a central tenet of Burn culture.

As we roll towards planetary doom and become evermore aware of our individual carbon footprints, you'd hope that these communal festival journeys will become more popular. But I have to admit: I’m not thinking about the planet’s future as the brown-haired girl in the sequin top inhales her frankly delicious-looking drugs. It transpires that she’s smuggled three grams of ketamine through the drug trafficking cakewalk that is Bulgarian customs.

A baggy gets handed round, and the glades and gullies of the Rhodope mountains start moving at unheralded speeds. The people around me become Mates for this new festival adventure. Some of us end up hanging out after the festival in Plovdiv, as we attempt to communally recalibrate our serotonin levels. Every time I see them on my newsfeed or in real life, I recall that festival through the most rose-tinted of spectacles, and particularly the wild and loose coach that got us there.

The journey back, though – Jesus Christ.

@dhillierwrites

It's the Sunday afternoon of the early May Bank Holiday, I'm mildly hungover and the pungent smell of cat piss wafting through east London's Tobacco Docks is absolutely not helping me out.

I'm here for the first ever London International Cat Expo, a two-day "extravaganza" consisting of 150 cats and kittens being judged in four different categories, various cat-themed talks and dozens of vendors peddling cat accessories ranging from novelty socks and greeting cards to luxury cat food and a self-cleaning litter tray that can be controlled by Alexa and costs nearly half a grand. There's even a meet-and-greet with author James Bowen and his famous cat, Bob.

James adopted Bob after finding him on the streets of Tottenham when he was living in supported housing after a period of homelessness, and credits the cat with saving him from heroin addiction and life on the streets. His heartwarming memoir A Street Cat Named Bob became a New York Times bestseller when it was published in 2012, and has since been translated into 30 different languages, as well as being turned into a film. Bob has over 50,000 followers on Instagram, so it's fairly likely that you know somebody who follows him, even if it's just your mum.

In fact, you probably follow a couple of Instafamous cats yourself, don't you? Be honest. Maybe you're a fan of Lil Bub or the late Grumpy Cat (RIP to the GOAT). Maybe you follow Smoothie or Venus the Two Face Cat. Maybe, like me, you’re a little obsessed with Wilfred Warrior. Or perhaps you don’t follow any of them because you’re trying to cultivate a ~cool~ online persona instead of that of a menopausal woman who still lives with her parents, or because you find it vaguely depressing to follow an animal that has literally 10,000 times the number of followers you have.

Either way, it’s hard not to be fascinated with the phenomenon of the celebrity cat. What is it about felines that makes so many people want to keep up with their cutesy social media updates? How come Nala, an ostensibly quite average Siamese/tabby cross, has 4 million followers on Instagram? And with so many lucrative pet food and catnip #sponcon deals up for grabs, how can I get in on this trend so that my own furry pal can start paying her way?

Having decided that the Cat Expo would be a great place to get some answers, I haul myself out of bed upsettingly early for a Bank Holiday and head down to Tobacco Docks in the hope that I’ll be rewarded for my efforts with some insider knowledge on how to monetise my pet – or, at the very least, that I’ll be able to cuddle a few kittens.

Upon arrival, I head straight into the chaotic fray surrounding the cat judging "arena", where the cat contest is in full swing. The place is rammed with spectators, walking between the aisles to get a closer look at the competing cats hanging out in their (incredibly plush) travel carriers, or gathering around the various podiums where cats are called up by their numbers to be judged.

As these cats are sexy enough to be entered into shows, I figure at least one or two of them will have garnered impressive social media followings. Asking around, though, while some owners have Facebook pages for their breeding businesses, only a fraction of today's competitors even know what Instagram is. This probably won't surprise you if you’ve seen the Netflix documentary Catwalk: in the nicest possible way, most people involved in the cat show circuit don’t exactly seem like the types to be too concerned with cultivating an online presence for their pets.

Once I've had a chance to say hello to all the kitties, and gotten used to the aggressive smell of soiled cat litter, I talk to the man behind today’s expo, Steven Meserve. Steven has been going to cat shows since the age of 18, when he got involved with breeding and showing Bengal cats in the US. This is his 11th show in the UK, while he's done over 30 in America. I gather that he’s kind of a big deal on the international cat show circuit, so figure he'll be the perfect person to ask for some advice on how to cash out on my cat.

"I think, with Instagram and Facebook, it’s getting more difficult, and you have to really devote a lot of time to it and be posting every day. It’s almost like a full time job," Steve tells me. "And I think the more popular ones that reach more people more quickly obviously have professional photography and really good shots, but they’re also quite clever. You kind of have to have an interesting angle."

"For example, my favourite Insta cat is Pompous Albert. He's a Selkirk Rex and he’s got a really squinty, condescending look," Steven continues. "In the show circuit that’s not a good thing because the breed is known for having big expressive eyes, but that’s kind of his shtick. He has this kind of grumpy pompous 'personality' that goes with his look and is kind of funny."

Journalist and author Nick Harding agrees with Steve’s assessment. Nick has just given a talk about his memoir, A Tale of Two Kitties, accompanied by his Bengal, Barry. Barry favours Twitter over Instagram, though he has a very modest following and doesn’t really tweet all that much. Nick’s theory is that handsome cats like Barry don’t necessarily do as well on social media as cats with "a weird look about them", because Instagram especially is saturated with pretty pets, so they don’t stand out as much. "They’ve got to have some kind of personality," he says, "and I think that translates better in static images if they’re a bit odd looking, rather than just another pretty cat."

But it isn’t just the freaky-looking pets that get attention: a good story also helps, as I hear from James and Bob when I finally get to speak to them during their lunch break. “It’s difficult to give you any advice, to be honest," James tells me, "because we didn’t really set out to make Bob famous or anything. It’s not like a Grumpy Cat situation – we just wrote the book and it all sort of took off from there."

James Bowen and his cat, Bob.

"I didn’t even realise when he was first garnering attention on the internet, so it was a bit of a surprise when we did our first book signing in 2012 that there were hundreds of people queueing up to meet him," James continues. "I guess people just connected with our story, but that’s not really something we did on purpose!"

So: a good story and an interesting look are key. But it also helps if your cat is a born starlet, which is what I learn from Starina and her owner, Saz. Starina is an "up-and-coming" Insta cat who is signed to the leading animal modelling agency, PetLondon, and has been featured in Vogue and Tatler, and in campaigns for ASOS, Stella McCartney and Paul Smith.

Starina the cat.

It’s clear that Starina is a natural in front of the camera, staring right at it as soon as photographer Bekky starts clicking away. "She’s gone everywhere with me since she was 14 weeks old," explains Saz, "and on one of our trips out we met somebody who happened to be an agent, and they took one look at her and signed her on the spot. She’s just a superstar – her temperament lends itself to it because she just settles so easily. And I've been putting her in a harness since when she was a baby, so she’s perfectly happy being dressed up in something too."

Aside from finding a cat who’s a born natural, Saz also has practical tips for owners looking to turn their own kitty into the next big thing.

"We had a few videos that went viral, which really helped with building her Instagram," she says. "But I’d recommend using the hashtags, especially #whiskerwednesday and #caturday. Try to have a theme or a niche, and then try to get yourself featured on some of the big accounts, like Cats of Instagram. Don’t overload people, but just post consistently and make sure you interact with other similar accounts. And hopefully it will just snowball from there."

So there you have it: a comprehensive guide to turning your cat into an influencer. Send my commission in the post, thanks.

@RosieHew

Something is stirring. When you woke up this morning, did you feel it? Did you sense the sun a little too hot on your neck, smell the Soltan on the air, inexplicably long for a crochet crop top in which to envelop your weary body? If not today, then you will soon. It is happening again.

Friends, Romans, people whose greatest pleasure in life is watching stacked nightclub promo guys get increasingly worrying sunburn: lend me your ears. On Monday night at 9:30PM GMT, Love Island released its promo video for 2019, presenting its first 12 contestants to the world, preened like competitors in the “Toy” category at Crufts.

So far, none of the 12 are particularly surprising (by which I mean, most of them have about 7-percent body fat and describe themselves as “flirty”). And though it’ll be interesting to see if ITV breaks the mould with later additions to the villa – a fat person, I beg – it is worth considering that the winners are generally always from the original crop of contestants. Statistically speaking, it is highly likely that two of this lot are going to win the figurative prize of “the nation’s collective heart,” and also the more material and therefore much better “£50,000 in cash.”

As such, it feels pertinent to ask who that will be. For it is like I always say: what better way to kick off a summer of judging the every action of these complete strangers than to guess their fates in the competition based on their photos and a three-minute ITV promotional video? Journey with me into the sublime.

LUCIE AND AMY

I’ve got to be honest, I thought these were the same person until like halfway through the promo, so have grouped them together as The Obligatory Blondes, like Gabby, Hayley, and many esteemed others before them.

Amy (on the right) is an air hostess, and aesthetically seems to have been chosen to attract the Laura Anderson 2019 Calendar crowd. She has a bit of the Dani Dyer about her – sweet, innocent, perfect face for the front of packets of strip eyelashes – and I think will probably do well as a result.

RE: Lucie, I am trying to reserve judgement because on one hand: this swimsuit choice is deeply powerful. But on the other, her early insistence on shoehorning the phrases “bevnished off” and “fwoofed off” (sinister innit?) into the promo video gives extremely strong Girl From School Who Pretended to Be a Cat for an Entire Year vibes, so really, the jury is out.

Prediction: Amy will have her heart broken by Tommy Fury and viewers will launch a Change.org petition to have him removed from the villa; Lucie will become embroiled in a post-show royalties battle with Primark who have printed t-shirts emblazoned with the word “fwoof.” Incidentally, her swimwear selections will single-handedly get me into a grand’s worth of credit card debt.

SHARIF

I like Sharif because unlike a lot of the others, he seemed quite comfortable on camera which – real talk! – is an important attribute to have as a Love Island contestant unless you want to end up at the Georgia Steele School of Detestable Histrionics.

Prediction: Can see him doing reasonably well – the de facto narrator of the season, like Olivia Atwood before him.

AMBER

"If people get on the wrong side of me," says Amber, "you'll know about it." Hopefully this means that in the grand tradition of Geordies on TV – Ellie from Love Island last year, Vicky Pattinson – she calls someone a cunt, which is absolutely the way to my heart.

Prediction: Actually doesn't matter how well she does because ultimately, she has probably already signed that six-figure Pretty Little Thing ambassador deal.

JOE

Joe is 22 and apparently owns a catering business, which screams "Tory" and is unfortunate for me because they have clearly cast him for the Harry Styles fan demographic, of which I am, predictably, a part.

Prediction: Will say something divisive about Brexit in the first week.

YEWANDE

Like season 3’s Camilla and season 4’s Zara before her, Yewande, a scientist, is this year’s Smart Woman You Wouldn’t Expect to Go On a Vapid Show Like This. Unlike those two, however (Camilla: too mumsy, Zara: too Brexit), in her few seconds on camera so far, she appears to be one of the most charismatic of the bunch. Looking forward to her inevitable terrible date with aircraft engineer Callum, who people have suggested she pairs up with as they are “both clever.”

Prediction: Stays until the final and then mercifully ousts Brian Cox out of a job.

TOMMY

Rated for referring to dick size in his first appearance on camera. Not fucking about, much respect.

Prediction: Probably going to do that Adam Collard thing of coupling up with three separate women over a two week period and then getting evicted because of it.

ANNA

Anna to me seems like the sort of person who tells you that you look “amazing babe” when you’ve got mascara round your mouth from crying in a nightclub bathroom, or your high-glam work colleague who tags her location as Sheesh Chigwell every weekend. By this I mean: I love her.

Prediction: Ends up getting chosen to leave too early but becomes a multi-millionaire within two years by starting a lucrative lip filler business.

MICHAEL

You can’t call yourself a hero, mate. I’m sorry!! I don’t care how many cats up trees you’ve saved!!

Prediction: Injured in a hubristic gym area accident in the second week.

THESE THREE ABSOLUTE CHANCERS

Buried deep under the Love Island villa, I firmly believe, is a stone tablet. The tablet is an eternal and ancient bedrock for covert blowjobs and men called “Joe” or “Charlie” spelling out “I LOVE U” in beans to woo models they’ve known for ~4 weeks. The tablet is holy.

On this tablet, I feel in my soul that the following is inscribed:

Any series of Love Island cannot air without the participation of at least two lads who seem like they spend their free time asking women in the gym to “just holla” if they want a hand using the weights machines. Amen.

This year, producers have yet again heeded the fearsome stone tablet, delivering the almost indistinguishable Anton, Callum and Curtis into our hot, waiting laps. The only one I have real opinions about so far is ballroom dancer Curtis (whose older brother is AJ Pritchard from Strictly), who seems like a milk-drinker, and also a cryer.

Prediction: Anton will couple up with Amy and get to the final, Callum will do well as a comic presence for maybe just over a month because he’s got an accent, Curtis will cry for the whole first day and have to be collected by his parents.

SO, WHO'S GOING TO WIN?

Early doors but based on a complex formula of traditional hotness x likeability + (personality - a bit of personality because the public finds too much threatening), I’m going to call it for Amber and sandwich man Joe. The oracle has spoken.

@hiyalauren

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

This Is Fine. is a weekly newsletter from VICE about the highly personal tactics people use to make the world feel less harrowing. In this edition, Peter Smith writes about freezing out overwhelming thoughts and situations by plunging themself into icy cold water. Sign up here to receive a new essay about a dealing-with-life strategy via This Is Fine. each Sunday evening.

I did a polar plunge with a gal pal about a month ago. The main idea is entering a body of water despite its miserably low temperature, so we ran headfirst into the steely arms of Mama Atlantic. As I hurled my whole self into her 50-degree throb, I let go.

Exiting the salty slush, my gal pal and I had been reborn. I was in the water for no more than 15 seconds, but I felt lighter. The ocean had taken something from me, as I knew it would: Shockingly cold water has been a cure-all for most of my life. Its frigid embrace takes me off the edge, and the edge off of me.

On the day of our Atlantic plunge, I had just returned from doing a play out of town. The show spanned a century, focusing on the life of a real trans woman who navigated Berlin under Nazi and Stasi regimes. I was the sole actor, playing 35 different people and speaking in 12 accents and two languages for an hour and a half. (As you can tell, there were many different people inside of me that I needed to drown in the ocean.)

Professionally, I am generous with my body. Show business forces my brain to consider my vessel its office. A mobile enterprise. My brain is Big Beef Boss, and my bones act as skyscraper (I’m 6’2” in flats). In this last play, my body would tell you that I was walking and squawking for 90 minutes: moving around, lifting my arms, sweating under the lights, raising my eyebrows, contracting my throat, keeping my eyes open, hurling to my knees.

My brain would say that I was rapid-fire disassociating into various “emotional truths” every 30 seconds, on average. I gave information as one person, then immediately received that same information as though hearing it for the first time as another. Two characters: a trans teen in 1945 Berlin (me), forced at gunpoint against a wall by a Nazi officer (also me). The Nazi, erect and violent, asked the kid’s gender, then—SNAP!—the youth, cowering and about to die, answered. SNAP! The Nazi asked the kid’s age. SNAP! “Sixteen,” I replied to myself. SNAP! The Nazi, in a moment of theatrical humanity, halted the execution squad to preserve the child’s life. My vocal placement, shoulders, face, feet, pelvis, and neck oscillated from passive to active in, ideally, the blink of an eye.

In one scene, I repeatedly banged a wooden rolling pin against the stage floor. Every night, my waist and right arm twisted up to the right, then, with all of my 180 pounds of force, I slammed the rolling pin to the ground five times. (I know it was five because I had to very loudly count to five in German while I did it.) During the fourteenth show, the rolling pin snapped in my hand. I had enough adrenaline in my system to confuse my pain tolerance and went into a state of shock.

In front of hundreds of eyes planning on looking at nothing but me for a while, I thought, Peter, Peter, Peter… Either this IKEA rolling pin is broken, I’ll apologize to the stage manager, and the show must go on, OR, it snapped in my hand, the fractured wood has stabbed through my palm, and the stage manager needs to drive me to the hospital. I have a bad habit of apologizing for myself, so, in the latter case, I decided I would write a thank-you note to each audience member who only saw 25 minutes of their promised 90. I pictured hundreds of blood-stained notes scrawled by my non-dominant hand.

