The author (right) doing some flirting at a silent speed-dating night (Photo by Lily Rose Thomas)

Flirting doesn't come easy to many. If you're not the kind of girl who's adept at conjuring trouser tents with bend 'n' snap tactics, you probably know what I'm on about: short of harakiri-ing your self worth by quoting Anchorman at guys you meet in bars, it's tricky to know how to initiate a chirpse.

And sure, rather than making a move, it's much easier to just wait for someone to emerge from the pages of a screwed up Richard Curtis script and send an apple martini and their number your way. But it's also completely unrealistic and a little bit delusional and all your friends and family should be quite worried about you if you truly believe that's ever going to happen.

Instead, you need to stop acting all school disco about dating and start doing some of the chatting up yourself. Here are some handy pointers to help you navigate this strange new world.

DUTCH COURAGE

I'm afraid to say: bashing out a squinty text in the bogs after five happy-hour sangrias doesn't count as flirting. I'm no literary historian, but I'm pretty sure the best romantic prose was never composed as the author held the toilet lady in a long embrace, murmuring something about "£1 being a bit much for a Tic Tac", while using one hand to steady herself on the cubicle wall. Sure, sending "r you outt dp tnigght" to every possible shag in your inbox is a quirky move, but it's also 11PM on a Wednesday, so maybe just use those large, indiscriminate thumbs to order yourself an Uber.

When you get in, eat at least five slices of toast and go immediately to bed. If you insist on disobeying this advice and instead decide this is the opportune time for a saucy bedroom selfie, you are very much mistaken; whoever wakes up to a flurry of unsolicited pictures of you squashing your tits together under your chin is definitely going to feel weird about it. Not sure what response you were hoping for, but it probably wasn't "Um, thanks?" time-stamped at 7.32AM.

HOUSE PARTIES

House parties were made for flirting; once you've whet a dozen whistles frotting your way across the kitchen floor, there are ample opportunities to light a few conversational candles. Absent-mindedly ashing in his beer is a quick and easy way to get noticed, for instance, as is helping yourself to his Glen's while standing right in front of him.

It is because of this limitless license to chirpse that house parties can be a bit of a mixed blessing. A few warm vodka-Lilts down the line, and you may find yourself sprawled on an IKEA rug slagging off the Tories with a bunch of cocaine-socialists. By this time you're probably feeling pretty chatty. How did you get so good at chatting? You probably got it from your mum, who you seem to have a lot to say about tonight. Flecks of white gunk are forming in the corner of your mouth as you tell the object of your monologue about your plans to crack the street food business, before showing him hundreds of pictures of your family dog.

As the sparrows begin to chirrup and the sun gleams through the windows onto your cracking concealer, ask yourself this: when was the last time I heard the voice of this person I'm vibesing with? And how many real-time minutes have I been talking about setting up a Kickstarter for my app idea? If it's longer than two, you have not been flirting; you've been very high, and have probably ruined his night.

(Photo by Tom Johnson)

DATING APPS

Flirting with virtual strangers on apps is a bit like getting stuck in the office kitchen, stirring a teaspoon of Nescafe round and round a Magic FM mug with your eyes half open while Louise from HR tells you about her "chilled" weekend. If you can't be bothered to wear trousers while flirting, the penalty is a good couple of hours of molar-grinding mediocrity before you meet up to disappoint each other in the flesh. This is how we do things now.

BREAKING THE MOULD

Flirting in daylight – or, god forbid, sober – will give most ladies a throbbing dry throat and a weird metallic taste in their mouth. And that, I'm afraid, is because you were born in the UK. As much as it may pain you to admit it, your national character dictates that you will probably never ask your tube crush to "grab a cawfee sometime". You might have watched him Tindering over his shoulder, but you're never going to be able to walk four blocks with him, talking earnestly about having hobbies. Inconvenient, but true.

Instead, the only public places it's socially acceptable to try out new flirty material are parks in the summer and pub gardens the rest of the time, and even then you're going to need a conversation starter, like an unruly Cockapoo or an open wound.

Thing is, do you even want to veer into that territory? Remember – if any guy has asked you for your number on a crowded commuter train, he will have been one of the following: a) completely insufferable, or b) someone who might later keep a lock of your hair in a wooden box with a tiny key. Don't stoop to that.

(Photo by Jake Lewis)

IN THE CLUB

Flirting on a big night out is an ambitious undertaking; you and your friends circling the handbag totem like a bunch of slutty Morris dancers is a visual spectacle, but one that's notoriously hard to penetrate.

Even when you're doing your best come-to-bed eyes from across the room, the reality is that flirting with strangers in the night is going to boil down to proximity. This means you're probably going to end up following the object of your desire around the club like a lost toddler in supermarket. Bar a couple of fancy-seeing-you-here cigarettes and knowing eye-rolls in the cloakroom queue, your best hope of sealing the deal in this situation is to find someone stupid enough invite 20 tenuous mutuals back to theirs for an afterparty.

KNOW YOUR MEDIUM

Messaging is the ideal platform for all literate potential hook-ups, as it allows you plenty of time to quickly Google – and feign enthusiasm for – their interests. If the apple of your eye is in the workplace, you've got a job on your hands. Realistically, you're going to spend a lot of your working day trying not to get caught frantically scouring Giphy, because heaven knows a well-timed sloth gif in an email thread is a millennial aphrodisiac.

By all means go multi platform, but more than two at once is overkill. Never do Twitter, though. The only people you'll find flirting there are "gin enthusiasts" and people who wear slogan T-shirts. If you want to go a bit throwback and flirt on the phone, never leave a voicemail; voicemails are for dads, butt dials and Specsavers appointments. Have you ever heard a successful flirty voicemail? No. And that's because they don't exist.

PRETENDING YOU DON'T KNOW WHEN IT'S HAPPENING

(Photo by Dana Boulos)

Because we're all absolutely terrible at this stuff, sometimes it's quite hard to tell when a mere vocal exchange has turned into a flirt. Basically, holding a conversation with an available man you've just met for more than three minutes makes you an open target for their advances. Despite the fact that every girl knows this, we often pretend that we don't. This, unfortunately, sometimes lands you in situations you'd rather not be in, like Scott from accounts putting his clammy hand on your knee, or a man on the bus mistaking a question about the next stop for an invitation to aggressively neg you for the next half a mile.

There are ways to quickly evacuate the flirt zone. Dropping the B-bomb early in the game is an easy out. See also: imaginary friends you need to buy drinks for and those fake toilet trips where you end up just rinsing your hands under the tap. Or if you're really desperate, telling a both-ends food-poisoning story will always get the message across nicely.

TRENDING ON NOISEY: Learning How to Hula Hoop With Acid Heads at Outlook Festival

OVERTHINKING IT

I don't know which sick Silicon Valley fuck invented the "seen" feature of instant messaging, but they have clearly never been hit square in the face with their own love boomerang. I know you've stared in breathless anticipation as the ellipsis pulsates on your phone, while you ask multiple friends in multiple chat windows if the flamenco emoji was too much. Whatever they tell you will probably be ego-preserving lies; if you're not sure if he's flirting back: he's not.

If you are considering starting a text with the words "me again", or composing a "sorry wrong number" Friday night message, the game is up. You are galloping into weird town on your crazy horse and you must kill it before it kills you.

You also ought to know that being "good" at flirting is actually a myth. I've overheard enough off-duty fashion bloggers talking about their horoscopes to have learnt that if someone wants to do the funky with you, most of the boring shit that comes out of your mouth will not be a problem. If someone likes the cut of your jib, they just do: even if your jib is flapping in the wind and has "daddy issues" scrawled all over it in lipstick.

Watch our documentary about the changing world of sex and dating, 'The Digital Love Industry'

GO GEDDEM

So you've shaved your legs you've spritzed an ambitious amount of perfume on your inner thighs and your eyebrows are so on fleek it hurts. You didn't pay a woman £30 to rip hot wax from your empowered bumhole for no one to appreciate how silky smooth it is, so get out there and Sheryl Sandberg the hell out of your flirt game.

If you're spending your single life standing flush to the skirting, waiting for Colin Firth to ask you to dance, you: a) urgently need to update your DVD collection, and b) have to remember that, since we stopped wearing bonnets, getting your chirpse on really needn't be that difficult. A bit of light rejection won't turn you to stone, and you can be 99 percent sure no one's going to burn you at the stake for giving it go.

And when he starts talking about a dodgy chicken korma he had last weekend, at least you can say you tried.

@lucyannhancock

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Dennis Cooper isn't a monster, but his books are. Ever since discovering the work of the Marquis de Sade at the tender age of 15, Cooper has spent his life devoted to writing merciless, gruesome fiction of the highest artistic caliber. His books are appalling, hypnotic, and exquisitely depraved, but if you can stomach your way through a whole novel, you might find yourself enlightened by its darkness.

Dennis always seems to be telling the same stories: all of his work dwells on adolescent horniness with reverence and tenderness. But while Cooper repeats the same narrative, he does so in endlessly various ways. While the consistently scandalous content of his books is what earned his notoriety, the structural virtuosity of his writing is what has garnered critical acclaim. He treats his prose, poetry, comic books, plays, and personal blog with the careful, precise touch of a surgeon who's elbows-deep in a patient's innards.

Finally, after years of anticipation, Cooper is poised to bring his vision to the movie screen with the premiere of his first original film. Like Cattle Towards Glow follows 13 young characters who find themselves in confusing and threatening situations by way of their sexual misadventures. In advance of the film's premiere in Paris this Friday, VICE spoke with Dennis about anarchism, the gay agenda, and giving his readers complicated erections.

VICE: I'm calling you from LA, which is the quintessential, wasteland-like Cooper setting—do you make it back to your hometown very often?
Dennis Cooper: I come back at least once a year because LA has the best Halloween. I'm obsessed with the haunted houses there—it's like the castles of Halloween, and there's hundreds of them.

Let's discuss your movie. Can you tell me what led you to working on a film? Readers of your blog know that this movie has been in the making for a really long time.
It kind of has a weird back-story because... About seven years ago I mentioned somewhere online, maybe on my blog, that I'd always wanted to make a porn movie. And this guy in the porn industry wrote to me, "I can get that made if you really want to do it, I have connections in the porn industry and I can get that made." I asked him "What are the guidelines? What sort of rules should I follow?" He told me to do anything I wanted, that there weren't any guidelines.

So, I wrote this script, and then when I gave it to him, it was just extremely impossible to make: It was too controversial, it was too arty. He tried to get it made and no one would touch it, so it died. But a few years later, a producer asked me for about the script again. My friend Zac [Farley] talked to me about it and said he wanted to direct it, so we rewrote it together. Zac directed the film, and Scott Michael Salerno did the cinematography, but everything else we did collaboratively—casting, everything.

Can you briefly explain Like Cattle Towards Glow?
It's in five parts—each part is a different story with different actors in it. It's a strange movie, it's very slow and deep in a way, but it's also very intense. Each of the scenes is about sex in some way, but in different ways—it's sort of about confusion about sex. It's not a porn movie anymore, but there is some explicit sex in it.

The first story is about this gothic guy who's a prostitute and sells himself as a dead body for people to have sex with. So in his story, this guy hires him and something goes wrong... Then there's one about this guy who's a spoken word artist who works with an electronic noise musician. They're doing a performance and the audience attacks the guy and rapes him on the floor while he's doing the performance. Then there's one about this girl and boy who live in the forest and dress up as monsters, and they kidnap a skateboarder and kill him. And there's another about this woman who's keeping elaborate surveillance on this young guy who lives in a bunker on the beach. I don't know... people should see [the movie] because it's actually really very cool.

I'm an anarchist, so I don't believe in collective identity. Even though I'm gay, I've never written about 'what gay guys do,' you know?

What is it that compels you write about pretty boys getting killed so much? Why is it such a recurring thing?
Well, of course the real answer is that I have no idea, because if I did, I wouldn't do it. I don't know where that comes from—I started using those motifs when I was a teenager, and obviously when I was thinking about it as a teenager, I was thinking about it being the young one. And now I'm much older and I'm still writing about it, and I'm not really the young one anymore. So... I don't really know. There's something about it that's very scary to me; I've always been fascinated by objectification. I really dislike it because when you objectify someone you're basically depersonalizing them and turning them into an example of a kind of beauty or attractiveness that you're into. And I think that when I was younger, especially, I was around people who were really, really taken advantage of for that—people who happened to be attractive, and so others would just do anything to get them, and then they would just drop them. So even though they said and sometimes even believed that they were actually interested in the person, it was all just this elaborate flirtation that was really about "conquering" the cute guy. I find that really disturbing, and I find it really fascinating that people do that to each other. I don't know why, but it's something that obviously interests me so much that I write about it a lot and I try to understand what's happening there.

When you write a story, whatever format it's in, how is it that you find a starting point to your creative process? Do you start working with thematic ideas, or specific details in the story?
It's not characters or stories or anything like that, because I don't care about those things. I use them as devices to get people to read, because people want those things, but they don't really interest me that much.

I tend to write about a similar thing all the time. I'm very confused about the stuff I write about, it's very compelling to me. The things that are confusing to me are the things that interest me. So, usually it comes from my need to represent something that's exciting me, confusing me, or scaring me. It's mostly emotional, really.

You said that your characters are devices to you—does that attitude extend to the way you use sex in your work?
It depends on what you mean because the sex in the book generally happens between the characters...

I mean, most writing about sex is incredibly banal. I'm not interested in giving people erections or anything—I'm interested in maybe giving them complicated erections—but the actual sex is not a device. But there are millions of devices that I use to try to get people to look at or read [my work], because I tend to write about things that are uncomfortable and disturbing. It's a matter of giving them some sort of eroticism and then undercutting it with something that's very disturbing or emotional and finding the right stew of stuff that will get it there.

There's been a lot of progress in the gay rights movement in my lifetime, and it's a much more visible movement than before. How does your work fit into that political movement, or how has it affected the way that you work?
First of all, I'm an anarchist, so I don't believe in collective identity. Even though I'm gay, I've never written about "what gay guys do," you know? I write about people who are off on their own and don't feel connected to anybody, regardless of what anyone else's sexual "thing" is. So it hasn't affected the way I think about things at all.

What really has happened is the more that "gay" got mainstreamed, the more stuff came out with gay themes in other mediums besides books. Because at first it was just books—when I was young, you just read books, because that's the only place you could find that stuff. Now there's movies and TV and everything, so gay guys don't read books anymore. So it's kind of interesting in that way—I think it actually fucked over a lot of gay writers who were writing for that audience because no one reads those books anymore. It didn't really affect me, though, because [my audience is different].

Actually, it's taken away a lot of the hostility towards what I do. When books were important to the gay movement there was a lot of hatred towards me because I wasn't sex-positive or whatever.

How is your work not sex-positive?
Because it doesn't present sex as a cathartic thing about love. It's not a celebration.

For your characters it is though...
Yeah, but there are those who want the portrayal of gays to be really positive and to speak to the world about how "normal" we are, and obviously the stuff I write about isn't like that.

It's so refreshing that you don't identify with the "gay" collective identity, or as a "gay artist." Most people these days seem to treat sexuality as a label and I think it limits what we can achieve.
The reason that the characters are gay in my books mostly is because it's just honest. That's who I am. It's not about identity.

Your work deals heavily with themes of alienation and isolation, to the point that sex becomes an act of depersonalized anatomical exploration, instead of a connection between people. I want to know whether love fits into this equation, and what connection you believe might exist between sex and romantic love.
Sometimes there's love, sometimes there isn't. I don't think the characters themselves would identify it as love—I think they'd see it as an artistic pursuit or the intake of information. I actually think that a significant part of the time [love] is what's actually going on, but they're afraid of that or not interested in the idea of love, so they don't actually talk about that at all.

People hardly ever talk about love in my work, although I think it might be going on. There's this total disconnect because the characters tend to be predators and victims. That's a really simplistic way to put it, but that's a dichotomy I work with a lot.

What is it that attracts you to that dynamic?
I'm very interested in power dynamics because of my interest in anarchism. There's a lot of intergenerational content in my work. Usually there's this older character that's going after the young one, and he might seem as if he's the power figure. Then the victim is usually passive and submissive and just wants to be wanted, and that would seem to be the weaker of the characters, but actually it's much more complex than that. I like contrast—it's easier to write about that stuff if you have contrasts. If you start to write about something like two guys in love, it ends up becoming kind of gooky because you have nothing to hang on—you just have two guys and they're both young, they're both attractive, one's a top and one's a bottom or something, and you end up writing this really boring stuff. But when you make characters really different from one another, [put them in opposition], and make them want different things instead of seeking to unite in blissful emotion, then it seems like sex is more interesting to write about or something.

What are your upcoming projects? Are you continuing making films or going back to your work as an author?
I put out this novel called Zac's Haunted House last year that's told entirely through animated .gifs. It's published by Kiddie Punk Press and is available to download or view online. I'm really excited about that [medium] and it's really fun to do, so I have a new one coming out called Zac's Control Panel that's going to be up on Kiddie Punk Press on September 10th.

Anyway, we're also doing another movie—we're looking for producers now. It's not a queer movie, it doesn't have sex in it, and it's about this guy who wants to explode. This young guy's goal is to explode, but he doesn't want to die, and he doesn't want anyone to think that he died when he exploded. He just wants people to think he exploded, and that the explosion is cool. So that's what it's about: a guy who's figuring out how to explode without dying.

Like Cattle Towards Glow debuts at L'Etrange Festival on Friday, September 11th in Paris, France.

Check out Dennis' website and blog.

Follow John on Twitter.

Illustration by Carla Uriarte

This article appears in The Incarceration Issue, a special edition of VICE Australia.

In June, 2014, 157 Sri Lankan Tamils boarded a fishing boat in the Indian city of Pondicherry. From there, they sailed for Australia, a mind-bending 4,039-mile voyage that could only make sense when you're fleeing decades of documented persecution.

After two weeks on the water, the boat was intercepted by Australian authorities. Its passengers were transferred to a naval vessel where they remained under guard for 29 days. After Australia tried and failed to negotiate their return to India, all 157 (including 50 children) were sent to Nauru in the middle of the night, without their lawyers' knowledge.

This year, the legality of this protracted detention at sea was challenged before Australia's High Court. During the case, a Tamil man—identified as CPCF—described conditions aboard the naval vessel as "very difficult." He claimed that he and the other asylum seekers were locked in a windowless room for 22 hours each day.

For its part, the Immigration Department argued that at no time had CPCF actually claimed asylum seeker status (the judgement summary states he was never asked to) and Australia therefore had no obligations not to try and send them back where they came from. In a 4:3 decision, the High Court agreed, ruling in January 2015, that authorities acted lawfully—setting a worrying precedent, according to many legal experts.

"It's given the government far more discretion, not reviewable by courts, to do as they like on the high seas," says Dr. Maria O'Sullivan, a lecturer in law at Monash University, who has written extensively on the case.

"Unlike criminal law, where there are limits on how long you can hold someone without a charge, this theoretically allows for indefinite detention of future asylum seekers."

Follow Max on Twitter.