All of that went through my mind in less than one second. The wall of people stared as I spoke my lines on deranged autopilot, acting as a German teen who’d just murdered her father with a rolling pin. Eins! Zwei! Drei! Vier! Fünf! I played that father seconds earlier. Did I just kill myself? I released the rolling pin, and all I had was a tiny splinter: no blood, nothing serious. I flung the broken rolling pin off stage and tried to forget myself again. Luckily, I’m trans.

My childhood was spent learning methods of splintering my brain from my body, and I sought catharsis from my dysmorphia and dysphoria from the inside out. “Down the hatch!” as we say at sea. I smoked my first cigarette in fourth grade. I needed it. I’m grateful for it. Yes, I was inhaling poison, but I was also taking deep, therapeutic breaths when I did it: mindful inhaling and exhaling.

What did I need to breathe through at age seven? When I learned that men attached certain roles to certain bodies, I taught myself tools to cope with emotional fluctuations and social performance. To handle gym locker room body anxiety; having to feign flattery when an old lady called me a “handsome young man.”

Sure, some tools were destructive. Hell, I’ve turned to drugs. Hell, I’ve done more than turn to them—I’ve groveled at their feet. I’ve suckled prescription medication’s teat, because sometimes the symptom is the only thing that’s visible of the wider issue. A psychiatrist in my youth prescribed amphetamines to keep my mind from spiraling into unwanted territory. I was depressed, but why? Speed makes you focus, but not often on the right thing. Nobody, including myself, had any interest in finding out what that was. Sugar was the worst drug I was addicted—it’s more than just legal, it is often mandatory: US food deserts force sugar-soaked, nutrient-deficient plastic-wrapped poison upon the innocent. Scientists have proved that Oreos are more addictive than cocaine, yet they’re available literally everywhere. Flint, Michigan has plenty of options to dunk in the sludge they’re still being told is water.

All of this discord surged through me after the rolling pin show. I came offstage bobbing in a sea of emotional inertia and physical exhaustion, my brain and my body screaming for stability. Behind the dressing room door, I ripped my clothes off.

Alone and surrounded by mirrors, all I wanted was fresh air and a joint. However, the only way to exit the theater was through the building’s front door. I raced out of my dressing room into the long, long lobby and walked briskly through audience members that were in no rush to leave. I jumped in the stage manager’s car, and, by the time we cruised out of the parking lot, I had smoked half of my pre-roll.

It took three tequila sodas, one tequila shot, three shared indica-dominant joints, a lot of dancing and a trip to the Krispy Kreme drive-thru to get me into a state where I was willing to go home. I stumbled into my room three hours after curtain call, still wired. Scrolling through sex apps, I smelled my armpits and remembered that I was covered in mud made out of my sweat and stage floor dust. Into the bath I went, along with Epsom salt, multiple bath bombs, and a few drunken splashes of rosewater. I soaked in the heat; drained the tub. Standing covered in salt and soap, I kicked on the shower to rinse off—SNAP! Fuck, it’s freezing! “AHHH!”

I expected the water to heat up faster, but I was pummeled by cold and shivering for a solid 10 seconds. It undid the hours I spent finding the perfect chemical cocktail and sobered me up. (Admittedly, the weed remained, but alcohol left the picture entirely, thank goodness.) This topical treatment—from the outside-in—had not only dropped the mic on my slew of potions, it had taken the weight of the play down the drain. A blizzard blessing in disguise. I was back in my body. I felt refreshed, lighter, and ready for bed.

I started to take cold showers after every show. (If only real-life Nazis could be chased away so easily.) I started to crave the cold. With hard nipples came catharsis. I would return to this feeling a month later when I ran into the briny deep with my gal pal.

I learned the art of dunking my face into an ice bucket from TV when I was very young. One Thanksgiving, some network had a movie marathon called “You Think Your Family Is Crazy?” (I didn’t have any reason to, yet.) I watched as Faye Dunaway opened Mommie Dearest as Joan Crawford performing her morning beauty regimen. When I saw her claws rub ice cubes on her face like an otter with pebbles, something was triggered deep within me, and I grabbed the age-old baton in the relay race of self-preservation in showbiz, which can mimic, so often, self-harm.

Movies on TV taught me icy glamor, and, later, the internet taught me how to have an eating disorder. In an effort to evaporate my body away, I discovered slideshow lists of unconventional ways to shed some pounds. Did you know that taking cold showers stimulates brown fat? What the fuck is brown fat? There is white and brown fat. Brown fat keeps us warm; white fat is the stuff mainstream media has taught us we are less than if we have “too much” of it. Brown fat, when stimulated by temperature, eats white fat to keep our “selves” warm. Meaning cold showers burn fat? Oh, baby, did my dysmorphic brain looove that. I wove this information into my routine by finishing off typically warm water showers with a 10 second count of cold water baptism. It eased me. It kept me cool. I’m grateful for it.

My track record with cold showers is messy. The antioxidant-producing properties are beautiful and helpful. The muscle-soothing, blood-pumping effects are great for someone like me, a mover and shaker. However, I gleaned all of those benefits in pursuit of a disordered-eating life hack. My first cold showers were a piece of the depression caused by a disconnect of mind from body, but while I was shivering in pursuit of ridding myself of calories, I was simultaneously aligning my ghost and my machine. My reckless imagination shuts up for 10 seconds and forces me to consider nothing else except the cold on my body. Once it’s over, my blood is encouraged, piping warmth back into my muscles and brain. Whatever mental hiccup I was obsessing over before becomes irrelevant. It is a great and terrible thing.

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It’s spring now. Rain is watering the flowers, the ocean is getting warmer, the earth is returning to life, and I have to go into a rehearsal for a musical about genital mutilation. The music is gorgeous and hard, but I have to repeatedly mine past trauma in order to hit the high notes. The work I take part in is not easy to let go of, or separate myself from. Living in trauma night after night for money requires unconventional methods. Some could say that freezing water also sounds traumatic, but when I rinse off after rehearsal, I am aware that I’m honoring myself. I am aware and grateful to have found a cure-all whose purpose has shifted throughout my life; has become more great than terrible. I found a palliative with a fluid identity to match my own. I hit the showers.

Follow Peter Smith on Twitter.

If you or someone you know is dealing with an eating disorder, you can contact the helpline of the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) at 1-800-931-2237, or visit their site. You can also live chat with a volunteer via Facebook Messenger , and text 'NED!' to 741741 for crisis support 24/7.

There is no lingering on the threshold of Jack Monroe’s world. No sooner has she opened the front door of her Southend home to me than she is gone, rushing to tidy the living room and bounding lithely up the stairs, the sound of her singing soaring through down the hallway as she does her hair.

The food writer and campaigner is busy testing recipes for her new book – her fourth, Tin Can Cook – as well as organising photoshoots and documenting the whole process in characteristically chatty snippets on social media. As she reminds me more than once during the course of our interview: “We've got work to do.”

To understand the urgency of Jack’s mission, you have to understand her. Although her recipes now regularly make the pages of national newspapers, Jack’s food writing had a humble start on her blog, A Girl Called Jack, at a time when she was relying on food banks for support. A 2012 post titled “Hunger Hurts” recounted in unsparing detail the pain of going hungry in the sixth richest country in the world. “This morning,” she wrote, “small boy had one of the last Weetabix, mashed with water, with a glass of tap water to wash it down with. I tell him I’m not hungry, but the rumblings of my stomach call me a liar. But these are the things that we do.”

When that post went viral, it was a breakout moment. Jack was interviewed, again and again, held up as proof that food poverty exists not “over there”, but right here on our doorsteps. What’s more, it can happen to anyone.

“We are all, or most of us, a couple of bad accidents or turns of events away from being in an absolute hole,” Jack tells me, perched on the kitchen counter now, legs swinging energetically. “I was working with the fire service in a job that should have been a job for life, with career progression, with a pension and promotion, and within a year I was sleeping on a sofa under a section 21 notice being evicted from my home and not eating or four days.”

What brought Jack’s blog to people’s attention was her story. But the thing that made people come back again and again were her recipes: clever, resourceful, informal cooking borne out of Jack’s need to feed herself and her young son as cheaply as possible. Straight away, there was an appetite for her work. These were recipes that would guide rather than prescribe, dealing in realism over aspiration. Jack used economy range products and fastidiously price-checked all her recipes to give a cost per portion. She came up with smart, Delia-esque ingredient swaps to save time and money. And crucially, the recipes tasted great.

It wasn’t long before there was a book deal with publishing behemoth Penguin Random House. Two glossy cookbooks – A Girl Called Jack and A Year in 120 Recipes – followed in swift succession, each taking Jack’s no-nonsense, affordable cooking gospel to the masses.

Jack describes herself as “like a King Edward, a good all-rounder.” (She even chose the name Jack as a nod to “Jack of all trades”.) But food – cooking it, writing about it, campaigning for everyone to have access to it – has always been at the heart of what she does. Before her job in the fire service (the job that she would eventually lose, sending her sliding into poverty), and long before her food blog, cookbooks and TV appearances, Jack left school at 16 and went straight to work.

“I look back and nearly all of my early jobs were in food,” she recounts. “Darren at Debenhams taught me how to cook an egg on the hot plate, and at the supermarket I worked at, I was on the cheese and ham counter for a while. My god, that was fun. I learned loads about cheese and curing meats.”

There’s a fairytale quality to this steady ascent: from supermarket deli counter to bestselling food writer – a kind of smart, scrappy Cinderella. At least, that’s how Jack likes to tell it.

“All of that,” she muses, “little building blocks to where I am now. It was all for something. It was for this!”

This unfussy hunger for everything haute cuisine or tin of beans, value range or artisanally made – is refreshing. And for a working-class writer who has felt the grind of poverty first hand, it’s not apolitical either. Finding a foothold in the largely middle-class world of food writing has presented challenges.

“I've had editors who've said, ‘Is this extra virgin olive oil?' or, 'Which type of salt do you use?' or, 'Cumin seeds or ground?'” she vents. “Every edit I sent back was, ‘Whatever's in the cupboard, whatever you've got!’”

Tin Can Cook is a challenge to this fussiness or, as Jack puts it, “a politer ‘fuck you,’ to basically the whole cookbook industry.” Using predominantly ingredients from tin cans, the book's recipes – rhubarb and custard pancakes, “tin-estrone”, beer-battered sardines – are an exuberant rebuttal to the idea that good food must be expensive, farm-fresh and unprocessed.

“Here's how to take tins – generally seen as apocalypse or undignified food – and turn them into something that you could serve up at any dinner table across Britain and be proud of it,” Jack explains.

A mackerel salad recipe uses everything from three tins: the oil from the tinned mackerel whisked for a dressing with the juice from tinned mandarins, and black beans sprinkled liberally through to make a beautiful salad of orange and silver.

“It could be served at The Ivy,” she enthuses, “and it came out of three tin cans that cost no more than £1.50 for all three of them.”

The tin can hasn’t always been so treasured. While we wax lyrical about cured meats, salt-packed anchovies or, Nigella’s favourite, pickled eggs, we struggle to muster quite the same enthusiasm for cans, which are, at the end of the day, just another way of preserving the food we eat. Before Tin Can Cook, the last cookbook devoted to the topic was Ambrose Heath’s wartime recipes collection, Good Things From Tinned Foods, which says something about the survivalist, austerity mindset that the tin can seems to evoke. The reluctance of the food world to really celebrate the tinned food seems less to do with the quality of the food itself than with how the tin can is codified: as a budget item and an emblem of an impoverished British food culture, its gleaming opacity at odds with the “honesty” we demand of our food today.

“[Cans] remove part of the process – the chopping, the parboiling, the cooking – and turn cooking into something that pretty much anyone can do,” says Jack. “I want to empower people who might have lost their way in the kitchen or never known their way around it in the first place. And just go, this is a thing you can do, you can do this, and if you want I can show you how.”

At a time when so much food writing is focussed on the ethics of where we get our ingredients from, Jack is determined that we don't lose sight who that food goes to. That means writing cookbooks not just for the middle classes, but for those with low incomes, people who are disabled, and, at the heart of Tin Can Cook, food bank users, for whom tinned foods are a lifeline.

Jack was a food bank user for six long months after she lost her job.

“I remember getting like a tin of Spam and being like, ‘Well, what on earth am I going to do with that to turn it into a meal?’” she says. The memories of that confusion and hunger are what galvanised her to tackle tinned foods head on. “I basically wanted to write the book that I wish I'd had back then.”

With a record 1.6 million emergency food packages given out by the Trussell Trust food bank charity in the last year, it’s clear that Britain is facing an extreme hunger crisis. And so, Jack has been hard at work. She has lobbied parliament. She has campaigned alongside the Child Poverty Action Group. Keenly aware that the people who most need cheap recipe ideas are those least likely to be able to afford a cookbook, Jack also started a fundraiser which has so far raised £24,000 for free copies of Tin Can Cook for food banks and their users. (“I'm never going to get rich doing this,” she notes wryly, “but I want to make a difference.”) She also lists the bulk of her recipes for free on her website, and has convinced a few tinned food companies – including Heinz – to donate cans to food banks.

“So much done so far,” she smiles, “but so much left to do.”

When Jack won an Observer Food Monthly Award for “best food personality” last year, it marked a decisive change of register, from food blogger to food celebrity. But her heart will always be in the kitchen.

“I know what I’m here for now,” she says, hopping down from her countertop soapbox to dish out lunch. “I've found my niche. I'm just going to keep doing it.”

She serves bowls of a thick, wine-red stew which has been very gently simmering on the stove since I arrived. She has christened it “borlotouille”, like ratatouille but with tender borlotti beans added to the rich, tomato base. It is warming, filling and fragrant with garlic – enough to make even the most stubborn tin can-sceptic eat their words. We enjoy it in the happy half-silence of people more eager to eat than to speak, though not before getting a requisite photo for Jack’s Instagram.

As I’m leaving, I pause to take a look at the dozens of cards displayed proudly in the hallway. Some are cartoonish; others are more serious; many say, simply: thank you. They are mostly from Jack's readers, people who slowly, recipe by simple recipe, discovered not only that they could cook, but that they actually enjoyed it.

“I wanted to surround myself with physical reminders of, look, you're doing something good,” Jack beams.

She pauses for a moment, and we look up at the cards, bellies full. But the revery can’t last long. As if remembering who she is, Jack clatters back into chaotic motion. She needs to get ready for the school run, test some more recipes, make arrangements for a big shoot. She bustles me out of the door and into the bright afternoon sun. I don’t blame her. There is so much work to do.

@rubytandoh

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Makes 4 sandwiches
Prep time: 20 minutes
Total time: 1 hour

Ingredients

for the chicken katsu:
9 ounces|250 grams chicken thigh meat, skin on
¼ white onion, finely chopped, rinsed, and squeezed
2 cups fresh panko breadcrumbs
1 ¼ teaspoon|3 grams kosher salt
1 cup all-purpose flour
2 large eggs, lightly beaten

for the b&s sauce:
1 cup|500 grams Bull-Dog sauce
3 tablespoons|50 grams Sriracha hot chili sauce

for the sandwich:
4 ½ ounces|130 grams white cabbage, thinly sliced, washed and dried
1 ½ teaspoons kosher salt
2 tablespoons Kewpie mayo
B+S sauce
1 lemon, cut into wedges
vegetable oil, for frying
1 loaf thick-cut milk (white sandwich) bread, sliced into 1-inch thick pieces

Directions

1. Prepare the chicken katsu: Chill the chicken thigh meat and the elements of your meat grinder in the freezer for 20 minutes. Once chilled, pass the chicken thigh meat through the grinder twice, then put in a bowl. Add the onion, ½ cup breadcrumbs, and salt to the ground chicken, then mix together. Form the mixture into four patties, place on a tray and then chill in the refrigerator.