TATTOOS FOR YOUR ENEMIES VOLUME 4
Jack Dominic Watts
Self Published

Complaining about stuff you like entering mainstream culture is a spoilt-baby thing to do. If your identity is dependent on being a one-off, you're probably a bit of a twat. That said, it could be argued that the recent acceptance of tattoos by the greater populace has rather sucked the fun out of them. Tattoos used to be for lunatics, criminals and wild-eyed children of the darkness, but thanks to Topman, craft beer and reality TV, they've fallen into the hands of vloggers and estate agents. Sadly, tattoos don't say "no thanks" at the moment, they say "I fuss about my hair a great deal". Now in its fourth issue, Tattoos For Your Enemies showcases Watts's wonky reworking of the tropes of old — skulls, ghouls, daggers, cartoon characters — rendered with an uncanny awkwardness that says "creepy goofy shit for fun weirdos" way before it says "potential tattoo for a Men's Health reader with perfect facial hair". Check it out if you're a fun weirdo. etsy.com/shop/jacksemporium

OUTLAND
Roger Ballen
Phaidon

There's something inherently scary about a lack of definition. In the case of Outland that lack comes in the blurring of lines between portraiture, art, pose and reportage. It's hard to know how to describe this book, now reissued with a load of new and unnerving images. It's, like, portraits of poor, disabled and mentally unstable people from South Africa's forgotten and remote villages, but Ballen sort of encouraged them to artdirect themselves, to pose and use props. So, the people are real. But the situations may not be. Get it? It's fucking weird. Another strange aspect is the way it does not appear to be tethered to any specific time. The images could have been taken in 1940 or 2015, though as it happens most were taken in the 80s and 90s, and that too gives the book a rather nightmarish quality. This portrait of mental and physical illness, extreme poverty, and physical and social isolation is not easy to look at, but it is fucking amazing. phaidon.com

ZONZO
Joan Cornellà
Self-published

Time was, the internet was crammed with little four-panel comics about dads raping their sons' eyeballs with AIDS dicks, but, in the era of social justice, these have fallen by the wayside. Catalan cartoonist Joan Cornellà takes us back to those halcyon days in ZONZO, with depraved illustrations of crocodile hunters stabbing children in the heart, deformed mutants imitating road signs with their warped viscera, and melted cows being reshaped into cute dogs. The only real issue with ZONZO is that there isn't enough of it. I could happily build a man-size fort of books with his pictures of arse-faced horse-humans getting sodomised by bollocklegged grinning men. The best thing about the book is its distinct lack of any message: it's a collation of brightly coloured, horrible scenarios played out in a mural-in-a-nursery kind of world setting. Perhaps this should be in nurseries — maybe then kids wouldn't be so fucking lame. elblogdejoancornella.blogspot.co.uk

I LOVE TO DRESS LIKE I AM COMING FROM SOMEWHERE
Flurina Rothenberger
Edition Patrick Frey

Flurina Rothenberger captures a world of serenity and romantic banality in this new book about the people of Africa. I Love To Dress Like I Am Coming From Somewhere is interspersed with the indigenous people's mantras — statements of independence and positivity — hand-painted and laid over the photographs. Rothenberger's subjects are confident in front of the photographer's gaze — their statures distinct in the landscape, their outfits, a combination of traditional Dutch wax fabrics and imported Western garments, reflecting the evolving narrative of the continent. Documenting multiple identities and lives in a beautifully curated production, the book exemplifies the pride and variety of Africa, all too often prescribed a singular story. editionpatrickfrey.com

THIS IS WHERE I LIVE
Wendy Ewald
MACK

At a recent dinner party I spoke to someone who was scared to go to almost every country in the world based on what she believed was a lack of safety. I blushed at her ignorance and told her most places were not as dangerous as she imagined. I then expanded this view to places I'd never visited. But what would it take for either of us to really know? Maybe we'd have to go and speak to all the different people who make up the society of a given nation. Maybe we'd give them a camera so we could see what they see, then edit that into a book, and even then we wouldn't know. We might end up with a book on the most contested land in the world — the West Bank — that can always be relied upon to bring up a different sort of debate at any dinner party. mackbooks.co.uk

I'm sure they have lovely get-togethers where they talk about tea. Photo via Twitter user Phraz.

Universities around Toronto found themselves bombarded with posters advocating for white supremacy Monday morning.

Vaguely reminiscent of World War II propaganda, the signs feature an image of two stoic-looking white guys in winter attire with the CN Tower in the backdrop; they promote a White Students Union.

A URL at the bottom of the poster directs people to the website for Students for Western Civilisation, a group that hopes to advance "the political interests of Western peoples."

In a post on its homepage, the group takes on York University, claiming the school's liberal arts programs are dominated by "leftist perspectives."

"All white people are racists, we're taught, and only white people can be racist, because white people are the sole beneficiaries of this white supremecist (sic) system."

Watch our documentary on a US-based White student union

To balance things out, the group claims its platform "would serve as a venue to explore those perspectives on ethnic politics that our Marxist indoctrinators seek to suppress and ignore."

Joanne Rider, a spokeswoman for York, told VICE eight posters were removed from the school's Keele Street campus Monday morning. She said Students for Western Civilisation is not a school-sanctioned group and that its members are unknown to York.

Reached by VICE Monday, Ryerson spokesman Michael Forbes said a security team was investigating the origin of the posters, several of which appeared on school grounds.

"We saw it as offensive. We don't condone it and we hope we can get all the signs down as quickly as possible," he said.

Bee Quammie, 32, an alumna of the University of Western Ontario and York, who is black, said the posters show that racism is still a major problem here, even amongst young people. "We have youth who are recruiting other youth who say they have interest to proceed with this idea," she said. "It just shows there is a lot more work to be done and there isn't room to be complacent about racism in Canadian society."

Screencap from'The Late Show with Stephen Colbert' on YouTube

There's a mile-wide gulf between a satirist and a late-night talk-show host. A satirist usually deals in caricature. A satirist has to do the "speak truth to power" routine, critiquing institutions, staying on-message, suggesting virtue by dramatizing its opposite. A satirist can subsist on applause instead of laughter. But a late-night talk show host has a more intimate obligation. He's somebody you invite into your home, usually your bedroom, to make you smile, and help you forget about the horror of being alive. By taking over The Late Show, Stephen Colbert can't just be a public wit anymore. He has to be America's avuncular therapist.

So obviously, The Colbert Report, not just the name but the concept too, is no more. This is a good thing, considering Colbert had burned out on the whole thing. "I play a character on my show, and he's modeled on punditry, and I no longer respect my model... I don't really know if I could have done it much longer, because you have to be invested in your model. And I am really not," he said in Judd Apatow's book of interviews, Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy.

The central question following his first week as The Late Show host, then, is whether the change was worth it. He's effectively killing the character that made him famous: the insane cable-news pundit whose real personality we could comfortably map to our own political biases. He's vulnerable now. He can't be Stephen Colbert, king of the cartoon pundits. He has to be Stephen Tyrone Colbert from Charleston, South Carolina, by way of Washington, DC, 51 years old, a real person.

That's why you could almost hear his heart beating too fast as he sped through his first monologue last week. He had never done this before. He had never performed without his market-approved character. He had to be earnest all of a sudden. And his first earnest act when he sat down at The Late Show desk as a real person was to pay tribute to his predecessor David Letterman, whose influence on comedy is incalculable and whose outstanding achievements in the field of late-night TV set an impossible standard to match.

The principle joy of watching Letterman's final days, as he openly rode out the clock to retirement, was how little time he had for Jimmy Fallon and what Jimmy Fallon represents: the importance of social media in modern comedy. Fallon is always up, always trying to go viral, always chasing after an anonymous 5 million YouTube hits as much as he is the audience getting ready for bed. If contemporary late-night stardom meant having a breakdance conversation with Brad Pitt, Letterman was having none of it.

Colbert lacks Dave's gleeful misanthropy, but it's clear the new host isn't interested in the tenuous renown that virality offers, either. As his first week went on, and Colbert kept reminding us that he's an affable guy with no interest in being divisive, it also became clear he wasn't trying to play to the TV and the internet at the same time. Colbert's show is leisurely paced, and while it may have stunts (Paul Simon showing up under a pseudonym, Jim Brown being there at all), it is not driven by them. Jimmy Fallon essentially hosts a variety show, a blissed-out New York Citycentric reimagining of Pee Wee's Playhouse that could air at 2 PM almost as well as it could at midnight. But Colbert is firmly in the tradition of Letterman and Carson: tell some jokes, put tired people at ease, and try to have authentic conversations with guests.

Fallon's brand of high-concept giddiness can only exist post-viral comedy, but Colbert's approach could have easily existed before it. By and large, the first four episodes felt less like an episode of The Colbert Report than they did an episode of Late Night with Conan O'Brien in 2003 or so, before the baggage of the NBC fallout: goofy, irreverent, and ultimately not too topical.

The Conan stamp showed up more than once. Les Moonves holding a switch to turn on reruns of The Mentalist is a dead ringer for the Walker, Texas Ranger bit. And the cursed amulet demanding Colbert shill for hummus is right out of Conan's playbook. Which is not a problem.

Maybe this is because of Brian Stack, Conan's former right-hand man on the writing staff, who left Conan's side after almost 20 years to write for Colbert. His presence suggests the show will continue navigating away from the minefield of ultra-topical comedy and toward material with longterm staying power. In the first week's big comedic highlight, ostensibly a series of Donald Trump jokes, Trump is never really the punchlinethe presidential candidate is just the vehicle that allows Colbert to debase himself with Oreos. That joke gets a laugh even if you don't know who Trump is, or what Oreos are. It feels like classic Conan, and it's brought home by Colbert's impeccable timing.

Meanwhile, Colbert's interview approach has been hit-or-miss because he tries to extract conversations out of the guestsand both parties have to be willing to participate for that to work. This doesn't quite jibe with the "pretend we're buddies, share an anecdote about my new project, plug my new project, be out of the studio in 15 minutes" interview format, upon which many late-night interviews rely. Letterman could get around that with his "dig your own grave" approach, which found him being as rude and caustic to guests as possible, but Colbert doesn't seem to have that level of acidity in his personality. So it was impossible for him to make Elon Musk sound like anything other than a Popular Science feature from 1997, or for Jeb Bush to sound like anything at all. He has to get guests out of plug mode for his approach to succeed. But when he succeeded, with Joe Biden, the result was probably the most intimate, empathetic interview of 2015. Neither of them asked you to listen, and that made it more rewarding.

This is why the real Colbert may very well be a more durable public figure than the pundit Colbert. The line between schtick and earnestness is clearly demarcated, and he can cross from one to the other seamlessly. He can mix verbal wit and 1930s screwball physicality in a way no one has since Phil Hartman on NewsRadio. He's as topical as the format demands without becoming an outright topical comedian.

And if nothing else, he's the antidote to Fallon, who carries himself with the scatterbrained urgency of a party host who tries too hard to make sure everybody has a good time. You know, the one guy who sort of knows everybody, and talks to you for ten seconds before he bounces to the next person, with a manic enthusiasm that's tiring even to bystanders. Fallon damned himself to playing a 19-year-old who spends his time between classes reading BuzzFeed. Colbert doesn't have that problem. His approach will get better with time. He'll age into this show well. It'll probably be better when he's 60. Therapists derive their gravitas from their age and wisdom, anyway.