2. Make the B&S sauce: Combine the Bull-Dog Sauce and Sriracha Hot Chili Sauce. Reserve in the refrigerator until ready to use.

3. Make the sandwich: In a mixing bowl, lightly salt the cabbage, then leave to sit for 2 minutes before squeezing out as much water as you can. Add the Kewpie mayo and mix.

4. Bread the patties: Place the flour, eggs, and remaining breadcrumbs in 3 separate bowls. Working with 1 patty at a time, dip the chicken katsu in the flour, coating it completely, then dredge it in the eggs, then the breadcrumbs. Lightly press a dimple in the middle of the patty to help it cook evenly and place it on a tray. Repeat with remaining chicken katsu patties.

6. Heat the vegetable oil in a deep fryer or deep saucepan to 340°F. Using a slotted spoon or ladle, carefully lower the chicken katsu patties into the hot oil. Deep fry until a deep golden brown, about 6 minutes.

7. While the patties are cooking, place the bread in a toaster oven or salamander (overhead grill.) Warm only one side of the bread – this will become the inside of the sandwich.

8. Remove the chicken patties with a slotted spoon and drain paper towel-lined tray. Roll in the B+S sauce until glossy and coated all over.

9. Evenly spread the cabbage mixture on the toasted side of the bottom slice of bread. Place the sauced chicken katsu patty on top of the bread. Top with the second slice of bread, toasted-side down. Very lightly compress the sandwich, flipping it over twice so that it’s evenly pressed.

10. Neatly cut the crusts from the slices of bread, then cut the sandwich so that the cut-side faces upwards to show the cross-section and filling; insert a bamboo skewer through the middle of the sandwich to hold it together.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: This recipe has been reprinted with permission of the author from Chicken and Charcoal: Yakitori, Yardbird, Hong Kong.

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Kneeling in front of a Zora Neale Hurston tribute piece on 150th and Riverside Drive, Nola Darling, the protagonist of Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It, asks, "How does it feel knowing that your novel Barracoon went unpublished for 87 years, collecting dust, only now to see the light of day?"

In the second season of the series, Lee dives deep into Nola's personal journey as a radical black artist who refuses to compromise her art for money, while being confronted by the uncertainty of not knowing when her work will pay off in a world that pressures black artists to play nice in white-dominated establishments. The season comes at a time when the creative class of Brooklynites that birthed Lee, Chris Rock, and many others of their generation is fully under threat as rents skyrocket in rapidly gentrifying, historically black neighborhoods. In the art world, major institutions like the Whitney Museum have made public efforts to showcase more artists of color, but have also given those artists the cold shoulder for speaking out against injustice in the institutions. Nowadays, it can be difficult for young, radical artists to see which way is up, but through Nola's story, Lee offers a type of roadmap for navigating the historically segregated sphere.

Now that the show doesn't have to recreate a modern version of the 1986 movie's plot, it's more tied to current events as characters face the consequences of gentrification, discuss the politics of offensive public statues, and even visit Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. The second season creates a sense that society desperately needs an intervention from artistic truth-tellers. There are a number of people in Nola's life who push her to make more commercial art, but her true saving graces are those who understand what she can bring to our current political climate and encourage her to stick with her righteous path, even when she's unsure what that will look like.

Beyond the encouraging plot line, Lee actively uses Nola's story in practical ways to teach aspiring creatives how they can build a viable lifestyle for themselves. Her adventures take us into spaces that help emerging black artists get on their feet, like the MoCADA Museum and a fictional black artist retreat on Martha's Vineyard that's dreamy enough to inspire Google searches for similar programs. Importantly, the people in those spaces aren't stereotypical pretentious black characters or couch-surfing hippie types that "need to grow up." Instead, Lee showcases actual successful black artists in a montage where they introduce one of their pieces, allowing their dignified yet down-to-earth appearances to speak for themselves. (That group includes newer powerhouses like Juliana Huxtable and Doreen Garner, as well as established icons like Carrie Mae Weems and LaToya Ruby Frazier.) The world Nola discovers—based largely on reality—is full of black artists that are taken seriously and celebrated, despite forces in society that can paint their dreams as frivolous or unrealistic.

The show's meta context of Lee's own success in his artistic career also helps drive home the point. A big outdoor scene in the season's fifth episode takes place at an annual public block party that Lee throws in honor of Prince called the "Purple People Party." The scene, and the real life party, are a powerful way to reclaim public space in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of Bedford Stuyvesant where newcomers have tried to stomp out black street culture with 911 calls for decades. His mark on Brooklyn can also be felt in other scenes, like when an angry mob protests a real estate firm's new Fort Greene office in a moment that echoes the standoffs in Lee's Do the Right Thing. At this stage in his career, he's using film to continue shedding light on social issues while depicting a world that's already impacted by his decades of art activism.

By the time Nola gains the courage and inspiration to tackle her first solo show with a disturbing, explicit piece at its center, she's able to let the divided reactions roll off her back. She's developed more of a backbone in her personal relationships and a confidence in her artistic direction, which she desperately needed to navigate the pressures facing young artists today. The show's title once referred to Nola's non-monogamous sex life, but now encompasses who she is as a creative, too. And through honing in on that, Lee is able to uplift a different type of alternative lifestyle at a key moment for society.

Follow Taylor Hosking on Twitter and Instagram .

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

A social network described as the "anti-Facebook" has become a haven for neo-Nazis connected to militant hate groups, Motherboard has found.

Minds is a US-based social network that bills itself as being focused on transparency (its code is open source), free speech, and cryptocurrency rewards for users. Much of the recent media coverage around Minds, which launched in 2015, has focused on how it challenges social media giants and its adoption of cryptocurrency, while also noting that the site's light-touch approach to content moderation has led to a proliferation of far-right viewpoints being shared openly on its platform.

In recent months, major tech companies such as Facebook and Twitter have taken controversial, if incomplete, steps to ban white nationalism and crack down on far-right content on their platforms. Upstart social media sites such as Gab (a Twitter-esque site known for its far-right users) have moved in. Minds isn't quite as popular as Gab, but the far-right has burrowed into the platform in recent years.

Under-scrutinized sites like Minds—which often have less rigorous moderation rules and practices than some social media giants—allow hate groups to exist unfettered online, even when platforms with millions of users like Facebook and Twitter deplatform them. Minds is working on letting users moderate content using a “jury system” that lets users vote on whether content should be allowed on the site.

Motherboard was led to Minds after tracing the online footprints of far-right groups including Atomwaffen Division (an American hate group connected to several murders) and the Europe-based Feuerkrieg Division, which bills itself as an underground paramilitary group and has called for political assassinations. On Minds, social media profiles connected to these groups maintained accounts.

In addition to these self-styled paramilitary groups, there are Minds accounts linked to Patriot Front, a white nationalist organization associated with the neo-Nazi who killed Heather Heyer at the 2017 "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, and the Canadian chapter of Generation Identity, a global hate group that came under fire after it was revealed the Christchurch terror suspect had donated money to one of its European chapters.

One tactic adopted by far-right extremist groups to maintain a pipeline of communication with interested recruits amid social media takedowns is to advertise encrypted email addresses and link accounts between platforms.

A post on the Minds account linked to Feuerkrieg Division from May 19 advertised the group’s parallel account on Gab and openly displayed its ProtonMail email address. This group is already being monitored by terrorism trackers TRAC analysis consortium and the not-for-profit Counter Extremism Project (CEP).

Do you know something about an extremist group and their activities online? We would love to hear from you. Using a computer or phone, you can contact Ben Makuch securely on Telegram @BenMakuch or email ben.makuch@vice.com.

Atomwaffen Division’s Minds account, while inactive since mid-2017, has still garnered close to 20,000 views on the site.

An image posted by one of the neo-Nazi-linked accounts on Minds. Screengrab: Minds

When initially contacted by Motherboard, Minds founder Bill Ottman said that neo-Nazi content on Minds "sucks," but that he thinks Minds is a place where civil discourse with extremists can de-radicalize them.

In recent months, Ottman has gained mainstream attention for interviews he gave to Joe Rogan on his podcast and to controversial Fox News personality Tucker Carlson on the dangers of social networks impinging on American free speech.

"These people are pretty sick individuals, but you have to zoom out and ask yourself: what is happening on the internet as an ecosystem?" Ottman said. "We would argue, it’s irresponsible of the big networks to be pushing all of these users into these other darker corners of the internet.”

Minds, as a whole, clearly aims to allow content on its platform that would not be acceptable elsewhere. However, its content policy states that posting content regarding terrorism or “true threats” of violence are bannable offenses.

After Motherboard shared six accounts it identified as being linked to neo-Nazi or otherwise hateful groups on Minds—and noting that the site’s own policies bar terrorism-related content—the company banned Atomwaffen Division for “terrorist activity,” and Feuerkrieg Division and another neo-Nazi account for “inciting violence.”

“Thank you for the reports and context. We have taken action on multiple accounts and the others are under investigation,” Minds told Motherboard in a statement.

One of the banned accounts was the creator of a neo-Nazi propaganda group on Minds with more than 350 members, but the group page itself remains online. It is highly active, with several new posts on Friday alone, including a lengthy post trying to demonstrate that the Holocaust didn't happen.

Minds currently has a content moderation team of "about five" people, Ottman said, and their job is to go through the report queue and mark flagged posts as being not safe for work (NSFW), or ban the offending account.

On Minds, images referencing anti-semitism, Nazism and neo-Nazism, white supremacy, and more are all plainly visible. However, some posts are sporadically semi-obscured behind an age block, suggesting the content is OK for adults.

On the Feuerkrieg Division-linked account, before it was banned, Motherboard spotted a swastika image that was slightly blurred and asked the user to confirm their age as being older than 18 to un-blur.

Minds age-blocks some content with a blurring effect. Screengrab: Minds

In the neo-Nazi Minds group with over 350 followers that was not banned, images depicting overtly hateful and neo-Nazi content are currently visible, while some posts were hidden behind an age block. One post, which appears to dox someone described as a “race traitor,” is plainly visible. Minds’ content policy says that doxing is grounds for a ban.

"The extreme right is always going to look for loopholes in content policies when it comes to propaganda and encouraging violence. The variable is where social media companies draw the line and decide that they don’t want to assist in this endeavor," Joshua Fisher-Birch, of the Counter Extremism Project, told Motherboard in an email.

Last week, Minds launched another layer of site governance to manage inflammatory content on the site, while juggling its outward commitment to "free speech.” The system allows users to vote on the permissibility of restricted content through an ad hoc jury system.

Currently, after the Minds team takes action on a flagged post, the account owner can appeal the decision. When that happens, 12 users are randomly selected and asked to participate in a vote in a pop-up. If 75 percent of the jury agrees to reverse the Minds team's decision, the appeal is successful. If not, the decision stays. Users on Minds get three strikes unless the offense falls under the “immediate ban offense” category.

Since the jury system doesn’t give users an initial say on content—that stays with the Minds team—right now the jury is simply an opportunity for users to say if they want to keep banned or restricted content on the site.

Minds said it plans to extend the jury system to handle initial reports as well as appeals. The site also claims to have developed an automated system for finding posts that violate site standards, and for surfacing the most urgent user reports for the moderation team to handle.

“We are dedicated to free expression and transparency as the antidote to radicalization, violence, and extremism,” the statement said. “The goal with the jury system is to have a more democratic and fair process for reviewing moderation decisions as opposed to forcing the community to adhere to the subjectivity of a single centralized authority with no transparency.”

Another defining feature of Minds is its implementation of cryptocurrency tokens called Minds that users earn from using the site. Users earn tokens based on their contribution to Minds—accounts that get more engagement earn more tokens—or buy them for the cryptocurrency equivalent of 15 cents USD.

These tokens can be used to boost posts in other users' timelines, or as a currency of sorts between users (for example, as part of a content-sharing agreement), or to purchase premium features on Minds. "One token gives you 1,000 impressions extra, and we serve them chronologically based on who’s refreshing their feed," Ottman said.

Far-right accounts on Minds have already benefited from its contribution-based token economy. In most cases, there isn’t a whole lot of money changing hands, but tokens on Minds can be used to spread far-right messages much further than they would organically.

Fuerkrieg Division's Minds account had accrued one wire—a payment between users to reward creators or tip—and five tokens. Its page, littered with anti-semitic tropes and propaganda urging its followers to “take action," earned over 27,000 views.

Another account banned by Minds after Motherboard raised the issue had close to 550,000 views and garnered 38 tokens and four wires. One of its posts featured a cartoon image of a Jewish man being lynched.

Minds has the ability to effectively demonetize accounts on the platform, according to Ottman. "In terms of, do we have the ability to stop users from earning [tokens]? Theoretically, yeah, we do," he said.

It's a moot proposition for Minds, Ottman said, because if an account was behaving badly enough to be blocked from earning tokens through the site (though they could conceivably purchase them through other means), then it would simply be banned.

Minds’ approach is out of step with mainstream social media networks, which despite their slow actions, have taken steps to curb far-right extremism on their platforms after widespread public outcry.

"Consistent Terms of Service and content policies paired with robust and consistent application across multiple platforms would prohibit violent and harmful actors from abusing these sites," Fisher-Birch said.

Minds’ approach appears to be, at least in some ways, double-edged. According to an Agence France-Presse report, over 100,000 people in Vietnam flocked to Minds after the country's government passed a law cracking down on dissent online and citizens feared that Facebook might scrub political discourse in accordance with Vietnamese government policies.

Regardless, it's clear that the same approach has made Minds a place for white supremacist and neo-Nazis, as well as their affiliated organizations—which claim to be armed and ready for violence—to link up and stay connected online.

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Rick and Morty is finally coming back for a fourth season this fall, and it looks like Dan Harmon is already getting ready for season five. Last weekend, Harmon took to Instagram to give us a behind-the-scenes look from the show's writers' room, posting a series of photos of writer Rob Schrab's ideas for future episodes—and they're, uh, absolutely wild:

"The amount of season 5 ideas Rob Schrab can come up with in a day is just awe inspiring from a certain distance at which I should have stayed," Harmon writes alongside a photo of him standing over a sea of scribbled Post-It notes, before posting close-ups on a few of Schrab's choice ideas.

A planet powered by chips and salsa? Sounds great. An episode where Morty buys a boat? Not so much. Sure, Rick and Morty have to crank out a whopping 70 episodes over the next few years and, fine, the show has already proven its ability to pull off everything from fourth-dimensional testicle monsters to sad montages set to Blonde Redhead songs, but these ideas are all over the place, even by Rick and Morty standards. Some are good, some are bad—and some are just the words "anal beads."

So in honor of the return of Rick and Morty later this year, we here at VICE have dutifully catalogued all of Schrab's ideas—at least the ones we can read in the photos—and ranked them from best to worst. You're welcome in advance, Adult Swim.

30. Anal beads

This isn't even an idea, really.

29. The People's (Basketball) Court

28. Bark-nado

27. Morty buys a boat

Could be good, could also be the plot of any family-facing 1970s sitcom.

26. Jerry gets a pinecone in his butt

25. Y-Ray vision [unintelligible]

The second half of this idea is impossible to read, so maybe it's a better idea with more context.

24. Blood shed

A lot of these less fleshed-out ideas are just built around puns. But "blood shed" is the best of them, at least.

23. Invisible pigs

22. The king of smiles

Good idea if it's about a monarch who rules over your right to grin, bad idea if it has anything to do with Radiohead.

21. The Thing but with women

20. Sperm blob

Gross.

19. Rick's day care

18. Planet Biopic

Did we read that one right? Is it a biopic about the life of a planet? Sure, why not.

17. Furniture zoo

16. Woman made of fish

15. Library of food

14. Trench coat made of dreams

13. Summer brings mannequin to life with [amulet/mullet]

This is another one that's tricky to read. Does Summer bring the mannequin back using an amulet, or is the newly-animated mannequin sporting a mullet? Do we have to choose? Both ideas are solid. Let's keep going.

12. Planet of no stop signs

11. Detachable fingers (or toes)

10. Dinosaur ghosts

Brilliant.

9. Artificial person with real leg

It's like a sci-fi Ship of Theseus.

8. Jerry makes a log cabin with hair

7. Planet powered by chips and salsa

6. Voltron but with vegetables

Also brilliant.

5. Jerry gets into a Twitter feud and wins... Now, someone is trying to kill him

4. Maximum Overdrive but with grass

Isn't this basically the plot of The Happening? Whatever, we'll take it.

3. When-wolf

2. Rick discovers the 11th Commandment

Yes. Even Harmon himself said this is one he wants to write. But it's still not the best of all possible ideas that sprang forth from Schrab's brain during his Post-It session. That prize goes to...

1. Wesley Sniper

Yes. There it is. The best idea of them all. It is beautiful. It is perfect. It must be an episode, preferably starring Snipes himself. The guy already made a cameo as himself in What We Do in the Shadows, so we at least know he's got a sense of humor. This one just writes itself.

Please, for the love of all that is holy, give us a season five episode about Rick and Morty facing off against Wesley Sniper with a subplot about Jerry's various Twitter beefs. We maybe don't need to find out whatever a "sperm blob" is but, honestly, we'll watch whatever regardless. At least none of the Post-Its make any reference to a "Kanye West episode," so there's that.

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Last week, Madame Tussauds London unveiled the latest victim in its ongoing practice of molding creepy, life-size wax dolls of famous people: Ariana Grande.

The wax figure has all the telltale signs of Grande-hood. Oversized sweatshirt? Check. Thigh-high boots? Of course. Signature high pony with ring accessories weaved into her hair? Yup, nailed those. Face? Well... let's just say it's looking more mayonnaise than Old Bay seasoning. It can be easy to forget that Grande has worked overtime to remove all signs of her Caucasian heritage, until you see a version of her with those modifications omitted.

In an almost Sliding Doors-esque manner of what-if juxtaposition, wax figure Ari looks like the younger, paler version of herself before she discovered (and then appropriated) black culture. That uncanny facsimile gives us a glimpse into an Ariana who could have been. One who had stuck to belting out Céline Dion and Barbara Streisand in the backseat of the car, and had never been introduced to "The Wobble" at a cookout. Because—reminder—Grande is 100 percent white, despite rampant confusion about her race. (Grande herself self-identifies as "half Sicilian and half Abbruzzese," which is Italian-American speak for "white, but with half a tan.")

Grande in 2008 (far left - credit: Joe Corrigan), 2011 (center - credit: Bruce Gilkas), and 2018 (far right - credit" Jim Spellman). Yeah, we see it, too.

Grande's look has, shall we say, evolved over the years. We came to know her as the child star of Nickelodeon's Victorious and Sam & Cat, sporting her natural Brittany Murphy-style curls and then a punky, red ponytail. In those days, her skin was pin-up-girl-level fair. Then, someone must have served Grande some seasoned chicken and picked the raisins out of her potato salad, because homegirl underwent a gradual, Jenner/Kardashian-esque transformation, where she became dramatically more tan; her lips got the Kylie treatment (ahem, "overlined"); and her vocals went less Streisand and more Mariah Carey circa "Breakdown." She started dating rappers and bad boys in hypebeast gear.

The fine craftsmen at Madame Tussauds London have been caught somewhere in between these stages of Grande, seemingly Googling images from 2008 for source material for the face, and 2018 photos for the body and attire. People reports that Madame Tussauds London took to Twitter to ask fans to vote on which version of Grande they should re-create: "Classic Ari,” “Sassy Ari,” or “Princess Ari." "Classic Ari" won out, but there's a clear disconnect. The body is "Boyfriend" but the face is "Bye Bye Bye." The body A-la-bama, the face is Chat-ta-nooga. The body is Amethyst Amelia Kelly, the face is Iggy Azalea.

Even Ari had to speak up, commenting "I just wanna talk" on Popcrave's Instagram post on the wax figure. I bet she does, considering how concertedly the pop singer has shifted her look and sound to reflect black culture and coolness, hiring black songwriters to cement herself as an urban adult artist (which has led to being accused of plagiarism and cultural appropriation by her black peers).

It's the case with many white performers who've wanted to shed the porcelain, Middle America-friendly pop image that shot them to fame. Justin Timberlake, Justin Bieber, Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus, and countless others have turned to emulating black artists to create an edgier, more sexualized, more adult persona. It's no shock that going "bad boy" or "bad girl" in many cases means appropriating blackness, when reports show that black boys and girls are labeled aggressive, sexual, and loud at a very young age.

And while she seems to want to embody what writer Rebecca Walker called Black Cool, no amount of tanning, blaccenting, or twerking in her videos while surrounded by black backup dancers will change that 23 and Me result. Madame Tussauds London's wax figure of Grande might just be a painful reminder to Grande that she is, indeed, white.

Follow Alex Zaragoza on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Oakland, California, is poised to become the second American city, after Denver, to decriminalise magic mushrooms.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Oakland’s city council was considering a resolution telling police not to investigate or arrest people using the drug, along with other “entheogenic plants,” which are plants containing psychedelic substances traditionally used for spiritual purposes, a category that includes ibogaine and ayahuasca. The first hearing on the topic was scheduled for Tuesday night; a vote could come next month. The resolution had significant support—City Council President Rebecca Kaplan told the Chronicle she backed it—and both Kaplan and Council Member Noel Gallo, who introduced it, said they were swayed by arguments made to them by activists about the ability of shrooms to treat mental health conditions.

If that kind of rhetoric is being taken seriously by politicians, the legalisation of psychedelics may be on the brink of becoming a movement with some momentum.

The main group pushing for the legalisation of psychedelic plants in the area, Decriminalise Nature Oakland, emphasises that these drugs can be used for therapeutic purposes. That’s also what activists in California and Oregon have been emphasising. There’s strong evidence that there could be medical applications for psilocybin, the chemical that makes shrooms more than just a burger topping. People have taken psilocybin to treat everything from OCD to end-of-life despair, and doctors have called on the government to reclassify the drug so it can be studied further and potentially prescribed at some point. Last year, the FDA gave a psilocybin-based treatment for depression the “breakthrough therapy” designation, a tag that could expedite its development.

The decriminalisation of mushrooms doesn’t mean we’re on the brink of a world where you can pop into a CVS and get a psilocybin tablet. For one thing, researchers recommend using the drug under the supervision of a doctor. For another, it’s unclear in Denver what decriminalisation will actually mean in the long term, especially if selling shrooms remains illegal. Finally, just because voters and politicians in left-wing locales like Denver and Oakland are relatively on board doesn’t mean this battle will get waged—let alone won—on the state and national level.

What’s significant is not the victories of the budding movement but the fact that the ideas appear to be taking root, however slow that process is. Activists seem to be borrowing a page from weed campaigners who emphasised the medical properties of THC and CBD. The idea that these drugs are not just a way for stoners to get high but a medicine may prove to be a powerful argument.

Psychedelic activists have been upfront about their nationwide aims. “Things are starting to roll. We’re getting calls from L.A. and other states in the U.S.,” Carlos Plazola, a co-founder of Decriminalize Nature Oakland, told the Chronicle. Ryan Munevar, the director of Decriminalize California, a statewide organisation, recently told the Psychedelic Times that he sees this as part of a long process: “Mushrooms first, and then all the other psychedelics. After that who knows, maybe we will pick even bigger fights in the drug war.”

Full legalisation of all psychedelics is a long way away. Psychedelics are still stigmatised, and Denver’s ballot measure was met with a fair amount of chuckling (a Colorado Springs Gazette columnist called the city “Weirdsville”). Researchers, doctors, and politicians will always be more skeptical of drug legalisation than activists, who see the drugs as a path to enlightenment and view their criminalisation as a deep moral wrong. But more limited measures have been gaining clear support: One recent poll, for instance, found that a majority of Oregonians supported the legalisation of medical psilocybin. And as the past month shows, those activists have a toehold in the system they didn’t before.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

It's 3AM and you can't sleep. Your mind wanders through the many horrors you've inflicted upon yourself with your own body and mouth: that time you misread a fist-bump scenario and shook the other person's knuckles rather than pounding them. The time you tried to thank a school crush for holding the door open for you, but instead let out a sort of alarming guttural scream? Every single time you've cracked your back at work and looked up to see Nice Susan wincing.

I don't blame Susan for never saying anything: most of us witness all of the above without saying anything, because it's polite. But how are we supposed to learn if people don't call us out on the stuff we do that annoys them? I know for a fact that there's one group of people who would be happy – maybe even excited – to call me out.

So, to find out where I might be going wrong in life, I got back in touch with some of my exes and asked them to review me.

The author with her current boyfriend (right).

EX #1

Sebastian and I were together on and off for about two years. Or, at least, as "together" as you can be ages 13 to 15. It's worth noting that I wasn’t allowed a boyfriend until I was 15, so this relationship came with a fair share of sneaking around.

VICE: So, be honest, no filter.
Sebastian: Honest, no filter, whatever you want, there were actually very few things about you that annoyed me. Your parents, though. It annoyed me that we couldn’t tell them.

That was more circumstantial, though. Anything that I did?
You were way too jealous. Like, fucking hell. I couldn’t talk to anyone because you’d be on top of me asking who that was and why I was talking to them—

Let’s not exaggerate now.
It's true! That’s why we broke up.

Did anything else that I did annoy you?
Honestly? That you broke up with me.

EX #2

This was the first time I was in love in love. Rodrigo and I were together on and off from the age of 16 to 19. My parents never liked him, and half of our relationship took place, once again, in secret.

Rodrigo: I don’t know if you still are, but you were extremely jealous. Some things were normal, but there were times where you crossed a line – whenever I’d like some girl’s picture, or whenever some girl would like one of my pictures.

Okay. What else?
You took little things and turned them into huge things. I remember once we broke up because I didn’t like your prom dress. That was so unnecessary.

Wow. I don’t even remember that.
Also, you would always turn things around when you fucked up. You’d take a tiny thing I said when we’d argue because of something you did, and suddenly I was the one apologising.

Oh dear.

EX #3

Jace is my most recent break-up. We were together for a year-and-a-half. We lived together, adopted a cat together, moved to a different city together. It felt like the real deal. Alas, he's on this list.

Jace: I just want to say I thoroughly enjoyed being your boyfriend. You haven’t really got any annoying traits, but going through my Instagram unfollowing people, and resenting the girls I’d had a thing with, even if it had been ten years prior… not cool.

That’s going to make me look fucking horrible. You’re right.
Essentially, just your jealousy – sometimes it felt like you enjoyed the idea of me being jealous. Also, there’s your temper. There is no gradient: its either nought or 100. You go full soap opera. And never letting me listen to what I wanted to in the car. And waking me up every time you needed to go pee so that I would come with you. You seriously fucked up my sleeping pattern.

In all fairness, that house was seriously haunted.

CALUM, CURRENT BOYFRIEND

Shockingly, old habits die hard. When it comes to EX #1's parent complaint, Calum comments: "Your parents don’t annoy me, they’re lovely. The fact you waited so long to tell your dad I even existed, however, didn’t make me feel great."

Calum has only ever met my dad on FaceTime. He doesn’t know how scary it can be to tell him things. Although, as a 21 year-old semi-independent woman, maybe it’s time to square up.

As for the overwhelmingly recurring jealousy theme – and I recognise that unfollowing people off my ex’s Instagram was a really shitty thing to do – he agrees: "Our biggest fight was born out of me having my arm around one of my close girl-friends of over ten years."

I could go into a very in-depth sob story about where my trust-issues-derived jealousy comes from, but I won’t. I'll just take it on the chin and move onto my other notable passion: turning little things into big things!

"You tend to turn passing comments into hour-long arguments," says Calum. "It’s like you like holding onto little things."

Though he (thankfully) couldn’t think of any specific examples at the time, Calum also thinks me turning him into the bad guy even when I was the one to have messed up "sounds like something that has happened".

As for my temper, he tried to sugar coat it as a "Latin fire thing", but recognises, "to us Brits, yeah, you go from zero to a 100 in a second".

We don’t have a car and neither of us drives, but apparently I'm as possessive of the Netflix remote as I am of the aux chord. Says Calum: "One of the few times we’ve watched a movie I picked, you made me turn it off because it was 'the worst fucking film ever'."

SO I’VE GOT A COUPLE OF THINGS TO WORK ON

You can try to learn from your past, using, like, memory – but if you really want to know what’s wrong with you, a tip: call up your exes. Take their reviews with a pinch of salt – they did go out with you, after all; you can't be that bad – but if they all bring up the exact same issue with pithy, pointed examples… well, maybe there is some room for improvement.

For Calum Best, Celebrity Love Island was a lads' holiday on expenses. Before filming began in the summer of 2005, he packed his wet-look gel and faded denim and flew to an island in Fiji, where the action was due to take place. He was met by Nuts models in string bikinis, jet skis, Mai Tais and interns who handed him sushi as he remained horizontal on a sun lounger. Calum didn’t find love – unless you count the muffled noises emerging from his trip to the bog with Rebecca Loos – but he did have fun. So much so, that when he was eventually voted off, he checked into a nearby hotel instead of heading home, occasionally yelling into the villa in the hopes that the remaining Islanders would hear him.

“There wasn’t a moment that sucked,” Calum tells me over the phone, in between long vape rips. The TV set that producers had built on an abandoned package holiday resort was, for a tabloid celeb in the mid-noughties, utopia.

Celebrity Love Island, which ran for two seasons in 2005 and 2006, was commissioned by ITV as a rival to Channel 4's Big Brother, which had dominated the headlines since it began in 2000. While today's reality TV landscape is very different (BB wrapped its final season last year, and Love Island – a re-do of the Celebrity Love Island format, but with normies from Blackpool who have 48k on Insta – has dominated the cultural conversation for the past two summers), back then, ITV needed to compete with the Big Brother behemoth. What they came up with was Celebrity Love Island, a programme that chucked the cream of Heat magazine-fodder into a Spanish villa, and asked us to watch them try to fuck each other.

Joining Calum and Rebecca (the Beckhams’ PA who allegedly had sex with David, before tossing off a pig during an appearance on Channel 5’s The Farm) on Celebrity Love Island season one was Page Three girl Abi Titmuss, Westlife’s bodyguard Fran Cosgrave, Atomic Kitten member Liz McClarnon, Hollyoaks’ Paul Danan and ex-Manchester United player Lee Sharpe. Season two saw Calum and Paul return, alongside Alicia Douvall, Steve-O of Jackass, model Sophie Anderton, and Paul Gascoigne’s step-daughter Bianca. But despite ITV investing two million pounds into the production, at one point during its first series, Celebrity Love Island garnered just two million viewers, compared with Big Brother’s seven million.

Ultimately, the show had failed to compete with Big Brother’s sixth and seventh seasons (which featured such classic moments as Kinga masturbating with a wine bottle and Kieron hiding foot scabs in his rival’s food). Back then, the public was clearly not enthused by the wholesome escapism of watching hot men in ripped jeans fall in love. Now, people pay £20 for Love Island water bottles, and dads everywhere find that "muggy" has entered their everyday vernacular.

To celebrate the return of Britain’s most treasured broadcast on Monday 3rd June, I wanted to find out about where it all began. I spoke to contestants, producers and tabloid journalists involved in the original Celebrity Love Island series – the cursed ashes from whence our beloved shagging programme rose – about their experiences of the show. What was it like leaving the island at a time when it was the Daily Mail and not social media trolls who called you fat? Why was everyone so angry about people being famous for no reason? And how did a mid-noughties flop become what is now the Premier League of reality TV?

“ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO DO THIS?”

When she heard about her son Calum’s decision to feature on Love Island, the former Playboy bunny Angie Best was nervous. “She warned me not to do anything stupid,” Calum tells me. “And my friends were like, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’” Calum’s family were right to be sceptical. In the 2000s, reality TV signalled the end of a career rather than the beginning of it. It was where celebrities went to mend their public image after some casual racism, or to bolster retirement funds (it was that or a Santander ad). Think Gillian McKeith, the woman who rifled through poo, going on I’m A Celebrity after we got bored of watching her fat-shame northerners.