Follow Kaleb on Twitter.

All photos by the author

If you've watched a video on YouTube in 2015, chances are you've seen Tai Lopez. Lopez bills himself as a self-help guru on the "good life," who can help you reach your full potential through his "67 Steps Program to the Good Life." His famous video advertisement, shot selfie-style, extolls the virtues of knowledge over materialismmoments after showing off his Lamborghini. The commercial, dubbed "here in my garage," became so instantly loved/hated that parody and remix videos soon followed, and the internet collectively wrote Lopez's business off as a "get rich quick" scheme.

Those who have tried Lopez's "67 Steps Program" also have their complaints. One such man, Scott Godar, purchased the program and made it though 15 hour-and-a-half videos of Tai talking before he asked for a refund.

"Tai seems like a very knowledgeable person, a very smart person, but he's an internet marketer. That's all he is," Godar told me. "I've watched a dozen and a half motivational videos on YouTube and got more out of them than Tai's program. They are one in the same and preach the same regurgitated information. Read a Tony Robbins book for God's sake! Tai's program is Tony Robbins and YouTube motivational videos rolled up into hour-and-a-half long sessions of listening to Tai talk."

Read: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Sims

The programwhich includes the aforementioned 67 steps, videos of Lopez pontificating, life-coaching calls from Lopez, book-of-the-day recommendations, and other "super bonus content"costs $67 per month (43). A recurring complaint among those who have signed up is that they didn't realize they were entering into a recurring billing cycle or that they weren't able to cancel their subscription. Others have argued that Lopez's advice isn't all that novel, since many of his talks piggyback off more established luminaries of the motivation and business spaces. Many point to Jack Canfield's The Success Principles, a 2006 book with it's own 67 steps, which they claim Lopez straight-up stole and repackaged.

A few months ago, Tai released the follow-up ad to his Lamborghini spot, this time showing off a Ferrari. Who the hell is this guy? I wondered. Is Tai Lopez a snake-oil salesman, a business savant, or something else entirely? I met up with him at his house in the Hollywood hills, in the very garage where he filmed his most famous video ad, to find out.

Lopez lives in a chic, modern house on a winding road. Like most of these mansions, the unassuming, single-story-appearing front leads into a multistory dream home with a breathtaking view from its perch on the side of a mountain. Despite having no qualms about asking every single renter I know how much they pay per month, it seemed a bit gauche to ask Lopez how much his mansion is worth. Zillow creeping later that night gave me a good idea, though, as neighbors on his block were listed at between $900,000 and $3.4 million (583,000 and 2.2 million) in value.

"The modern world makes it hard to be happy. We're bombarded with stuff. I know it's an oxymoron, because I have the Ferrari and Lamborghini." Tai Lopez

The interior of the house was well-decorated, but lived in. Naturally, books were everywhere, in keeping with Lopez's "book-a-day" ethos. The place wasn't dirty, but could've used some tidying. For a guy teaching others how to best organize their goals and lives, you'd think the dude could just make a stop at The Container Store. Lopez pointed out a not-quite-as-fancy couch in the living room that was his reminder of worse times when he was literally sleeping on a couch.

"That's the couch?" I asked.

"No," Lopez replied, "but it sorta looks like it."

Tai Lopez in his backyard

According to his assistant, the home and cars belong to Lopez. "Tai has never rented a car except from an airport on a business trip," she said. The home, along with his others, is owned through his companies, LLCs, and estate trusts, not rented out like a tawdry porno shoot, as many have asserted online.

"I did a video earlier this year, that one in my garage," Lopez said after he took me for a spin in his Ferrari. "It's almost the most watched video campaign in history."

I didn't bring up the absurdity of touting viewership figures on an ad you're paying to put in front of eyeballs.

I also didn't tell Lopez that many people watched it because they loved to hate him. Instead, I asked about the point of the video.

"I think it has an important message," he replied. "It looks like it's about me showing off Lamborghinis, but that's what I call 'interruption marketing.' We see about a minimum of 2,000 ads a day in the modern world." The Lamborghini, he explained, is designed to break through the noiseso that you can learn about Lopez's self-help program, which he says actually has nothing to do with material wealth. He knew the ad would catch peoples' attention, but he says he "had no idea people would find it this interesting."

Lopez is full of contradictions like this. One of his claims to fame is his commitment to reading a book a daythough he later admitted that he sometimes has someone else read the books for him, which puts a big, honking asterisk next to that claim. While he emphasizes that knowledge is more important than materialism, his office is filled with books. It looks like a Barnes & Noble window display, with the towers all meticulously askew, pristine spines all facing outward.

"The modern world, however, makes it hard to be happy. We're bombarded with stuff," he said. "I know it's an oxymoron, because I have the Ferrari and Lamborghini, but I read a book on happiness from a top scientist specializing in happiness. He talked about the difference between conspicuous and inconspicuous consumption."

Lopez went on to tell me about how, just the other day, he made the decision not to buy a Rolex because he realized it wouldn't make him happy. "That said, if I was the last guy on the planet, I would still head right to a Lamborghini dealership and grab some of those," he added. "Those are just fun to drive."

More on people who are internet-famous: VICE meets Shoenice22, a YouTube sensation who will eat anything for fame.

I asked Lopez how he accrued so much money and he told me about his first taste of entrepreneurialism, when he was 19 years old, running a farm in Virginia. He says he told the farm owner, "If you put the money up to buy the cows, I'll do all the work, then you get paid back first, and if there's any money left over, we'll split it." He claims he made $12,000 (7,780) that summer.

Lopez told me his "family situation fell apart," so he went to live with the Amish for two and a half years. It was there that he says he learned what little value there is to material wealth. "The Amish are the coolest people," he said. "If I had a million dollars in a sack I had to leave with somebody for ten years, I'd find a random Amish family and I guarantee I could come back in ten years and there'd be the whole million there."

After that, he claims he became a certified financial planner and started working in wealth management in the early 2000s. He says he was the "founder, investor, advisor, or mentor to more than 20 multi-million dollar businesses." Of these, he is probably best known for owning several dating sites for gold diggers, including EliteMeeting.com, ModelMeet.com, and MeetingMillionaires.com. Each of the sites dealt with complaints ranging from fake profiles to unauthorized charges on credit cards tied to accounts. One complaint, from 2009, called Lopez "the most unscrupulous dirtbag on the planet."

Lopez shrugged off my questions about this part of his career. These sites were "just part of portfolio," he said, despite the videos of him on each of the sites. And the complaints? Lopez says their scant handful of Better Business Bureau complaints were nothing compared to the thousands big competitors like Match.com received.

According to his LinkedIn, Lopez started his self-help business in 2001. He describes his program as a series of "online education systems that help people solve the 4 hard problems of life."

Lopez knows that some people see his business and think it's a scam. He says those assertions are baseless.

"Basically, the only people who say this are people who have never tried any of the programs. The positive testimonial rate is beyond belief. Literally thousandseven tens of thousandsof people love it," he said.

He also added that there is a 100 percent refund rate for anyone who isn't satisfied with his products, and so "therefore, it logically could not be a scam since anyone who wants their money back gets it all."

Read: Did Instagram Bro Hero Dan Bilzerian Get His Start Thanks to His Father's Dirty Money?

This seems to somewhat be at odds with some of the personal testimonies about trying to cancel subscriptions to Lopez's programs, but others have said they were able to secure their refunds.

"When people hear me or anyone talking about money, there's a part of their brain that immediately thinks: Get rich quick scheme. But there have been get rich quick schemes since the dawn of time and I never say anywhere that you're gonna get rich from my steps," Lopez said. Which is true, I guesshe never says you're going to drive off in a Ferrari tomorrowbut he does imply that you'll be able to drive a Ferrari someday.

Leaving the Lopez estate, I was unsure if I'd even peeled back the first layer of this onion. I scheduled a follow-up call with him, but even then, it was difficult to tell if he was knowingly scamming people or honestly trying to help them. Lopez has a habit of speaking in riddles, and seemed more interested in quoting public figures and going on an endless catalog of tangents than giving forthright responses to my questions. Like a feral child raised by Ted talks. But there were also times when I saw his humanity shine through, and against all odds, it made me feel for him.

For all his wealth and success, Tai Lopez doesn't have the bravado or swagger of someone who knows in his marrow that he's done something substantial. He spoke multiple times over the course of our conversation about searching for happiness and, if I had to guess, I'd say he hasn't quite found it yet. Maybe he's internalized all the online hate, something he had to know he'd get when starting this kind of venture. Maybe the struggle to prove himself weighs heavy. This is a guy who has "MENSA Member" in his Twitter bio, after all. Maybe he even feels some guilt about siphoning money from people with nowhere else to turn, even if nothing illegal is going on.

Lopez says he's focused more on fulfillment than momentary happiness. I sincerely hope he finds both, two things everyone deserves, although I doubt they will come in the form of another exotic car.

Follow Justin Caffier on Twitter.

Cover art detail from 'Return to Earth', a game so bad all useable screenshots have been destroyed

Nintendo's Wii was a remarkable console. It broke down barriers, offering a point of re-entry for lapsed gamers who felt the medium had moved on too far for them to feel involved, and a safe space for newcomers to take their first steps. It brought friends and families together, tacky plastic peripherals clashing over those mega-tubs of Quality Street you get at Christmas or just after, for half the price. It didn't care who you were, what your gaming past was, or what you wanted to achieve in waving a remote in front of a TV screen like you were trying to land a pixelated plane being beamed into your living room. The Wii never discriminated. Casual, hardcore, super-fan or fair-weather enthusiast, all players were welcomed.

Yet the Wii was host to some truly appalling video games, some of the worst ever made. There was Ninjabread Man, a game so badly broken and bug-riddled that playing it actually makes its awful pun of a title seem pretty funny. Pimp My Ride, the game, made the TV show it took its license from look worthy of all the Emmys a man could carry. There was Sexy Poker, which you've already worked out the depressing premise of in your head.