“At the time, I was with a modelling agency called Select who found me high-end work,” Calum continues. “I was shooting for GQ and going to award shows. They asked me, ‘Are you really willing to risk your career just to get on this programme?’ But I was young. I thought, 'I’ll worry about what I look like once it’s over.'”

THE ACTION

Despite the tabloids’ complaints that the show was “boring dross,” both original Love Island seasons had their fair share of drama. An entire bottle of sauvignon blanc was poured over Sophie’s head after she snogged her mate’s crush, Pierce Brosnan’s son Chris. In series two, when Colleen Shannon – a DJ and Playboy model who brought 28 bikinis with her to Fiji – rejected soap star Lee Otway, he stormed into the diary room and smashed thousands of pounds worth of camera equipment. And at one point, it looked like Abi Titmuss and Rebecca Loos were going to shag: while Abi ate chocolate cake, Rebecca told her, "I could help you burn that off in one night,” before adding, "What I need to do is tie you down and make love to you. You would never be the same woman again.”

Most of the excitement of Celebrity Love Island season one, however, was related to Paul Danan, or "Dangerous Danan" as he became known. Fran Cosgrave remembers a time when he almost came to blows with Paul. “When I came out, my Mum was like, ‘I’m so glad you didn’t hit that boy’,” he tells me. He clashed with Paul after the actor had been slurring rude comments at woman cast members. “He got right up in my face but then security separated us. He was screaming and blinding while being dragged away.” At one point, Paul became so volatile that the other contestants refused to sleep in the same room as him.

Colleen says her wildest moment came when producers brought in Jackass star Steve-O. “He poured milk under the fridge and left cheese everywhere and sat in the kitchen for 36 hours to see if any lice or animals would crawl out. Sure enough, they did. Then he took his pants off and tucked his junk in between his legs and did a backflip.” Steve’s sunny mood quickly changed after producers refused to bring him more alcohol. In the end, he only lasted only three days.

It’s difficult to imagine Steve or Paul being asked to feature on Love Island in its current incarnation, especially as producers have recently ramped up the show's mental health checks and procedures. Paul recently admitted that he was suffering with drug withdrawals during his time on the show. “I remember actually crawling to the beach hut in the first few days and I was shivering and shaking, going, ‘Oh my god, I don’t know what’s going on with me,’” he told the Teenage Diary Podcast. He has also alleged that he was given Valium by producers to calm him down: “It just chilled me out and the next day, I was fine.”

And according to Celebrity Love Island executive producer Natalka Znak, Steve wasn’t stable during his time on the show, either: “I’ve had several conversations with Steve since,” she tells me. “He barely remembers being there.”

“WE WERE IN AN ABYSS OF DEATH AND YOU JUST HAD TO KEEP HOLDING ON”

Compared to this decade’s Love Island – in which members regurgitate spaghetti Bolognese down each others' throats, or insert handfuls of hot dogs under bikinis, the original Love Island tasks were far less sexual. Instead, they involved puzzles, presumably intended to make the cast members look stupid. In one game during the 2005 season, Lady Victoria Hervey – "it" girl and daughter of the sixth Marquess of Bristol – failed to identify America on a map, even though she lived there. Hayley Hughes’ suggestion that Brexit means "no cheese" on last year’s Love Island seems scholarly in comparison.

With a big budget and more casual approach to health and safety, Celebrity Love Island also had very different rewards for winning tasks. Calum and Rebecca swam in the sea with manta rays and dolphins. Colleen and Lee scaled a 150-foot line between two mega-yachts, while Fran and FHM "Sexiest Women in the World"-regular Jayne Middlemiss went cave-diving in tunnels underneath a volcano.

However Fran tells me that these once-in-a-lifetime treats could turn sour: “At one point [during the cave dive], the camera man’s lights went out. Everything went pitch black and we were perching on these sheer walls which you couldn’t hold onto. I remember Jayne screaming. We were in an abyss of death and you just had to keep holding on.” Eventually, the lights came back and the couple abseiled to safety. “Jayne got her rope tied up and ended up swinging around upside down off the side of this mountain,” Fran adds.

His date certainly sounds more eventful than those of the 2010s Love Island, in which rewards usually involve two estate agents discussing eye colour on a picnic blanket in rural Mallorca, drinking Prosecco out of plastic glasses.

NEVER WORK IN MEDIA

Unfortunately, filming was significantly less exciting for those behind the scenes. Natalka had to work until 7AM to ensure that the programme was edited and polished for the next day. “The crew were staying at these all-inclusive resorts,” she explains. “I remember trying to sleep at 11AM and there were tourists playing volleyball in the pool.”

Not everything went to plan. In season two, Natalka had to dig into the production budget to pay villagers to tether their animals after a few near misses driving camera equipment around at night. When a new entrant, model Emily Scott, had her hair blow-dried at a local salon, the hairdresser managed to tangle her expensive blonde weave into matted ball of fuzz. Natalka ended up flying a hair extensions specialist in from Australia.

“WHAT DOES SHE EVEN DO?”

Even with Steve-O’s wild antics and Alicia Douvall failing to prepare beans on toast, Love Island was slated in the papers throughout both seasons. Charlie Brooker dubbed it, “The show that makes the score from Requiem For A Dream start playing in your head.” And even though his son featured on the show, for George Best it was, “one of the worst programmes ever made.” So, what was going wrong?

Peter Dyke, a showbiz and TV reporter at The Daily Star at the time, places some of the blame on the lack of chemistry between presenters Kelly Brook and Patrick Kielty (who were reportedly not getting on after Patrick told viewers that Kelly used to date Islander Paul). Peter also surmises that much of the failure of the show lies with what he saw as an underwhelming cast. “Viewers were a bit disappointed by the calibre of celebrities, so much that they dropped the term ‘celebrity’ from the [title of the] second series,” he tells me. “The press started calling them 'wannabes' because so many of them were keen to become famous.”

Back in the mid-2000s, being "famous for no reason" was still a relatively new concept and one that was met with much criticism. The idea of someone like Abi Titmuss going from being a nurse in Lincolnshire to owning a gold snakeskin Michael Kors bag without having first legitimised herself via a career in acting or music was seen as a violation of the social order. Women like Katie Price, Jade Goody and Jodie Marsh were accused of corrupting teenagers, creating a cult of silicone, dulled aspirations and bleach-blonde hair.

Journalists were also bored with the celebrity format and took their frustrations out on Love Island. The Guardian bemoaned the existence of shows with, “celebrities on horses, celebrities on ice, celebrities in the sauna.” For Natalka, these criticisms were never about the quality of Love Island, but rather a political attack on ITV and the lighthearted entertainment it made.

“People were constantly saying, ‘TV is crap, it’s rubbish now, it’s not like it used to be,’" she says. "Criticism of the show was always in the context of, ‘Oh, TV used to be brilliant in the 70s and now we have to watch this shit’.” Back then, Love Island was seen as cheapening culture. Today, it is compared to Brecht’s theatre and lauded as a social experiment reflective of the current zeitgeist.

“I LITERALLY WOKE UP ONE MORNING WITH ONE BOOB”: THE AFTERMATH

As their turns on Celebrity Love Island ended and the set was left to gather dust, most of the cast found it difficult to return to a world now hungry for a piece of them. Colleen became convinced producers had secretly bugged her hotel room and the stress of looking good for the press drove her to work out so obsessively that her breast implant exploded. “My breasts developed scar tissue and ended up erupting after that," she tells me. "If you're working out too hard on your chest muscle your body just rejects it and I literally woke up one morning with one boob.” Never one to call in sick, Colleen still flew out to DJ at a club in LA. “I remember stuffing my bra with a sock or a tissue. There was a jacuzzi after party with all these cute boys and I just had one boob.”

Aside from body parts popping like whoopie cushions, much of the pressure on contestants came from the unrelenting tabloid scrutiny. It was similar to the trolling we see now on Instagram, where ex-Islanders have to cope with Mark from Inverness asking if their dad’s proud of them. Today, the tabloids are meek, content to remark on contestants looking "fresh-faced" when leaving the gym, or analysing a "pert posterior" as someone gracefully steps over a puddle. But in the noughties, showbiz journalism was much nastier. This was the era when Heat magazine had a whole section dedicated to a “hoop of horror,” zooming in on celebrities’ cellulite, snotty noses and camel toes. The Leveson Inquiry of 2011 and 2012 – an investigation into the ethics of the UK press – had not yet happened, meaning that tabloids were ruthless in their coverage. Unsurprisingly, most of the Celebrity Love Island cast were offered up as public sacrifices by the red-tops upon leaving Fiji.

The Mirror printed an article about Sophie under the headline: “SEX-MAD star Sophie Anderton lashed her lover to the bed during a kinky romp - and was nearly caught in the act by her mum and dad.” After her weight was mocked on the show, The Daily Record wrote of Abi: “Abi’s not just a pair of boobs... She’s a big fat belly as well.” Right after Paul endured a heroin overdose, The Daily Star ran the headline, “Paul’s a total maniac: Ex-lover tells of crazed Danan’s drug lust.”

For Calum, being repeatedly labelled a “sleazy lothario” trampled his self-esteem. His missteps were constantly dredged up: the time he was found snorting cocaine in a hotel room with sex workers when he was in a relationship with Lindsay Lohan; the CCTV footage of him committing “sex acts” on a fire escape with Mick Jagger’s daughter Elizabeth. Eventually, he started to live up to the caricature that people painted of him, going out and drinking all the time because he believed that was all he was good for.

“'What even is his purpose? Look at him spending all of his Dad's millions,'" Calum says, impersonating his critics. “'He's following in his Dad's footsteps, he’s a drinker.' It fucked me up, it left me depressed, lonely and with nowhere to turn. At one point, I said to my Mum, 'I don’t think I will make it to 30.’ That's how down in the dumps I was."

After it was cancelled, it didn’t take long for Celebrity Love Island to fade into obscurity. But Calum Best still has hold of his fame, even if it is for no reason. Shortly after winning season two with Bianca Gascoigne, he played himself in an episode of Footballers’ Wives and released two self-titled fragrances – the first called ‘Calum’, the second ‘Best’. His MTV show Totally Calum Best saw him attempt to be celibate for 50 days (he failed).

Calum still looks like Jude Law, if the actor was handing students 2-for-1 Jägerbomb vouchers on a Friday night. Now he’s got an Instagram body of his own, complete with a tattoo of the words, “Old Soul Young Heart” in swirling script across his hairless chest. Recently, he told The Sun that he would like to go on the new series of Love Island to find a girlfriend.

ITV, please, please take note.

@annielord8

I sometimes wonder to what extent I'm oppressed as a gay man. I live in a big city, and through a process of selection I'm only friends with other gay people, or people who aren't homophobic. Working mostly in gay-friendly pubs in Hackney, I've never experienced employment discrimination. My mannerisms are fey enough that most people clock me as gay within a minute of conversation, but my dress sense is sufficiently boring that I never get harassed on the street.

The oppression, for want of a better word, is internal. The damage was done years ago. It finds its expression in years of (if not outright addiction) substance abuse and (if not exactly mental illness) poor mental health. This stems from a violence that is institutional and society-wide. It’s about policy and representation and the legacy of Section 28. But it's hard for me to see it in conceptual terms. Instead, I see Stirling, my hometown; I see the people I went to school with, and my teachers, and all the men who ever attacked me. Knowing I shouldn't, I blame it all on Stirling.

Every time I come back, Stirling seems smaller, with fewer people in the streets and more empty shops. To feel this way about your hometown is not unusual, particularly if you’re attuned to the energy of a large city. But I don’t think the impression is entirely a trick of memory. I left Stirling at the beginning of a decade of austerity: if it seems reduced, that's probably because it is. Beyond the old town, the city is handsome but indistinct.

The decline of its high street is not unique: you’d find the same vape, pawn and charity shops in any small city in the UK. But there's an excellent record shop, some decent cafes, a handful of great pubs. I admire the optimism of whoever just opened a year-round Christmas shop, after the last one closed a week before December. In whatever direction you look, you see plains and pylons for miles, and then hills. The topography creates a sense of yearning; you can always see somewhere else in the distance.

It is – or was – a homophobic place. When I was growing up, alcopops were widely referred to as "poof juice". Straight men in bars would order "a bottle of blue poof, please", entirely without affect, even if they were ordering for themselves. One pub was gay-friendly for over 20 years; when it made this status official, its windows were smashed within a week. I rarely had a night out without encountering some kind of homophobia. Once, when I was walking home, a group of men shoved me to the ground and shouted "poof!" again and again as they kicked me in the face. I didn’t find this surprising.

I was quite badly bullied for being gay (or rather assumed to be – I wasn't out) for the first two years of high school. When I was 14, someone wrote in pen on a toilet wall, "Jamie Greig is an emo poof." Accurate, but it made me feel sick with shame for weeks. My little brother was starting school that year and I was worried he would see it and feel embarrassed to be associated with me. Then, in a small act of grace, someone else wrote underneath, "No, he's a fucking legend." I never found out who it was, never thanked them.

Being bullied damaged me in ways that have endured into the present, but I’m not bitter about it. I made peace with these people. Many of them later became my friends. When I see people who bullied me post pro-gay rights material on Facebook now, I don’t think that they’re hypocrites or demand to know where that energy was in 2005. I’m just happy they’ve changed. Teenagers who are allowed or encouraged to engage in homophobic bullying have been let down by society, too (though admittedly not as much as gay teenagers themselves).

If I hold any bitterness, it's towards some of my old teachers. One of them once shouted at me for telling a fellow pupil to "fuck off". I replied, truthfully, "He called me gay," and the teacher answered, "Well, are you?" Another, when I was 14, outed me to an entire class by reading out a list my friend and I had made of all the boys we fancied (in hindsight, I probably shouldn't have left that lying around). It wouldn't be accurate to say that these teachers tolerated homophobia; rather, it was something they encouraged. I try to look at Stirling with forgiveness, but I'm not sure everyone deserves it.

If I'm portraying myself as a victim, that’s not the whole truth. Being in pain makes you self-absorbed. I could be cruel. I’m sure there are people who remember me as a bully. I was pretentious, veering wildly between despising myself and thinking I was an unheralded genius. I made life at home unbearable for my family. When I came home drunk, my mum and I would have terrible screaming matches. When I was much younger, she’d spent some time in hospital and I gave her a scented heart made of cotton. Years later, after a particularly vicious argument, I took a pair of scissors and cut it into little pieces, leaving them on her bed for her to find. I ruined my younger brother's 12th birthday by drinking a litre of vodka the evening before and ending up on a saline drip.

I’ve apologised for these things many times, and been forgiven, but I’m still not rid of the guilt. I’m not sure I deserve to be. I don’t know to what extent behaving with such cruelty and selfishness can be excused by having experienced homophobia. At some point you need to accept some culpability for your own behaviour.

I became a dilettante of dysfunction, dabbling in every petty crime and disordered behaviour you could care to mention. After embarking on an incredibly mild crime spree, I was assigned my very own police counsellor. If this was supposed to be a punishment, the joke was on Central Scotland police: I was intensely attracted to him.

In what felt like a parody of chaste courtship, he would pick me up in his car once a week, drive me to an Italian cafe and buy me whatever cake I wanted. We didn’t talk about the reasons for my behaviour; instead, we mostly discussed his upcoming holiday. I once accidentally texted him to ask if he could sort me out some pills, then sent a panicked follow-up in which I claimed my friend had stolen my phone. He didn’t respond to either. After three months I was awarded a laminated certificate commending me on the "positive changes" I’d made in my life, of which there had been fuck all.

At times, Stirling was a desperately unhappy place. When I was 14, I left school one lunchtime, took two packets of painkillers and walked up to a quarry a few miles out of the city. For a long time, nothing happened. When I licked the rain on my face, it tasted like paracetamol. I sat against a tree and read To Kill a Mockingbird, which we were studying for English, then eventually gave up. I went home soaking wet and covered in twigs, my uniform caked in mud, and headed straight to my room where I spent the rest of the evening puking up thick, yellow bile. I never told anyone, never went to hospital, never had my stomach pumped. It would be meaningless to say I was depressed: I was just young and vulnerable and completely ill-equipped to deal with the extreme stress, both internal and external, of being gay. Not for the last time, Stirling almost killed me.

But despite everything, I loved being a teenager. The melodrama of it all. It’s something you need to relinquish if you ever want to recover, but there’s a comfort in finding your own unhappiness aesthetically pleasing. And I was lucky to come of age at the height of the emo craze, when bisexuality was briefly fashionable and I could spend my weekends kissing boys with relatively little social censure. People generally assumed this was an affectation, which carried far less stigma than if it were seen as sincere.

I loved King's Park, the epicentre of adolescent Stirling. It was partly quite a posh and primly manicured golf course; the rest was a wilderness of jutting rocks and used condoms and paralytic scene kids. Hedonism gets more boring the older you get: I could get on the guest-list to the opening night of the Venice Biennale and it wouldn't match the glamour of heading to the park on a summer's evening with a bottle of cider and a £2 pill.

I loved going dancing in the less terrible of Stirling’s two clubs, nights which were my introduction to club culture. When the DJ played "Blue Monday" or "Show Me Love", in a blur of smoke machines and strobe lights, it was easy to imagine you were somewhere exciting. I had a lot of great friends, too, almost all of whom I’m still close with. Our lives have changed – we may not have as much in common anymore – but a shared affection and concern has kept us bonded together. We loved each other, cared for each other. If I got too wrecked at a party, they would carry me up the stairs, like a couple crossing the threshold, and place me down on someone’s bed, cover me with blankets.

As I was writing this, my mum accused me of being a "self-hating Scot". This is untrue. Of the many things I hate about myself, being Scottish isn’t one. But, in some ways, I do hate Stirling, and by extension, Scotland. I hate the sour machismo, the small-minded meanness of it, I hate the fact that it will always remind me of terrible things I did and terrible things that were done to me.

Is it possible to feel this resentment without it becoming a form of snobbery – a way of disdaining the people that stayed? Can it be anything other than a means of positioning yourself as a big-city sophisticate, the kind of person who refers to themselves as a "Londoner" as though it were a spiritual category? I’ve bragged about how provincial my adolescence was, using it to acquire a kind of reverse clout. I’ve exploited it for sympathy, while resting my head on someone’s chest and turning my face away in an effort to look mysterious. If I owe Stirling anything, it’s a self-serving narrative of survival and redemption.

I’ve never lived in Stirling as an adult, and I hope I'll never have to. Perhaps I could make my peace with it, if I tried, but I’m simply unwilling to put in the effort. It’s unfair of me to write off a whole city, an entire nation, on the basis of my experience there over a decade ago. But unless you attended a liberal private school in London or Brighton, perhaps resenting the place you’re from is an inherent aspect of being gay. How could it be otherwise? My relationship with Stirling will always be complicated, but I do think it’s a beautiful place. Over time it’s become easier to reconcile those things, if from a distance.

Stirling’s so quiet at night that, standing in my mum’s garden, the motorway roars like a waterfall. That sound used to make me wistful, like the road was filled with outlaw lovers tearing along in stolen Cadillacs. I used to imagine someone up in the Highlands, some character from a Springsteen song, who’d finally thought, 'Fuck this, I’m heading south,' and I’d long to join them. Now, when I return, all it takes is one midnight cigarette to feel that same desire to leave – it's like muscle memory – as though I've forgotten that I already have.

@fudwedding / @christopherbethell

“I can’t believe life’s so complex / When I just want to sit here, and watch you undress.” So sings PJ Harvey on her 2000 track “This is Love”. She’s wearing a whipped cream-coloured suit jacket in the video, tassels dangling off her sleeves, arms cradling an electric guitar. Then she turns to the camera, eyelids cloudy with gold dust, and drawls: “This is love, this is love, that I’m feeling.” It's the sort of thing that makes you want to whisper "what a powerful way to enter the millennium," to yourself.

PJ Harvey – real name Polly Jean – has always occupied a strange place in the music conversation. On the one hand, her influence can be felt everywhere. You can hear her bleak, grey-blue tones in bands like Bat For Lashes and Warpaint. You can see her slash of red lip and low slung guitar in St Vincent and Anna Calvi. Her dark, lyrical style and heavy riffs ripple throughout so many artists' sounds, from Sharon Van Etten to The Kills and Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

But she’s also never been fully embedded within the mainstream. Sure, she’s accumulated a long line of award nominations – seven Grammys, eight BRITS, the only artist to receive the Mercury Music Prize twice. She’s even been appointed an MBE. But you’re not about to see her throwing out gags on 8 Out of Ten Cats, or showing up in the showbiz section of the Mail Online. Her tracks don’t often scrape the top 40, and she’s had one chart-topping album. In that way, she’s neither an obscure/cult figure, nor globally recognised. She sits somewhere in between. She’s timeless, her own force.

Taking a trip through PJ Harvey’s nine studio albums (11 if you count her collabs) is like wading through a black lake at night, if that lake lived inside your soul. She sings relentlessly of water and drowning, of sex and romance, of cities and seasides and nature. Her guitar lines are open and lush; sometimes grungy and pummelling, other times so held back you can barely hear them. Like a poet – which she is – PJ Harvey knows how to work with space and tension. “You shoplifted as a child / I had a model's smile...” she sings softly and deadpan in “We Float”, before the whole thing blooms and transforms completely, a new song within a song.

It can be difficult to know where to begin with PJ. She’s been releasing music for years, and inhabited many lives. Before she was PJ Harvey the solo artist, she was PJ Harvey the trio (alongside Rob Ellis and Steve Vaughan), and before that, she was in a band for three years called Automatic Dlamini with now-longtime collaborator John Parish. Even so, listening to her music is less about the individual records, and more about the world she’s created within them; one that was born from the long dewy grass of Somerset, the murky chaos of London and the twinkling high rises of New York. It’s a world that can be playful and darkly unsettling, often at the same time.

Most recently, PJ Harvey contributed two songs (“The Moth” and “Descending”) to the Ivo van Hove stage production All About Eve, which came to an end this month. Last week, she also released track "The Crowded Cell," off her score for Channel 4's well-received Shane Meadows show The Virtues. To mark both occasions – but also just as a tenuous excuse to revisit her back catalogue in detail – here is the only guide you need to getting into Polly Jean Harvey.

So you want to get into: Heavy lo-fi grunge PJ Harvey?

In 1995, Alanis Morissette released one of her most well-known tracks “You Oughta Know”, in which she switched up the narrative that women must always be self-contained and leave quietly after facing rejection. Two years before that, however, PJ Harvey released “Rid Of Me” – a dirtier, grungier, angrier version of this exact sentiment. “You’re not rid of me / You're not rid of me,” she sings faux-sweetly over a simple, chugging riff. And then the drums crash in and she’s almost-shouting: “Don’t you wish you never, never met her? / Don’t you wish you never, never met her?”

Some of PJ’s most potent, affecting work is also her heaviest and most lo-fi. There’s a rawness to her earlier albums – especially debut Dry and its followup Rid of Me, released in 1992 and 1993 respectively – that make her music feel as if she just grabbed her guitar in an impulsive rage. At the time, critics tried to shove her under the riot grrrl umbrella – probably because she’s a woman with a guitar who sings about gender sometimes? – but PJ never belonged to any ‘scene’, and she certainly doesn’t owe much to hardcore punk in America. Her thick, sludgy guitar and loud-quiet dynamics were, and are, more in line with grunge / rock bands like The Pixies, Sonic Youth and The Breeders if anyone.

By the time PJ released her third album, 1995's To Bring You My Love, she'd parted ways with bandmates Rob Ellis and Steve Vaughan to become a solo act. The album, and its follow up Is This Desire?, sees PJ lean away slightly from those thick and heavy guitar riffs, embracing a subtler sound and inviting electronics into the mix. Not completely of course – this is PJ Harvey. “You ought to hear my long snake moan / You ought to see me from my throne” she sing-screams on one of her heaviest, most rock n roll tracks to date, “Long Snake Moan”, her gravelly voice buried between walls of thick reverb, drums pounding until the end.

Playlist: "O My Lover" / "Dress" / "Happy and Bleeding" / "Rid of Me" / "Man Size" / "Missed" / "To Bring You My Love" / “Long Snake Moan” / "Is This Desire?" / "A Perfect Day Elise" / "The Sky Lit Up"

So you want to get into: Pop according to PJ Harvey?

Around the release of Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea in 2000, PJ Harvey said this to Q: “Having experimented with some dreadful sounds on Is This Desire? and To Bring You My Love – where I was really looking for dark, unsettling, nauseous-making sounds – Stories From The City... was the reaction. I thought, 'No, I want absolute beauty. I want this album to sing and fly and be full of reverb and lush layers of melody. I want it to be my beautiful, sumptuous, lovely piece of work'."

By “sumptuous and lovely”, PJ didn’t mean she was about to release a bunch of saccharine candy-pop ballads. Rather, in her words, this fifth album is “pop according to PJ Harvey, which is probably as un-pop as you can get to most people’s standards”. The album opens with desolate, stormy guitar while PJ shouts “Look out ahead, I see danger come / I want a pistol, I want a gun” before her voice rises to a melodic falsetto – you can hear that beauty she was speaking about. The tracks throughout this album are maybe more catchy and accessible than her earlier work – “We Float”, for instance, has the most tender, melodic chorus – but they’re still grunge rock. They’re just gorgeous and emotive too.

Later, on Uh Huh Her, PJ Harvey plays every instrument, other than the drums courtesy of former bandmate Rob Ellis. The result is an album she described at the time to Mojo as “very gentle, very loving.” The song “Desperate Kingdom of Love” has the intimacy of something that was supposed to remain a secret, and in “Shame” she sings softly, “I'd jump for you into the fire / I'd jump for you into the flame”, an accordion quietly stretching in the background. None of these are pop songs per se, but a sweetness here permeates even her most vengeful moments.

Playlist: "Big Exit" / "A Place Called Home" / "We Float" / "The Whores Hustle and the Hustler’s Whore" / "This is Love" / "You Said Something" / “Desperate Kingdom if Love” / “Shame”

So you want to get into: PJ Harvey the Poet?

If you cast your eyes across the tracklist for Let England Shake, PJ Harvey’s eighth studio album, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was the contents of an anthology of English war poetry. And fair enough. The lyrics were written long before they were put to music – meaning they’re also basically poems. “Blown and shot out beyond belief / Arms and legs were in the trees,” she sings over sweet, jangling autoharp (which she learned for this record especially!) at the beginning of “The Words That Maketh Murder”, the title of which sounds like a Smiths song, but could also feasibly be something plucked from the works of Wilfred Owen.

Some might not be keen on this side of PJ – there are no lo-fi rock anthems a la ‘92 – but others regard it as some of her greatest work. So much of this 2011 release is unexpected, masterful and rich with imagery. Where PJ once used vivid, apocalyptic lyricism to sing about her own personal wars – in romance, sex and death – this time she swivels the lens outwards, towards actual wars. “The scent of thyme carried on the wind / Stings my face into remembering,” her voice floats, higher than it’s ever been, over folk strums on “On Battleship Hill”. Before the album’s release she told Andrew Marr that her “biggest fear would be to replicate something I've done before.” It’s a fear she needn’t have worried about.

PJ’s literary energy doesn’t just end with the fact this album – which won her a second Mercury Prize, by the way (the first was for Stories From the City...) – follows the longstanding artistic tradition of turning the bleak, bloody sadness of war into words. She also worked closely with photographer and filmmaker Seamus Murphy, who created a dozen short films around this record. In 2015, the pair collaborated again for The Hollow of The Hand, PJ Harvey’s first poetry book, released on Bloomsbury. Like Patti Smith, Leonard Cohen and Nick Cave before her, here PJ is an artist just as appreciated for her pen to paper, as her hand to guitar.

Playlist: "Let England Shake" / "The Glorious Land" / "The Words That Maketh Murder" / "On Battleship Hill" / "England" / "In the Dark Places" / “Written on the Forehead” / “The Colour of the Earth”

So you want to get into: Politically-minded PJ Harvey?

When artists reach a certain stage in their decades-long careers, they often go one of two ways. They either switch up their sound in an effort to stay relevant and match whatever the youths are into (“Let’s just say, I was listening to a lot of grime while writing this album” – ageing white rock star, five years after grime reached its peak). Or they essentially give no fucks about any of that, and write about the things that matter to them in that moment, utilising their huge platform and an already engaged audience.

PJ Harvey chose the second route, and her most recent album, The Hope Six Demolition Project, released in 2016, sees her lean further into social issues. The album's title is a reference to the HOPE VI projects in Washington DC, where run-down public housing has been demolished to make room for less affordable homes. Elsewhere, she sings about ethnic cleansing in Kosovo (“The Wheel”) and war-torn communities in Afghanistan (“The Ministry of Defence”). The release drew criticism for responding to issues without offering solutions, but in a twist of events, it also became PJ's first UK number 1 album – more than two decades after she first emerged.

Sonically, this side of PJ Harvey properly embraces American blues, rock and folk. She uses her actual voice less – there’s no screaming, shout-singing or guttural growls like in earlier tracks – and instead pushes her lyricism and instrumentation centre stage. Accordions and autoharps, flutes and saxophones, violins and clarinets, whistles and hand claps... The Hope Six Demolition Project is an explosive euphony of sound and movement. If PJ Harvey started out as a kind of impulsive grunge rocker who screamed her mind, this album sees her step into her current form: a thoughtful storyteller – more interested in the world around her, than whatever lies inside.

Playlist: "The Community of Hope" / "The Ministry of Defence" / "Chain of Keys" / "Near the Memorials to Vietnam and Lincoln" / "The Orange Monkey" / "The Ministry of Social Affairs" / “The Wheel” / “Dollar, Dollar”

@daisythejones / @_joelbenjamin_

Your mates are on their holibobs and you’re jelly. Instead you’re at home in fluffy socks messaging your ex (waste of space) and reminding yourself, again, to pick up fresh batteries for your Ann Summers Rampant Rabbit. Your most relatable TV moment is a toss up between Kat Slater self-identifying as a total slag and Ian Beale having nothing left, x2. You consistently tell your mates you’re on your way when you’re sat with toe separators on, watching the Love Island recap. Your commitment to fitness goes as far as concernedly declaring a diet then drinking a bottle of Chardonnay and ordering a korma and peshwari naan and cackling maniacally. You’ve tried to keep up with Brexit but the most engaging moment remains Gemma Collins on live TV telling Theresa May: “If you need some help, hun, I’m free for an hour after the show.” All considered you are, indisputably, a hun or an appreciator of huns.

Hun culture is more than an inside joke – one that amounts to calling everyone “hun” or asking, in a wry act of faux sympathy or post-irony, “u ok, hun?” – or even a recognisable UK-specific meme style. It’s rooted in banter based on class observations, yes, but a very British sensibility and lifestyle.

It’s hard to explain what it is without using disparate examples, and almost impossible to convey to an American (a hun could never be American – we'll get to the US' basic bitch soon). It’s Lisa Scott-Lee roller-blading around London in hot-pants and blue fingerless gloves to sell a Nivea spray. It’s Davina McCall saying “look, you'll get a bum like that, COME ON” and smacking her arse at the camera during one of her own 30 Minute workout DVDs. It’s trying vegetarianism after watching a horrible documentary but stealth-eating a kebab in the Uber home, drunk. It’s dramatically committing to “good vibes only” then five minutes later diving into a bitch-fest about some bastard in your office who keeps eating all the free fruit. It’s laughing at your mate’s “live, laugh, love” canvas but wondering in bed that night at your lowest, while right-swiping, if you have really lived, laughed and loved.

Hun culture was born from the shenanigans of the ladettes of the 90s. Ladettes died out as an identifiable social phenomenon at the turn of the millennium – women could do what they wanted so there was no need to pop a boob or drain ten cans to make a point. Hun culture today is similarly drunk and disorderly but in a context that wouldn’t make observers bat an eyelid. Pints were swapped for prosecco. Not giving a fuck turned into pretending to not give a fuck while crying over everything.