And 2010's Doctor Who: Return to Earth, despite all the promise of a great license and the incredible popularity of the BBC's flagship sci-fi series, was one of the Wii's most abhorrent exclusives. Official Nintendo Magazine, a publication you'd think would at least be sympathetic towards even the hottest garbage finding a home on a Nintendo system, awarded it a 19 percent review score. "A profoundly miserable experience," they wrote, chucking in such choice, unlikely-to-make-the-back-of-the-box words as "abysmal", "incoherent" and "contrived".

Sadly for fans of Doctor Who and of gaming Return to Earth was far from the first video game bearing the license to come out stinking worse than the dead Face of Boe left to crisp in the final fires of the Time War. Of the titles released since Doctor Who's 2005 revival, when Christopher Eccleston assumed the role of the Ninth Doctor, only 2013's match-three-style Doctor Who: Legacy, released to coincide with the series' 50th anniversary, received anything like a positive reception, and that was mostly because it was a freemium game that didn't immediately try to bleed your bank account dry. Someone did think of the children, for once.

At least all the monsters have been present and correct in relatively recent Who games, though. Back in the 1980s, when the BBC didn't fully own the rights to iconic characters like the Daleks and K-9 (it still doesn't), substitutes had to be used. 1985's Doctor Who and the Mines of Terror, a semi-Metroidvania-style platformer from a time before the original Metroid was even out, saw the Sixth Doctor encounter sort-of-familiar robotic enemies, except these ones were rolling around on caterpillar tracks. Close enough, but the game's production costs crippled its developer, Micro Power, and they effectively folded soon after its release.

On Motherboard: The Physics of Doctor Who's TARDIS, Explained

Back in 2012, Supermassive Games the Surrey studio behind this summer's surprise hit Until Dawn teamed up with the BBC for Doctor Who: The Eternity Clock, which was supposed to represent the first game in a series. But while the puzzle-platformer wasn't in the Return to Earth bracket of unplayable brokenness, again the Who licence had been squandered on something of a stinker. A wealth of great inspiration saw the game realise some creative moments a section where River Song has to keep her eyes on several creepy sorts from the Silence as she side-scrolls her way towards a stasis field generator stood out as something different from the game's more basic puzzles but they were in vain as The Eternity Clock couldn't squeeze in enough of the show's singular warmth and wit to elevate the generally generic gameplay and overcome its own array of bugs. Said series was quickly canned.

History is littered with further failed Doctor Who franchise tie-ins which is baffling, looking at what a terrifically profitable commodity it is for the BBC today. How can such an iconic character have been so poorly served by video games? We might have seen an outstanding title in the late 1980s, when licensed video games enjoyed a boom as companies like Ocean began to properly capture the spirit of movies like Batman and RoboCop in multi-format releases. If the TV show had been an all-ages international hit as it is today, back then, studios would have been queuing up to take it on. But it wasn't. It was adrift in the broadcasting doldrums, a fading franchise eventually put on ice in 1989 after Sylvester McCoy's tenure as the Seventh Doctor failed to reverse falling viewing figures. And post-comeback, we're yet to see the definitive Who game materialise, despite a fair few attempts. Which leads to the question: will we ever?

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The Doctor multiple (re)generations of him will appear in a video game this year, as the forthcoming LEGO Dimensions features a Doctor Who level pack. But regarding a headlining-capacity release of his own, the horizon appears empty. Unless, that is, you make your own. The Doctor Who Game Maker launches on the BBC website today (September 15th), to coincide with the beginning of the TV show's new series on BBC One this Saturday night (September 19th). A statement from the corporation promises the suite of drag-and-drop tools I'm picturing a simplified take on what Super Mario Maker's doing right now, so very well will enable the creation of "brilliant games using a range of heroes, monsters and worlds visited by the Doctor". It's more an educational vehicle than video game proper, part of the BBC's Make It Digital campaign, but the Game Maker will at least place the blame for any shoddy results, shareable online, firmly at the feet of the player who created them.

Beyond that, what would a good Doctor Who game even need, if made today? For one thing, it'd need to find focus within a fiction that permits its central protagonist and, presumably, a companion or some to travel anywhere in space and time. A Doctor Who game can be set in any period of human history past, in the here and now, or in a time so far ahead of where we are now that it can be completely ridiculous and yet somehow make sense because, hell, what do you care what the Earth's really going to be like in 2816? That in itself represents a massive demand on a creative team: limiting themselves to best serve a story, when the possibilities for environmental design are endless. What would the "game over" conditions be, when the Doctor can regenerate, becoming a new person? Can the Doctor actually die? (Yes, he can not that he ever has, yet, I don't think, but we're now on Doctor 12 of a "maximum" of 13.)

'LEGO Dimensions', Doctor Who trailer

Could some ambitious team take it on in the way that Rocksteady approached Batman with its Arkham series, and build their own Who universe (am I allowed to write "Whoniverse" here, or will someone come for my VICE card?) separately from what we already know, but retaining the same character names and their established personality traits? Perhaps different Doctors would possess different abilities, meaning that each playthrough could lead to new conclusions based on what's been unlocked between the opening cutscene and end credits? It'd have to be kid friendly, to a degree, but that doesn't mean it needs to lack imagination, novel gameplay or introduce entirely new characters (a brand-new Doctor, even) to fit an innovative mechanic just look at Nintendo with their track record of producing amazing games playable by parents and children alike. In fact, just look at Nintendo.

Wait, you did that once already. Return to Earth. Okay, maybe don't do that again.

There's also the Telltale model to consider, basing a story-driven, point-and-click-and-QTE game on the franchise in the way the Californian studio has The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones and, soon enough, tales from the Marvel Universe. That could work, certainly, and Telltale's record is decent at the moment Tales from the Borderlands is scoring well, and Minecraft: Story Mode might prove more than the cash-first car crash of a tie-in that it looked like on its reveal. But it'd be a quick fix, an easy and obvious way out, an overly linear adventure when the scope for a Doctor Who game is immeasurably massive.

The opening moments of 'Doctor Who: The First Adventure'

Such an approach surely wouldn't satisfy those who've been waiting to play the Doctor in a meaningful way ever since 1983's The First Adventure gave a quartet of mini-games ripping off Pac-Man and more a Who makeover and shamelessly called itself the original "official" Doctor Who video game. (And besides, we've already had The Adventure Games, not that you can play them anymore.) Instead, I imagine fans pre-pubescent and post-retirement alike dreaming of a Mass Effect-like experience full of interplanetary exploration, countless aliens to fight and befriend, and just a dash of above-the-shirt romance.

But I don't think we'll ever see it. I don't think the programme rights holder, the BBC, would risk its most valuable IP with any studio that wanted to go big and bold with a character so strictly controlled, so meticulously shaped over several hundred episodes, be that BioWare, Telltale or anyone else. Inevitable interference from New Broadcasting House would undoubtedly compromise any game director's vision for where an interactive Who goes; which might be why what's come out thus far has been so pathetically piss poor or, at best, entirely rudimentary. Too many voices, too little sense: a decent Doctor Who may forever prove the impossible game.

Of course, I could be proven wrong. I'd like to be proven wrong. But until then it's either build your own, make do with LEGO Dimensions, or just shut up and play The Phantom Pain like everyone else.

Get more information on The Doctor Who Game Maker, and the new series of the TV show, at the BBC. LEGO Dimensions is released on September 27th.

@MikeDiver

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All screenshots taken by the author

The world of Avalanche Studios' recently released Mad Max is desolate even by the standards of a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Where a game like Fallout 3 puts you in and around a recognisable major urban space, packed with the crumbling ruins of skyscrapers, large office buildings and even the Pentagon, Mad Max's expansive environment is essentially a fucking massive desert with very few identifying features to inform the player about the civilization that stood here before everything went dramatically south.

What this does is heighten the sense of this world being a wasteland rather than just a bunch of buildings that were blown apart by some bombs. It works brilliantly well. Just like Cormac McCarthy's The Road, the game of Mad Max doesn't waste its time establishing what actually ended the world, and instead thrives on a sense of mystery. What came before this sand, this dust, this nothing is an unknown, highlighted only in (admittedly crap) relics that the player-controlled Max finds dotted around, which attempt to give some environmental storytelling to the world. There is threat all around: from other humans, doing whatever they can to survive, their minds fixed on mayhem, to the scorched land and the devastating storms that blow across it. Mad Max establishes your car, the Magnum Opus, as the safest place in the game, in a way that reminds me how Elite: Dangerous treats its ship your ship. When you get out of your car, you're immediately in danger. Exiting the driving seat is a risk, always.

When danger eventually and inevitably arrives, it's fast and explosive. The chase can be long, stretching across entire portions of the desert as multi-car convoys converge for battle. Metal crunches metal. Entire cars get blown to smithereens, drivers still in their seats. Max satisfyingly whips out a shotgun, goes into slow-motion and shoots a gas canister on a car's rear end. It ignites. So good. Photo Mode does the rest.

The Big Nothing that Max finds himself in is, well, big. And despite being virtually empty, the wastes of the Great White are incredibly dense. Everything is sandy, dusty and hot Mad Max has the best video game sand since Journey, only this time there are explosions. Exhaust fumes and heat haze makes the air feel thick, and the clever people at Avalanche swirl it all up into an arid dustbowl that makes sweat just watching Max trek up a gigantic dune. I suppose it had to pop. With nothing but sun, sand and sky to look at, there needs to be a reason to stick around in this world. But it's not without variety: Max's journey takes him from the bottom of an evaporated seabed, through coastal towns to highways and canyons.

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The air changes as you travel further inland not that there's a sea shore to comprise a starting point. It's almost clean at the bottom of what was once the seabed. It feels light, serene, and the only thing that disturbs it is you, revving through it in an armoured war-machine travelling at 80mph. It's a weird sense of connection with the world, sand, but making the lovely hot clean air thick with dust is one of Mad Max's most satisfying elements. So many games driving games put you on asphalt roads with recognisable physics and tyre degradation. It's rare you get to race through something as thickly resistant and alive as sand and dirt and mud. It drifts and it billows and gets in every crack and crevice. I fucking love it.

Sand and dust is never more apparent when a sandstorm sweeps in. These are violent, apocalyptic random events that your on-board mechanic, Chumbucket, will spot in the distance towering dust clouds that move toward you at relentless speed. Trying to outrun one is pretty much impossible, and when they hit driving around becomes a case of trying to avoid lightning strikes that'll rip your car to shreds. Find shelter, or be prepared to struggle.

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The sky changes everything, too. Skyboxes are wonderful tools for making you feel absolutely tiny, and Mad Max uses them bloody brilliantly. Dawn, day, dusk and night all feel completely different, and cloud cover affects the mood as you travel from point to point. Even with a ginormous, practically empty play space, the fact that the manual act of driving feels so good, beneath these widescreen skies, keeps your attention locked.

You rise above sea level the further north you travel. Up in The Heights you can turn around and look over the entire landscape, all the way to the horizon. And drive into the northeast of the game's ample map and you'll reach The Dump, an endless scrapheap with mountains and mountains of scrap metal and unwanted shit. The structures of the old world provide some of the only means of traversing across the dump, forming tunnels through the hills of rubbish. Furthest north is Gas Town, a perpetually smoggy industrial hub that plays host to a warlord.

With so much of the world a barren waste, Avalanche makes incredibly good use of its rare larger landmarks. These are the wasteland's reminder that this was once a populated and bustling place. Crumbling towers, wide overpasses, wrought iron oilrigs and abandoned docklands are all that protrude from the dense dust. And just like the desert itself, they feel huge.

But as well as shrouding civilisation, the apocalypse uncovered things, too. Once-underwater sulphuric vents are now exposed on the evaporated seabed, and one particularly brazen warlord has fashioned a fortress from a vast volcano that rises out of the sand like a rocky Godzilla, craggy and angular. The world has been drained.

Avalanche has created so much with so little. The inhospitable nature of Max's world never stops. Even after the sun sets, the world continues to change. It feels dynamic, and despite so much nothing it's unquestionably a living, breathing place. Great world building in games is often separate from great game design, and this is certainly one of Mad Max's problems. Repetition creeps in. It falls victim to the usual open-world game traps of running around on fetch quests and taking out mostly meaningless small objectives to progress the story proper. But when you're driving, just driving, through Max's world, all that stuff doesn't really matter. It's simply one of the best road trips I've ever taken.

Mad Max is out now. If you want to win yourself a PlayStation 4 copy, a box of related goodies and a PS4 to play it on, click here to enter our competition.

@samwrite

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Image of the drug lab from 'Scenario in the Shade.' Courtesy of Red Bull Studios and Freeman/Lowe/Herrema

In Jorge Luis Borges's fantastical story "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim," the narrator reviews afake book, going so far as to not only describe its pseudo-plot and thebackground of its fictitious author, but to compare the "reviews" of its firstand second editions by other "critics."

The acclaimed artist duo Freeman/Lowe (Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe) have done something not so dissimilar with their latest show, Scenario in the Shade, a multimedia mindfuck of an exhibitiona collaboration with musician/artist Jennifer Herremathat opened this past weekend. The trio has converted Red Bull Studios in Manhattan to the point ofunrecognizability. Until December 6, the arts space will be a bombed-out labyrinth of sculptural and sonic environments, each room the remnants offabricated gangs and subcultures that once roamed a made-up megacity called SanSan International.

"San San is like a metroplex that has grown from San Diego to San Francisco,but SF is now in Alaska," the artists explained to me a few days before theopening. "We're workingwith these very constant science-fiction and alternate-history models wheretime is out of joint."

Other images from the installation. Courtesy of Red Bull Studios

To explore Scenario is to be ripped out of realityand plopped into a Warriors-style dystopian urban landscape where chemtrails likely stain the skies (if there were skies to see)and the water is almost certainly spiked with Orange Sunshine LSD. Upon walkingthrough the exhibition entrance on 18th Street, visitors are greetedby a decrepit bodega, an antiquated parlor, and a 70s-style drug den fitted with a couch sunken into the carpeted floor that gallery-goers enter through the back of a wardrobe (because of course there'd be a Narnia motif), as well as a room containing the leftovers of a drug lab, a kinda-continuation of Freemanand Lowe's 2008 installation, Hello Meth Lab in the Sun. And that's just the first floor of the 15,000-square-foot space.

The subterranean level, which visitors enter through a porta-potty,includes a fully built-out courtroom; an area surrounded by aquariums, where aragtag band featuring Herrema and members of Gang Gang Dance and MGMT performedduring a private preview; and hacked arcade games like Time Crisis 3 that spoutpsychedelic visuals. There's even a theater, if all this is too dizzying for you and you need to sit for a minute, where visitors can watch a 30-minute survey of the physical exhibition that is the second part of a trilogy beginning with Freeman/Lowe's 2014 show The Floating Chain.

On Motherboard: The Inevitabilities of Killer Robots

Not that overwhelming environments are the only thing on displaythe artists also installed speakers in thevarious rooms which emit a "sprawling sonic collage," including contributionsfrom Kurt Vile, OFF!, Devendra Banhart, Hot Chip, and Bad Brains, together forming seven hours of music that will be released as arecord on Drag City. The trio describes just the sound aspect as "its own sortof living organism," suggesting that Scenario,amalgamated, is akin to a living mammalbut probably closer to a fantasticalbeast sporting ten heads and iridescent teeth.

For more on Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe, watch our 2012 video featuring the artists:

"I feel like this is first opportunitywhere we were allowed to do it all," Herrema told me.

"It'sclose to the idea of a complete artwork," Lowe added. "We had a chance to makethat. There were so many toys to play with here: studios, a video-viewing room,and this weirdo architecture to respond to. You can really make a completepicture."

As I triedto process it all, the three artists explained what inspired the installation itself, prior to even broaching the mad-genius backstory of San SanInternational and the gangs that occupy it.

"It's about a sort of multi-universe and us trying totranscribe from within that matrix," Lowe explained. "You know that feeling when youwalk down Canal Street, right? It's about the polyphonic head-fuck that isCanal Street, but a globalized model. We are kind of automating this little bitmore to reflect the actual reality of the urban experience."

Zeroing in abit on this specific iteration of their ever-expanding, precariously tetheredoeuvreScenario includes Eastereggs from past exhibitions, equally batshit (albeit less expansive) endeavorsthat sometimes related to San San. The artists divulged that while the spaceaims to encapsulate said urban, polyphonic head-fuck, they're also trying totell a story "about people through their objects, and through theirenvironments."

"How can you use material to create afictional narrative?" Freeman asked rhetorically. "In our studio discussions, we focused in onsubcultures and gangs and the way their territories are distributed among acity, and how their style, aesthetic sensibilities, and objects become the identity for certain groups." Forexample, a sculptural cactus-crystal hybrid appears in the exhibition,representing a fake plant that produces a drug called Marasa that one gang(vaguely inspired by real-life hooligans The Scuttlers) was fond of taking. In turn, there's the drug-lab room, likelyalluding to Dr. Arthur Cook, an Albert Hoffmantype psychopharmacologist theartists imagined for their 2010 exhibition Bright White Underground. Dr. Cook is said to have invented Marasa andadministered it during group-therapy sessions, which may nod to that vibe-y,carpeted den inside the faux-wardrobe in Red Bull.

From left: Justin Lowe, Jonah Freeman, Jennifer Herrema. Photo by the author

Herrema performing during a press preview. Photo by the author

Gallery visitors exploring the installation. Photo by the author

"There'sthis connected narrative, but we're not precious or totally directive with anyof these spaces," Herrema said. "It's not a Walt Disney rideit's more like ring-around-the-fucking-rosie."

Lowe added that even if there are noticeablenods to pop culture, be it 60s and 70s drug parties or William Gibson or PhilipK. Dick, "the familiarity of the environments is there so people canuse those reference points to have an emotional or intellectual responses.

"We're verymuch bringing in culture and we're bringing in how we experience daily life," Lowe continued. "Sothere are brands. There is repetition. You do see Nike and Coca-Cola again andagain. You do see that same haircut."

Despitefinishing what may be their most meticulous, ridiculous, and comprehensive installation to date, the artistshave greater ambitions for the future of their dive into hand crafted alternaterealities.

"We're still interested in this serial, sort of chapter-basedstorytelling," the trio agreed. For the third installment of their film trilogyand future exhibitions, they imagine "a long-form narrative feature that tellsthe stories of Dr. Cook, the gangs, and all the characters involved," using actors and maybe even dialogue.

"San San International is just the mall, the metroplex," said Lowe. "Next time, we're gonnawalk you out the front door and bring you to Mercury City."

Even if the hinted macro-metropolis never comes to fruition, it's fun to imagine Borges browsing through Freeman, Lowe, and Herrema's entrancing sculptural worlds, the deceased author taking notes and even feeling a pang of jealousy at the sheer scale and ambition of a project as tripped out as the artists's latest.

Follow Zach on Twitter.

Scenario in the Shade is open at Red Bull Studios through December 6. For more information on the exhibition, visit the art space's website here.

Alberto "Alpo" Martinez before his arrest. Photo courtesy the author/F.E.D.S Magazine

The name Alberto "Alpo" Martinez tends to elicit strong reactions. He's been celebrated as a street legendof epic proportionsan iconic figure out of hip-hop mythology who was played by the rapper Cam'ron in the movie Paid in Full. At the same time, Alpo is often reviled as a snitch, a rat of the highest order who allegedly betrayed the street code tosave himself, tarnishing his legacy in the chronicles of gangster lore.

One thing is for sure, though: Word of Alpo's apparent release from alittle-known federal prison witness protection programthey're called "cheese factories" on theinsideis resonating on the street. Don Diva magazine, probably the longest-running periodical devoted to the drug underworld and street life in New York City and beyond, reported that Alpo was released on its website last week.

Alpo was known as a trendsetter in crack-era Harlem, transporting hundreds of kilos of cocaine into Washington, DC, while flaunting his wealth and flamboyant lifestyle withcars, clothes and jewelry. But when he killed his best friend and business partner Rich Porteranother Harlem drug dealer who's beenimmortalized in hip-hop loreAlpo's rep took a serious blow. When Alpo went on to testify against the man believed to be his former Washington, DC, enforcer in open courtapparently to spare himself a life sentencehe was branded a traitor.