It really took off with Twitter account Social Needier, handle @uokhun. It was born on the 18th of November 2012 with the tweet: “Some people are just not worth it. They know who they are!!!!!!” Underneath someone replied “LOL u got that rite hun!!!!!” and Social Needier replied “xx”. With tweets like “Just can’t take it anymore!”, “havent slept (again!!) hopin today is better 4 me but that depends on u know who grrrrrr :(( #keepclimbingthatmountainhun” and “literally cant beleve some ppl, specially after yesterday”, its mastermind sent up the tone of oversharing, horribly intimate early social media posts. We might associate this type of desperate groaning more with Mum Facebook now – grammatically incorrect, heartfelt essays about the minutiae of the lives of middle aged and older women – but not so long ago, this was us all. Young and old whined on the internet in a bid to seek connection. But there was, however, only one type of feminised individual who would curl up on the staff-room sofa at 3PM and share something like this Social Needier tweet: “not comin 4 drinks after work. U know y, not feelin ill but feelin rage! Slanket n pink wine n tv xx :(”.

By January 2016, Dolly Alderton had written a feature for the Times titled “U OK hun?” that looked into the phenomenon of the hun as a female stereotype. She was, as the sell professed, “needy, a bit basic but always fun”. By this point, Nick Grimshaw had been compulsively using the word on his radio show, the now-defunct Instagram account @hunofficial began to pull together huns or hun appreciators as part of a community – even starting a club night in east London – and you couldn’t go on Facebook without having been invited to a “hun’s leaving drinks x” event, plastered with screengrabs of Jo O’Meara smoking fags in a dressing gown.

Before you might ask, hun culture is similar but distinctly different to the Americanised concept of the “basic bitch” which lacks the theatricality or camp of hun culture. “The basic bitch has no humour or kindness to it and actually can be tied to certain behaviours, like wearing certain clothes or liking certain drinks or music,” pop culture writer Alim Kheraj tells me. While it’s rooted in an appreciation of a specific type of British ‘low culture’ and its female hun celebrities, there’s a universal hun spirit, a joie de vivre that bonds huns together. Within that, a scale: from Benevolent Hun (Martine McCutcheon) to Changeable Hun (Kerry Katona) to Fuming Hun (Pat Butcher and Peggy Mitchell in one room).

“The whole hun culture thing allows people to completely take the piss out of themselves and everyone around them, and no one can say a single thing or get threatened by it and you put the word hun on the end,” the man behind the hun Instagram account Hunsnet says. What it has become, he says, is like a secret club or social code. “You can turn up to any situation, chuck down a couple of buzzwords, and you know if people are in the club or out of it. It can completely skew your conversation and what you would or wouldn’t say.” It’s rejecting respectability politics and relaxing into your unfiltered best worst self.

Now, that club of sorts is for British women and gay men what lad culture was for straight men from the 90s onwards. It’s an excuse to share and celebrate your most base desires: booze, food and emotions, packaged in a self-aware, British way. Where ladettes brushed up against issues of what femininity should have been – prim and proper, not like the lads – huns are supposed to be girlbosses, woke, highly-educated, plugged into the #discourse, able to joke about their Fleabag-esque messy qualities but have it under control, and want it all. It’s nearly as alienating as the 80s female ideal. Sometimes, women simply can’t be arsed.

You could easily link the rise of hun culture to a backlash against both influencer groupthink and the need to connect to the news cycle's constant churn. “I can’t relate to Instagram models sitting on a beach in Bora Bora drinking coconut water and nibbling on hair gummies,” the owner of the 57,000-follower strong For The Love Of Huns Insta account tells me over email. “But I can relate to Daniela Westbrook leaving Greggs with a steak bake and not a care in the world x”.

Both she and the Hunsnet account owner only speak to me on condition that no personal details at all be shared – they want to keep the fun and mystery but also don’t want their double lives to be linked to their workplace or digital footprint. It doesn’t surprise me since by today’s standards hun culture constantly threatens to veer into the “problematic”. A whole separate article could be dedicated to unpicking where hun jokes cross over with blatant misogyny – particularly when it comes to chat about vaginas or sex drives. The original @hunofficial account was deleted after a misguided comment defending Dr Luke, and it can still be a space where outdated gay male misogyny goes unchecked.

That’s one genuine criticism, but to call the enjoyment of these memes classist – which does happen online occasionally – would be to miss the point. Those who adore hun culture are largely working class themselves, or as the Hunsnet owner pointed out, like himself, “people who are from a working class background but may have had a glow-up of late. They’ve gone to university, now might be working in London or Manchester.” The celebrity huns that get used in the memes – The Cheeky Girls, Lisa Scott-Lee, Natalie Cassidy – are from reality TV, short-lived pop acts or soaps, and were in the heyday of their reality TV, soap or pop careers when hun appreciators were young (Hunsnet says most of his users are between mid-twenties to late thirties). It’s a time in British pop culture that the hun masses fondly remember.

Something mum-like about celebrity huns makes them endearing. I half-think of Kerry Katona as a spiritual mum, with Iceland-deal platters at the ready, cheap wine in the fridge, aphorisms when needed. Alim agrees, adding that we relate to them in a protective and caring way too: “The huns are mothers but also need to be mothered.” Passing class concerns might come from the tragedy and dramatic arcs of these celebs and their lives. A hun wants so much and, between public moments of triumph, never quite manages to pull it off. “There’s an element of watching the mess or embarrassment that feels wrong, but there’s a real human aspect to it too, which makes me think it’s more complicated than just being misogynistic and mean,” Alim continues.

It’s why many gay men such as him feel an affinity to the hun. In The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture, Daniel Harris writes that “at the very heart of gay diva worship is not the diva herself but the almost universal homosexual experience of ostracism and insecurity.” See: Nikki Grahame screaming “who is she?”, The GC falling on ice, or Charlotte Crosby crying over a lad. Many parallels can be made to diva worship, just as many divas are themselves huns: Gemma Collins, Adele, Barbara Windsor, Tulisa, Miss Piggy (The Muppets has strong ties to British culture, the pig was voiced by a dude and its sheer levels of camp override the previously stated US rule).

Unpleasant memes aside, it’s only offensive if it’s not relatable. Which it clearly is. “As Brits we are good at taking the piss out of ourselves. [It’s a] long-standing tradition within British comedy, with shows like Never Mind The Buzzcocks, to celebrate our celebs in a tongue-in-cheek way,” says For The Love of Huns. She adds that plenty of the women featured on the page often like and share the posts – Love of Huns fans include Gemma Collins, Ellie Goulding and Kat from Big Brother series 9.

Whether it’s waking up to face your depraved sexual mishaps after a bank holiday weekend, accidentally liking your ex’s new girlfriend’s Instagram post or getting verbally destroyed during a performance review at work, the topics and the way they’re delivered cuts to the heart of something ridiculous and otherwise un-catered to. One of my favourite #relatable memes captions “Me jumping from crisis to crisis” under a clip from the final conceit of Beverley Callard’s (of Coronation Street fame) fitness DVD. Dancers throw her into a swimming pool at the leisure centre they’ve filmed at. With arms outstretched and a mock-shocked face, Beverley contorts her body into an elegant position before being submerged, completely aware of the oncoming thwack of chlorinated water. It’s camp suffering at its finest. If nothing else, hun culture shows that there will always be women and gays who feel too much, with only social media to express it and a bottle of Echo Falls and a Kinder Bueno on hand, to self soothe.

@hannahrosewens

Images for collage used: Gemma Collins book signing via; Greggs sausage rolls via; Natalie Cassidy via; Steps via; Kat Moon via; Echo Falls via; Cheryl Cole via.

Sometimes technology feels more omnipotent than just a computer or a phone. The Greeks had their chiselled gods like Zeus and Aphrodite. Pagans got hot for nature, the Romans were up on astrology. And us: we’re devoted to little screens that sit in our pockets. These devices aren’t God but they are probably something close to resembling a deity in a world dominated by atheism.

Like you, I hate my phone. Chuck it in a river, burn it, smash it into pieces. Except I can’t do that. One) I’m not a nihilist; and two) it is useful for communicating with friends. Being around these devices has changed the way we as humans process memory and nostalgia, as well as communicate. That’s what Joe, one half of east London duo 0171 tells me, when we meet over a couple of tins in a London park.

0171 – completed by Joe's bandmate Georgie – make music you could best describe as fractal. Lyrics connect abstractly with one another, like glimpses of snatched conversation and last summer’s texts melded into one. For example, their debut track “1000 Words”, from February, begins in one breathless stream: “I’m sorry I didn’t reply I was doing things I didn’t think to reply I’m sorry it was nice I was lying on grass with others”. And then the instrumental thrusts and pulls you into a lift of pure nostalgic euphoria.

Today they release the video for “Red Light”, which they say is inspired by “a couple finding a sexual thrill from filming each other, and being filmed; a yearning to be completely present in the moment, where you can just feel without thinking.” There are some definite voyeur vibes, as we’re brought on a couple’s woozy adventure through New York City. It's full of close contact, intimate moments and has the feel of home footage mixed with the best moments of a teen film. Watch that below, then read on, to learn what the deal is with 0171.

THEY'RE REALLY INTO FOOTBALL

Georgie: “I started playing when I was about 12 and really wasn’t that good but went religiously every week with my best friend Tarn after having sausages, chips and beans at my house. We played for our local team called Red Roses and also our school team. I now play for Goal Diggers FC which is based in Holloway. It’s one of the highlights of my week – it’s really rare to be in a space which is just women and non-binary. Me, Joe and our friends are big Arsenal fans too, we go to The Famous Cock every week to watch the boys play. Hector Bellerin in my fav – he’s a walking Angel boy.”

GEORGIE STUDIED MEDICAL PHYSICS AT UNI

“I’ve always loved maths and problem solving so it kinda just made sense. I had some interesting interactions with some of the men on my course… majority of them were completely normal, but the ones who would discuss in labs who was more likely to win a Nobel prize would refuse to lend me things or reluctantly give it to me and say ‘as long as you give it back.’ Weird. I have a tattoo of a square wave on my wrist too, which nicely umbrellas my two loves; physics and synths.”

THEY VALUE KNAUSGAARD-STYLE MINUTE DETAILS

Joe: “I have this tendency to go really deep into something when I get into it. The Knausgaard books made such an impact on me cause they’re so obsessive. There’ll be like a page of him loading a dishwasher or something. Or describing being scared to go to the toilet at night when he’s younger. But you read it and it’s so specific it brings back all these memories you have about your own life. He’s talking in such minute detail about himself, and yet it really feels like he’s getting to the bottom of what living is really life. I ended up reading four of the six long books… I think that might be enough, for a few songs at least. There’s only so much you can sing about dishwashers.”

JOE'S A PARTICULAR FAN OF FLOWERED UP'S "WEEKENDER"

“It’s difficult to put into words what this song is like. It’s a debut single that’s 18 minutes long, complete with the best music video maybe ever made. You know when you look around at modern music and you’re like ‘I wonder which of these songs will be seen as classics in a few decades?’ ‘Weekender’ definitely did not become a classic. But that’s what makes it special – it’s just so genuine and full of emotion. We used to watch it in our flat every night before going out. Or just after dinner. There’s always something more to see: you can never know enough about that song.”

THEY KNOW THEIR WAY AROUND AN INSTRUMENT OR TWO

Georgie: “I learnt to play piano, first by ear, when I was about five or six. My piano teacher would teach me to recognise the emotions behind certain keys or tonality by playing fun games – for example, hiding a toy for me to find and playing sad notes when I was far from finding it and happier notes when I was getting closer. Like most people who play instruments I tried out a bunch of other ones – violin, drums, the harp – but the instruments that stuck were the ones I could sing over.”

Joe: “Yeah I had a similar run of different instruments when I was younger: first cello, then drums, bass, guitar, piano. Drums were always my best instrument, but as soon as I got my first guitar all I wanted to do was record my own songs. We’ve probably written 300 songs as 0171 now, but it’s always been the thing that makes me feel the most. I’ve always been shaking with excitement when I’m recording, no matter how good the song is.”

AND THEIR INSPIRATIONS RANGE FROM TECHNO TO… 90S POP

Georgie: "My first massive inspiration was Avril Lavigne – I was OBSESSED. Then as I got into my late teens I was really into EELS, Sparklehorse, Elliot Smith. The Eels are my favourite – I love how they’ve got a handful of songs that seem joyful and bouncy but are about crushingly depressing topics. Then I got into techno – I loved Blawan and Pearson Sound and all the big male names, but then I discovered Discwoman, a New York-based collective for electronic musicians. I’ve seen Umfang, who is my favourite, play a lot – everyone should see her, she’ll blow your head off."

Joe: "I have my neighbour to thank for my earliest loves – Britney and the Spice Girls. If we make it really big there’s a video I’ll be blackmailed with involving me dancing and singing ‘I’m a spice girl’. Georgie and I like going out to techno nights, and we love all the ‘cutting edge’ production people like SOPHIE and the PC Music brigade, but I think we’re most inspired by artists that put big emotion first. Arcade Fire really get to me. And more recently I’ve been into Big Thief’s album and also Nilüfer Yanya, especially her song ‘Melt.’"

@ryanbassil

Last week, 427 million people in the EU were eligible to vote – and for the first time in decades more than half of them made use of that privilege, from Northern Ireland to Cyprus, Lisbon's nightlife district to Finnish villages with more vowels than consonants in their names. While that might sound like good news, the reality is that last week's European elections have contributed to the continent's ongoing turn towards right-wing populism and extremism.

If European politics weren't already fascist enough, Italy's interior minister, Matteo Salvini, is looking to form a new group made up of far-right parties from across the continent, making it potentially the fourth biggest parliamentary group, while full-blown anti-EU parties such as Hungary's Fidesz, Britain's Brexit Party and Poland's Law and Justice Party could bring even more nationalist fervour to the parliament's floor. Not to mention extremist groups like Hungary's Jobbik and Greece's Golden Dawn still going fairly strong.

To prepare us for our ever-worsening future, we asked VICE offices across Europe to name and shame the most dangerous MEPs in the brand new European Parliament.

GERMANY

Maximilian Krah, Alternative für Deutschland

Photo: imago images | HärtelPRESS

Who? Maximilian Krah's alarming rhetoric is one of the reasons Germany's domestic intelligence agency is currently investigating whether or not it should put the country's right-wing populists and oppositional party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) under surveillance.

What does he believe? The 42-year-old lawyer has frequently described the current migration policies in the EU as umvolkung – a term that was used by the Nazis to force people to assimilate into German culture. Krah also warned of a "collective sexual abuse of European girls" caused by what he calls an "oriental conquest". During campaign season he praised audiences in his home state of Saxony for being "all German, Saxon and white".

How big was his win? While the AfD only scored 11 percent nationwide, one in four voters in Krah's home state of Saxony – known for its anti-migrant riots, anti-Muslim PEGIDA protest and right-wing terrorism – voted for the AfD. As one of the most influential figures in the east German state, Krah's network spans various protest groups to create a "patriotic citizen platform", in which AfD politicians and various members of Generation Identity campaign together.

What's next from him? In March of this year, Krah attended a conference by the World Congress of Families, a fundamental Christian organisation opposing LGBTQ+ and abortion rights. A photo shows Krah with Matteo Salvini. It surely won't be the last meeting of the pair, as the rhetorically adept Krah is not a man of small ambitions.

– Thomas Vorreyer, VICE Germany

Jörg Meuthen, Alternative für Deutschland

Photo: imago images | Jan Huebner

Who? Jörg Meuthen is the national spokesperson for the AfD. He also looks like that awful history teacher you used to bombard with spitballs.

What does he believe? Meuthen wants fewer refugees coming to Germany. He also says that Europe needs to stop caring for Africa because Africa needs to take care of itself. As for the Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán, Meuthen has offered to "roll out the red carpet for him".

How did he get elected? Meuthen said, "Climate saviours are more dangerous than climate change." A popular statement among many Germans who'd rather hang onto their Volkswagen diesel engines and cheap barbecue meat.

What's next for him? Meuthen has announced his plan to reestablish a "Europe of Fatherlands" – a collection of ultra-right groups from around Europe. He says he wants "Germany to make decisions for Germany again". To that end, he's even floated the idea of a "Dexit".

– Niclas Seydack, VICE Germany

UK

Anne Widdecombe, Brexit Party

Ann Widdecombe. Photo: Colin McPherson / Alamy Stock Photo

Who? Widdecombe is a former longtime Conservative Party MP who became notorious within the party for her long-standing support for the death penalty, which she views as a "deterrent" that would save innocent lives.

What does she believe? In addition to being pro-death penalty, Widdecome is anti-abortion. A devout Christian, Widdecombe converted from the Church of England to the Catholic Church because she was so appalled by the idea of women being priests. She doesn't believe in climate change, and has consistently blocked gay rights legislation, including voting against same-sex marriage.

How did she get elected? Widdecombe won one of three seats for MEP for the South West of England.

How big was the win? Sizeable: the Brexit Party won 36.7 percent of the vote.

What's next from her? Given her history, we can expect more regressive, illiberal views on gay marriage and abortion rights, and climate change denialism. But the main thing that Widdecombe is determined to achieve is Brexit at all costs.

Richard Tice, Brexit Party

Who? A multi-millionaire property developer, Tice is the co-founder of Leave.EU, which campaigned for Brexit in the 2016 referendum.

What does he believe? Tice is so determined to ensure the UK crashes out of the EU without a deal that he subsequently went on to found Leave Means Leave, which lobbies for a hard Brexit. According to Leave Means Leave's website, "There is still everything to play for – the night is darkest before the dawn, and we will prevail in the end." Whether what's left to prevail over is the mouldering ruin of the British economy remains to be seen.

What's next from him? The hardest of hard Brexits.

– Sirin Kale, VICE UK

SPAIN

Jorge Buixadé, VOX

Who? Buixadé is one of the leading figures in Spain's far-right party VOX party.

What does he believe? Like most members of his party, he advocates economic protectionism, reactionary policies and the strengthening of national sovereignty and borders. During an intervention in a campaign event, he became known worldwide for saying that feminists were ugly, comparing them to Cinderella's stepmother and stepsisters and saying that "ugly feminists tell other women what they should do". After these statements, thousands of people on Twitter responded with the hashtag #FeministaFea (UglyFeminist), which became a worldwide trending topic.

How did he get elected? Buixadé was a state's attorney between 1999 and 2003, and was stationed in the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia. Before that, he had been a candidate of the Spanish fascist party Falange, and later worked as a political advisor for the right-wing Partido Popular, pocketing €100,000 from one of the city councils he worked for.

Hermann Tertsch, VOX

Photo via Flickr user PP Comunidad de Madrid | CC BY 2.0

Who? Tertsch is a Spanish journalist of Austrian descent who's been writing for the main Spanish outlets for decades.

What does he believe? Over the years, his liberal right-wing stance has progressively taken a turn to more extremist positions. His career has been marked by controversy. Several years ago he went as far as saying that the leaders of Podemos – the political party representing Spain's new left – would kill for their ideology. A few weeks ago he referred to left-wing journalists who tried to unveil his fascist past as "scum".

– Alba Carreres, VICE Spain

AUSTRIA

Harald Vilimsky, Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ)

Who? Vilimsky is a member of the right-wing, nationalist Freedom Party, and looks like the bouncer outside a club you wouldn't dream of entering.

What does he believe? Once upon a time, Vilimsky let himself be tasered by a corrections officer. He wanted to prove that the tasers that his party wanted to use against prison inmates were completely harmless. Since then, Vilimsky has made headlines with strange statements. Recently, he claimed that Jean-Claude Juncker, the President of the European Commission, is an alcoholic.

How did he get elected? By doing what his party and right-wing populists in general do: calling for more police and fewer migrants.

What's next for him? The FPÖ is considering forming a joint parliamentary group with the German right-wing party AfD. Their common goal: a "Europe of Fatherlands". All white, all nationalistic and all stuck in the past.

– Niclas Seydack, VICE Germany

ROMANIA

Rareș Bogdan, the National Liberal Party of Romania

Photo via Rares Rogdan's official Facebook page.

Who? Rareș Bogdan is an ex-TV personality turned politician – the poor man's Donald Trump, if you like. He's also one of the loudest voices inside the right-wing National Liberal Party of Romania, a winner at this year's EU elections.

What does he believe? He's a populist and a nationalist, and while he was a TV host for Realitatea TV, a Romanian news channel, he frequently appeared wrapped in a national flag or with a flag hanging from his desk. He's a staunch critic of the governing Social Democratic party (PSD) and its leader, Liviu Dragnea – which is not a bad thing – but his rhetoric is often populist, clownish and contains more style than substance. He also seems to think that Liviu Dragnea's party is going to give Transylvania back to the Hungarians to buy the support of the local Hungarian party (Hungarians are the largest minority in Romania, with a considerable representation in Parliament). Which is kind of delusional, and also just fanning a xenophobia and anti-Hungarian sentiment that's already so prevalent in post-communist Romania.

How did he get elected? Being a popular TV host really helped. During the last two years, the liberals were the main opposition group in the Romanian Parliament, but its leadership was considered weak by many, so they needed someone popular enough to surpass the Social Democrats in the upcoming elections. That's why they chose Rareș Bogdan as their front guy for the liberal campaign, which proved to be a winning strategy.

How big was his win? His party's win was pretty big, as it managed to defeat its arch-nemesis, the PSD. On the other hand, the centrist Save Romania Union-PLUS alliance, a grassroots political movement that managed to more than double its results in two years, could prove to be a serious threat to Bogdan and his party in future elections.

What's next from him? Although he has five years as an MEP ahead of him, he'll probably become even more involved with national politics and even more influential inside the Liberal Party, leading them into next year's Romanian parliamentary elections.

Cristian Terheș, Social Democratic Party

Photo courtesy of Cristian Terhes' Facebook.

Who? Chris Terhes is a Romanian Greek Catholic from America, turned politician and member of the Social Democratic Party.

What does he believe? Four or five years ago, Terheș was a huge supporter of the anti-corruption movement, and highly critical of the ruling Social Democratic Party. Leftist only by name, the SDP's policies and leaders are considered pretty conservative. Over the years, he's turned against the anti-corruption camp and grown closer and closer to his former enemies, the Social Democrats. For Terheș, the fight against corruption suddenly became Stalinist in nature, and he became very concerned about the fate of jailed politicians, whom he perceived as martyrs of an abusive system. He's extremely homophobic, being a huge supporter of last year's referendum to make gay marriage illegal. After the referendum failed, he said: "The homosexual agenda will become even more violent in Romania, and the Romanian society does not have the proper antibodies to fight against it."

How did he get elected? All he had to do to get elected was to say whatever Liviu Dragnea and other SPD leaders were saying – which mainly involved spreading conspiracy theories about the Deep State. He was a regular guest for Antena 3, a pro-SPD TV news channel, so this helped him to become a SPD member and candidate for the European elections.

How big was his win? This is a big win for a guy with no political experience. Unfortunately for him, his party suffered a major blow, losing the elections to the National Liberal Party, while the SPD leader, Liviu Dragnea, was sentenced on corruption charges to three years and six months in jail.

What's next from him? Five years of living the good life as a member of the European Parliament, and five years of spreading more homophobic bullshit and conspiracy theories about the Romanian judicial system.

– Razvan Filip, VICE Romania

GREECE

Kyriakos Velopoulos, Greek Solution

Photo courtesy of Kyriakos Velopoulos's official website.

Who? Velopoulos is a former TV presenter who became famous by claiming to sell "Jesus' handwritten letters". Ηis party is ominously named "The Greek solution".

What does he believe? Putin, fake news, conspiracy theories including UFOs. And then the usual anti-immigration rhetoric.

How did he get elected? He used his endless TV appearances peddling nonsense like miracle creams to spread his hate speech.

What's next from him? Moving up to selling God's handwritten letters, I suppose. And helping his party get a couple of MPs elected at next month's Greek national elections.

– Despina Trivolis, VICE Greece

PORTUGAL

Nuno Melo, CDS-PP

Photo via Wikimedia Commons user Plcohelo | Public Domain

What does he believe? Melo has insisted that he and his party are not far-right – instead, they're "the last frontier of a democratic right" – but he's still made some remarkably shady statements over the last few months. For example, when he was asked his opinions on a new Portuguese law that would restrict the number of guns a person could own, he compared owning a gun to owning a car.

How big was his win? The party maintained the number of representatives in the European Parliament: one. However, they had set the goal to elect one more and are being considered one of the major losers in Portugal. They got 6.2 percent of the votes.

What's next from him? We can expect him to ask for more strict measures against immigration. According to him, "We need people, but not any kind of people".

– Sergio Felizardo, VICE Portugal

ITALY

Silvio Berlusconi, Forza Italia

Who? You know who.

What does he believe in? Himself. The billionaire businessman is the most famous Italian politician of the past 25 years. He has served three times as prime minister, despite his involvement in scandals of all kinds – from corruption to sex parties, right up to conviction for tax fraud.

How did he get elected? Today, he is no longer as dominant as he once was, and his party only won 8.79 percent of the vote in the European Elections. Despite the Italian anti-mafia committee declaring him "unpresentable", though, he's still here. And with over half a million preferences, he will have a seat in the European Parliament, a place that has seen him embarrass his country in many different ways. In 2003, for example, while giving a speech inaugurating Italy's six-month presidency of the EU, he compared German socialist Martin Schulz – who had dared to criticise him – to a Nazi concentration camp guard.

Angelo Ciocca, Lega

Who? In his hometown of Pavia, Lombardy, Ciocca is known as the "Bulldog" and, weirdly, "the Brad Pitt of politics".

What does he believe? He is very active on social media and is known for his pathetic stunts against "Brussels bureaucracy" and migrants. In March of 2019, for example, he protested against the abolition of daylight saving by bringing a giant replica clock into the EU parliament chamber. In October of 2018, during a press conference, he was filmed trampling on the EU Commission’s decision to reject Italy’s draft 2019 budget with a "strictly Italian" shoe.

European Commissioner for economic and financial affairs Pierre Moscovici did not take it very well, and called Ciocca’s move "grotesque", writing on Twitter that "Initially, one smiles and banalises it because it is ridiculous, but later one gets accustomed to a dull, symbolic sort of violence. And one day you wake up with fascism."

– Leonardo Bianchi, VICE Italy

BELGIUM

Gerolf Annemans, Vlaams Belang

Gerolf Annemans (right). Photo courtesy of Gerolf Annemans's Facebook.

Who? Annemans is a leading member of Vlaams Belang, Belgium's Flemish far-right party.

What does he believe? He wants to fight against immigration and would like Flanders to be an independent state, separated from Wallonia. Annemans and his party think the EU has become a "superstate" that only cares for international crime and illegal immigration. Therefore, they wish for each European state to control their own borders again.

How big was their win? 12.05 percent, a rise of 7.8 percent, the biggest increase of all parties.

– Souria Cheurfi, VICE Belgium

After three weeks of pointless speculation, countless headlines, a notable uptick in traffic for Wikipedia's page on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, a fusillade of open letters, an orgy of geopolitical posturing and the curious sympathetic context of an Armenian army lieutenant getting axed to death in his sleep, the 2019 Europa League Final will finally emerge from the realms of fantasy and become real this evening, as London is airlifted in the form of a blockbusting cultural event 2,800 miles east to a medieval "City of Winds" on the shores of the Caspian Sea.

At this stage, it feels reasonable to say that Baku has assumed the air of a place that resides somewhere beyond the reach of mortal experience, a distant land of dreams designed by Del Toro, Calvino, Nintendo or Namco where dogs bark rainbows and flowers ask you what day it is. There are many reasons for this, but mostly it’s because, for the last three weeks, the Azerbaijani capital has been talked about constantly by people who’ve never been there and know nothing about it. Which is totally fine. TalkSport presenters aren’t paid for their intimate knowledge of remote Eurasian petropolises, even if it's been fun listening to Alan Brazil and Jason Cundy struggle as the station’s been transformed into a weird trauma hotline for the legions of fans unable to surrender thousands of pounds and hundreds of travel hours to see their team take part in tonight's game.

Arsenal and Chelsea were handed 6,000 tickets each for the second biggest final in Europe’s club football calendar. There were concerted outpourings of rage and ridicule when the allocations were announced – Baku’s Olympic Stadium has an overall capacity of 60,000 – yet Arsenal have managed to sell just 3,700 of their quota, while Chelsea have sent 4,000 back to UEFA. The details have been pored over obsessively enough elsewhere, but a scarcity of direct flights costing in excess of £900 have pushed those hardy enough to make the journey into feats of admirable patience and masochistic ingenuity; one Chelsea fan told ITV News he'd spent a week travelling 3,500 miles to Baku, spending five different currencies in three countries along the way. At least UEFA were good enough to advise people against driving their cars to the final, a course of action that would’ve necessitated a 120-mile round trip skirting two or three active war zones.

There is no point repeating UEFA's excuses for this mess because they are all utterly fucking stupid. Adding further levels of derangement to the occasion is the fact that Arsenal's Armenian forward, Henrikh Mkhitaryan, doesn’t feel as though he can travel to Azerbaijan without his liberty or even his life coming under threat. While there are those who’ve taken potshots at Mkhitaryan for this stance, others have been shrewd enough to note that, as recently as 2012, the Azerbaijani government were extraditing then lionising one of their military officers who’d been caught standing over the body of a dead Armenian man with a massive, blood-stained axe.

UEFA and the national authorities half-heartedly tried to reassure Mkhitaryan that nothing similar would happen this time, that there would be no Ramil Safarov waiting for him in a hotel room in Baku and that, above all else, this was a sporting occasion, one unlikely to foster the kind of berserker aggression that cost Gurgen Margaryan his life back in 2006. This logic might have made more sense if Safarov and Margaryan hadn’t been studying on an English-language course organised by Nato’s "Partnership for Peace" programme at the time.

It’s one of the dawning ironies of the world we live in today that sports-washing invariably serves only to make the public more aware of awful acts perpetrated by repulsive people, something seen not just in the build-up to this final, but also at the tail end of the domestic season and the gathering noise around Manchester City. Who is all this serving, exactly? The fans can’t go, the players can’t play, UEFA look stupid and the regimes look evil. In the three-week gap that has preceded the match itself, all of this noxious fervour has been allowed to build to a whining pitch. In a weird kind of way, it feels almost appropriate, the perfect atmosphere for such an odd game, one that – shorn of real supporters and taking place in front of sponsors thousands of miles from home – is all set to feel like the biggest pre-season Gulf state friendly there has ever been.

As ever, salvation resides in London’s pubs. Tonight, those who spend inordinate amounts of time and money watching, talking and thinking about Chelsea and Arsenal will cram the capital’s sports bars and boozers, poky little armpits set up to sweat alcohol into the mouths of the faithful, noisy Foster's-top fart boxes who can’t find the time to replace the carpet but are precision-engineered to transform fluttering guts into rare moments of communal euphoria.

On hundreds of thousands of screens and projectors, people who should be at tonight’s game will see a match unfold that means so much to both clubs, a cross-city derby tasked with midwifing just one gilded new era. Granted, it’s Arsenal who need it more; Maurizio Sarri’s side are already safely qualified for next season’s Champions League, and even if they weren’t their ownership model means they’d not need to fret too much over the implications of missing out. For Arsenal and Unai Emery, this isn’t just a one-off 90 minutes to see who gets to lift up a trophy; it’s a gateway back to Europe’s top table, renewed membership of the continental elite and all the riches that brings. It’s also a chance to inoculate themselves against the horror of Spurs winning the Champions League on Saturday.

It’s testament to football’s enduring appeal that absolutely none of what I’ve discussed in this column will be present in the minds of the die-hards who’ll spend this evening drenched in booze and sweat and glued to a despot-endorsing bastard-final thousands of miles away in a petrol-dipped post-Soviet outpost of the steppes. After three weeks of diplomatic rancour, crisis calls, admin tiffs and attempts to steer the narrative, it is – mercifully – nearly time for the talking to stop.

@hydallcodeen / @Dan_Draws