To get the real deal on this infamous figure, VICE turned to another former Harlem drugdealer, Kevin Chiles. Chiles served over adecade in the feds for his own drug organization, founded Don Diva from the cell block, and was a contemporary of Alpo's backin the 1980s. Back then, the crack epidemic was in full swing and young hustlers likeAlpo, Rich Porter, Azie and Kevin Chiles were making a name for themselves byperpetuating the lifestyle and fashions that rappers would go on to emulate.

Here's what he had to say.

VICE: Now that we think he's out of prison, do you suspect Alpo will comeback to New York? Harlem, even?
Kevin Chiles: I am most certain that Alpo won't comeback to New York. He knows he has a bullseye on him. That situation with Rich left Harlem scarredand people have strong feelings about it. And he admitted to playing a part inthe death of another with a well-liked figure, DomenicoBenson from Brooklyn. I could see a youngerdude, on the come-up, try to make a name for themselves by taking Alpo out.They would be instantly infamous. I'm sure these are things he should beconsidering.

How did you learn Alpo was out?
It's beenspeculated that he's been home for years. But I know it's truenow because he had been speaking to a mutual female associate of ours. In theconversations, Alpo was trying to fill in the blanks of years past and my namecame up. She seemed excited about speaking to him and she thought that I wouldshare her enthusiasm, but she sensed after talking to me that I wasn't.... I explained to her that I wasn'tchecking for him, but I didn't go into details about the specificsbecause she was outside the lines as far as that lifestyle was concerned.

You and Alpo were once friends right?
I was cool with all of themme,Rich, A, and Po. We would play basketball, gamble, compete over girls, swap cars;we did all those type of things on the regular. At any given time betweenme, Rich and Po, we may have had 15 to 20 luxury cars like Porsches, Benzs, BMWs. etc.If one of us pulled up in a car the other liked, we let him hold it.

What was Alpo like?
He brought attention to himself. Hewas charismatic and outgoing. He had a party always going on around him andpeople gravitated to him. What ultimately was unique about Alpo was that hewould go from uptown to downtown from the East side to the West side almostlike he was campaigning. He was an adrenaline junkie and he was crazy aboutthem bikes. Anybody that knows anything about Harlem, especially in the summertime, is that you have different groups that ride through Harlem doing trickson bikes and Alpo was one of those dudes that was notorious for that. Po wouldbe on a bike doing wheelies like 15, 20 blocks at a time.

What did you make of the film Paidin Full and how it represented Alpo, Rich, Azie and Harlem?
I don't thinkit captured the essence of what it was like being a twentysomething millionaire in Harlem. The influence and power was overwhelming. It made youfeel invincible. We were young and had a lawlessness about usyou felt like you owned the city. The musicand the fashion of the era just added to the allure.

What happened when Alpo killed RichPorter?
We originally didn't knowAlpo killed Rich. It was speculated but it wasn't untilhe did an interview and told on himself. But Rich's death had a huge impact on Harlem. The timing couldn't havebeen worseRichard was in the middle ofnegotiating the release of his 12-year-old brother, Donnell, who had beenkidnapped and was being held for $500,000 ransom. Rich was killed, and then afew days later the body of his little brother was found in the same vicinity.

What do you think about snitching ingeneral?
We all signed on to live our livesoutside of the law. There's a certain principle or mindset thatis put into play. For me and anybody of that mindset or lifestyle who choosesto live outside the law, there's a certain understanding: It's neverright in any instance to take your situation and then pass it on to somebodyelse to suffer the consequences of your actions. A man takes responsibility forhis actions.

What is up with Don Diva magazine forthose who aren't hip?
We call ourselves an urban lifestyle magazine.It doesn't just encompass the gangster lifestyle we touch on all aspects of theurban existence. The magazine was created because I didn't wantto see people follow in my footsteps. I know this new generation is infatuatedwith what they think that the gangster lifestyle represents, but they have nounderstanding of the consequences and collateral damage it causes.

When I cameup with the idea for the magazine, I was probably at one of the lowest points ofmy life and wanted to be able to do something to affect change. One of the onlyupsides to being incarcerated in the federal prison system was that I was ableto meet other individuals of my stature from all over the country. We all hadour own experience with the legal system and the other consequences that comewith our lifestyle. I knew if I could tell the stories of individuals who arerespected in their communities like Larry Hoover from Chicago, Demetrius "Big Meech" Flenory from Detroit, Akbar Pray from Newark, New Jersey, Guy Fisher fromHarlem Kenneth "Supreme" McGriff from Queens and The Chamber Brothers from Detroitjust to name a fewwe could help thisgeneration make better decisions.

These individuals and their stories serve asa cautionary tale. No one wants to end up dead or in jail for the rest of theirlife.

Follow Seth Ferranti on Twitter and check out his book on Alpo here.

Police making an arrest after stop and searching someone, not drug testing him randomly in a club queue (Photo by Tom Johnson)

At first glance, Club Tropicana does not look like the epicentre of Aberdeen's drug scene. The retro music venue attracts a mixed crowd every Friday and Saturday, which dances to Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet, overlooked by portraits of Del Boy and David Hasselhoff.

But on a Friday evening in late August this year, six police officers arrived at the club. They came with a sniffer dog, a CCTV van and an "itemiser", which tests hand swabs for traces of illegal drugs. They also returned the following evening, testing around 100 people over the weekend. As it turns out, Club Tropicana is almost certainly not the epicentre of Aberdeen's drugs scene. According to the venue, the police failed to record a single positive reading over the course of the two nights.

Police Scotland is now facing a major backlash over the incident. Everyone from the leader of the Scottish Lib Dems to the former head of Scotland's drug enforcement agency have condemned the action. But what's gone largely unnoticed is the extent to which clubbers across the UK have been facing drug tests for several years. What's rightly now being flagged as a major infringement of civil liberties was quietly introduced without debate as early as 2002. It's an increasingly common tactic just one of a raft of draconian measures now routinely imposed on clubbers.

In Scotland, the incident at Club Tropicana is being seen as a nadir in relations between the nightlife industry and the police. Donald Macleod, the owner of several clubs in Glasgow, tells me: "Confidence among club owners and publicans is at its lowest level." The situation has been worsening since police forces across the country were merged to create Police Scotland in 2013. Shortly afterwards, new chief constable Sir Stephen House said: "My view is policing doesn't solve problems. We are not a solutions agency; we are a restraint agency."

This view was at least partly responsible for the loss of legendary Glasgow venue the Arches in June last year cited in an investigation into the closure by clubbing website Resident Advisor. Following a tragic drug death at the Arches, the venue became the focus of intensified police pressure and subsequently lost its late licence. A few weeks later, the club went into administration.

Scott Forrest was music programme manager at the Arches. "The police put the venue through the ringer," he says. Forrest says the club was fastidious in reporting drug seizures to the police reports which were then used to justify increasingly onerous demands on the venue. "We were following the law to the letter," he says. "What are venues supposed to start doing blood tests on the door?"

One Glasgow club operator tells me what happened at the Arches has led to distrust between the police and venues. "The concern for other operators is what happens if we continue to follow best practice guidelines and report instances of drug confiscations and other drug-related activities?" he says. "Effectively, the police are forcing what they perceive to be a problem underground."

The incident at Club Tropicana has done nothing to help matters. "They are hailing the operation as a success," says Macleod. "A waste of time and resources is closer to the truth."

READ ON THUMP: Has the UK Really Fallen Out of Love With Nightclubs?

Police Scotland is far from the only police force to pursue such a strategy. In the last couple of years there have been reports of police in Yeovil, Swansea, Wokingham and Bridgwater using itemisers. Club owners in Brighton and London also say they have been targeted. In case there was any doubt that police in Scotland and the rest of the UK share similar views on clubs, Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe gave a speech earlier this year in which he asked: "Do we really need as many licensed premises?"

Police Scotland claims the itemiser is only used in partnership with venues. A statement said: "The use of the itemiser is done ethically, with respect to human rights and with the consent and support of licensees."

Club Tropicana owner Tony Cochrane says this isn't the case: "The club only heard 30 minutes beforehand. It wasn't a choice," he tells me. "They say they had permission in so much as the manager felt obliged to what could he say? We objected the second night and they still did it." Becky, a press officer at Police Scotland, called me to deny the club was given less than an hour's notice, but was unable to say when the management was informed about the operation.

A London club owner tells me about two incidents of police drug tests at his venues in recent years when he was told he wouldn't be allowed to open if he didn't cooperate. Each time, one person out of 100 tested positive. Neither was found in possession of drugs. "There must have been about ten police officers in attendance on both occasions," he says, describing the operations as "a complete waste of resources as well as an invasion of civil liberties". But it's not just club owners who have raised concerns. Civil rights group Liberty said back in 2002 it was "deeply worried" about the use of itemiser technology. Its worries obviously went unheeded.

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People who visit nightclubs are now subject to stricter scrutiny than people boarding transatlantic flights. ID scanners, sniffer dogs, fingerprinting stations, breathalysers, body searches, CCTV and metal detectors are all in use across the UK. In other walks of life, this is only acceptable if you're under arrest or, at the very least, suspected of a crime. Effectively, all clubbers are now classed as criminal suspects. While it would be naive to claim that people don't take drugs at nightclubs, most don't. And while plenty of other public places are also the home of occasional criminal activity, none face the same sanctions.

The Arches is not the only victim of oppressive licensing rules. Fabric escaped the threat of closure at the end of last year, but was slapped with a raft of conditions, including a requirement that it pay for sniffer dogs. The club is currently appealing. Alan Miller, chairman of the Night Time Industries Association, says clubs face both increased costs and a potential loss of custom as they become ever more inhospitable places to visit. "Cumulatively, these measures have an enormous impact," he says. "It's a major problem treating British citizens and tourists as if they are guilty of doing something wrong, indiscriminately."

Even putting aside issues such as civil liberties and the importance of nightclubs to the UK's cultural scene, there's still a huge question mark over the approach being pursued by the police and licensing authorities: What exactly does it achieve?

Matthew Dimmack is director at The Haunt nightclub in Brighton. He recalls being visited by the police with drug testing technology at another club around eight years ago. If drug testing was supposed to tackle substance abuse, it doesn't seem to have had much effect. Drug deaths in England and Wales are now at their highest levels since records began.

"If you come into my club and something happens, I've got a lot of trained people around. If you do drugs at home or in the park, there's not anyone there to help you," says Dimmack. "Stopping people taking drugs in nightclubs isn't going to stop anyone taking drugs."

@mark_wilding

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Journalist and author, Juliet Jacques (Sarah Shin)

In June 2010, Juliet Jacques began writing for the Guardian, chronicling her experiences as a transgender woman as she got ready to undergo sex reassignment surgery. Her deeply personal column, My Transgender Journey, lasted three years and was shortlisted for an Orwell Prize.

In the three years that have followed her last blog, Juliet has become a well known journalistic voice, writing across matters of identity, culture and feminism, interweaving the personal and political.

Now, Juliet has published her first book, Trans: a memoir recounting her life from new university graduate to now as she navigates her changing identity and all that it means to be a trans woman, as well as an aspiring writer, today.

Here, VICE has reprinted an excerpt from the epilogue of Trans, in which Juliet is interviewed by author Sheila Heti about her book, feminism and writing.

Sheila Heti: Why did you want to end the book with a conversation?
Juliet Jacques: I wanted to cover what happened after my final Gender Identity Clinic appointment in April 2013. And as so much of what has happened since then has had to do with my relationship to the media, I thought the format of this epilogue should be a magazine-style interview. Also, I wanted to explicitly mention a problem I had with the media transition being portrayed like a mythical hero's journey. To me it didn't feel like that, rather a bunch of hoops to jump through while working in boring jobs.

After I finished the Guardian series, I felt so burnt out. I scaled back my social life and Internet presence, and my feelings about the transition changed. I became so angry about how long the Real Life Experience took, and how difficult it was. Writing this book, I arrived at a more nostalgic attitude about certain aspects of my life, particularly my pretransitional explorations of gender.

The narrative concludes on a deliberately flat note. People might have expected me to leave the clinic and jump in the air, and a film might have finished by freezing on that moment, but life just went on. What else could have happened, apart from me going back to the office and thinking: what now? It really was that anticlimactic. But while the transition had to close there, the book didn't. I thought this might be a way of showing that life didn't end at that point.

One of the most painful moments in the book is the suicide note you wrote, where you say you had tried to give life some meaning through writing, and that you hoped to leave the world a little better than when you found it. How much of that desire to leave the world a better place is in your mind when you're writing? Is there a way in which having that thought is helpful, but another way in which it's kind of oppressive?
If you thought like that about everything you did, you'd go insane which, I suppose, I did. Sometimes I'll take on a commission thinking, 'If I do this, it'll buy me a few days to do what I love.' Usually, this means short fiction. I worked for the NHS until last summer, and the fundamental principle there was: do no harm. I try to apply that to writing. Not every piece I write is going to contribute to a grand aim, but hopefully, enough of them do.

I wrote in the book about the anxieties of being a trans advocate, but a lot of it has been great. The thing I enjoyed the most came in 2013, where I was asked to speak to a sixthform Feminist and LGBT Society. The invitation came from my old college in Horsham. I had such a happy time there: I told a few people I was 'a cross-dresser' and felt comfortable experimenting a little (although later I met Ryan, whose experience of transitioning there was not positive). So it was wonderful to see how much things were improving, with these teenagers creating spaces for themselves.

If you'd told me in 1998 that one day I'd come back and speak to a society like that, which included trans people, I doubt I'd have even understood what you were describing. I had a beautiful afternoon, talking with them about their cultural references, gender politics and ambitions. I got back in touch with several teachers. Perhaps they wondered what had happened to me. Because of my name change, they wouldn't have known.

It also felt so good because with the Guardian series, I was aiming at people like the sixteen-to-eighteen-year-old me people interested in language, gender and politics and trying to make those things accessible without talking down to them.

Elsewhere, speaking to the Bishkek Feminist Collective all under thirty, I think about the situation for trans people in Britain, they told me about how hard it is to get gender recognition or surgery in Kyrgyzstan. One of my favourite moments came when Selbi, translating between English and Russian, asked, 'Did you respond to the Julie Burchill scandal?' I laughed that Burchill piece was so noxious that it stank all the way to central Asia. I didn't think when I started that people in Kyrgyzstan would be invested in these arguments, but they are.

Did you ever feel any resentment about having to write this book? There are many places where you discuss the onus on trans people to convey their experiences and write autobiographically. Were there any points where you thought, 'Why do I have to do this?'
Definitely. Having written my life story once already, I found it incredibly frustrating that if I wanted to be a literary writer and journalist, I had to cannibalise myself a second time before I could do anything else. Initially, I wanted to write a wider history of trans people in Britain, as well as short stories, but all I could get publishers to consider was a personal story. This became more annoying with my awareness that once the book came out, I'd be accused of overshadowing collective politics with a self-centred publication, and reinforcing stereotypes of trans people as individualistic.

Plenty of times I've wanted to write about other things, but trans writing has taken precedence partly because I felt the need to do it, partly because other people seemed to feel I should use my platform to address our political problems, and partly because editors reach for the first name they associate with certain topics, and with trans topics, that's sometimes me. The way I've tried to handle it is to cover other subjects as much as possible, only returning to trans issues when I feel it's absolutely imperative.

I hope this book fulfils the same aims as my journalism on the subject providing a better understanding of trans living, some sort of reference point. Every time I think there's no further need for this sort of writing, the situation changes. I thought after Burchill and Littlejohn, things were calming down, so why do I need to do this? Then the situation changed again the transphobic radical feminist perspective pushed back into the mainstream and there was a need to create a weightier counter to that.

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Can you talk about your relationship to radical feminism, and to feminism in general? Do you consider yourself a feminist? You wrote about Germaine Greer and a certain line of feminism that you say "hates" trans people.
I discovered transphobic feminism through the Guardian, after seeing one or two post-punk bands allude to Janice Raymond. To me, that was feminism. I hadn't read any theory besides Valerie Solanas or studied feminist politics. I could have done in Manchester and I wish I had now. Instead, I had this modernist/socialist background that was scornful of what it called "identity politics", a position I later saw as prejudiced in itself.

When I read Bornstein, Stone and others, I thought of them as transgender theorists. I didn't connect them with feminism, even though they were responding to that discourse. I read them alone rather than through any sort of community, so that was how I framed things when I started writing around these issues seeing trans and queer people on one side and feminism on the other. I knew nothing of third- or fourth-wave feminist efforts to integrate these sides, besides knowing a bit about Judith Butler, who I'd not yet read.

It was only when I joined Twitter that I got a following of people who identified as feminists and learned about transfeminism, cyber-feminism and intersectionality. I had to give myself a crash course. If I hadn't, the articles probably wouldn't have worked.

Maybe because I spent my twenties feeling so excluded, I find the word "feminist" difficult to apply to myself. And perhaps after working through so much trans terminology, I'm fatigued with labels in general. But feminism has done a lot to shape my writing: A Transgender Journey was an attempt to counter socialist, conservative and feminist transphobia at the same time.

You read something like The Transsexual Empire now and you really are floored by its depth of hatred. But in 1980, the US National Centre for Health Care Technology commissioned Janice Raymond to write a paper about medical care for trans people to help them make evidence-based decisions on the efficacy of treatment. Her paper was very hostile to gender reassignment, and Medicare didn't fund hormones or surgery until May 2014. It resulted in thirty years of people not being able to access those services unless they were wealthy. In the book, I talk about Julie Bindel's piece about rape crisis centres, and about the time I was nearly sexually assaulted in 2012. The Equality Act of 2010 tries to secure certain trans rights, but also talks about conflicting needs the example it uses are centres for survivors of rape or domestic violence being allowed to exclude trans women. That means we don't have anywhere to go that feels safe, especially given the coalition government's assault on services for LGBT people and women. I don't know what the right answer is, but I do wonder how that discussion might look if trans people hadn't been characterised as walking rapes, and if the people doing that hadn't had the ear of policy makers.

My tactic has been to acknowledge that there's no way around the fundamental problem with a certain brand of feminism refusing to accept our identities, so I try to appeal to an audience not immersed in those arguments, saying, "What's the fairest perspective on this?" It's an effort to make sure that trans perspectives on trans lives reach people in influential positions.

There's an interesting line in the book where you say, "If you articulate an outsider critique well enough, you stop being one." What's your relationship to being an insider or outsider after being embraced as a voice by people in the trans community, and politicians who invite you to their events and want you as a spokesperson?
I've felt like an outsider from an early age first in my family, then at school and in my home town, then at university, then in every job I've ever had. So a big problem came when I felt that considering myself an outsider wasn't tenable any more. There was this strange mixture of fascination and repulsion in going to places like the House of Commons. I've noticed that there are many ways I feel like an insider in terms of where I'm published, who I've met, and the opportunities I've had. But I sometimes still feel like an outsider within those circles, because my perspective and frame of reference make me feel like I don't fit in.

I think I'm through with those swanky liberal LGBT events now I'm now far more selective about what I'll go to. But there's a great line in a Lydie Salvayre novel about the narrator's voluntary reclusion meaning that people don't invite her to things. Remaining an outsider while keeping your hand in physical and online communities enough to ensure you're not forgotten, and that you keep up with the discussion enough to remain relevant, is incredibly difficult.

First-person opinion journalism has exploded in the last five years, and there are so many people doing these sorts of pieces now that I can sustain regular slots in mainstream media outlets but I still feel relatively marginal just because I don't write that often, and when I do, it's not on the expected topics. Perhaps it's more important to keep questioning the power dynamics of the industry, and to make sure that what I write is sincere, not a performance, and done for the right reasons.

One of the motivations of your book seems to be to cut down this phrase 'trapped in the wrong body' as a dominant way that people who don't know much about trans people think about them. You really demonstrate why it's not apt.
The conclusion that I and people like CN Lester reached at the same time was: what if we're not trapped in the wrong body but trapped in the wrong society? If I'd been allowed to transition in my early teens, then my adolescent and adult life would have been much easier. Kate Bornstein was questioning this phrase twenty years ago, but I still see it in mainstream media as a way to convey gender dysphoria. I understand why it exists as a shorthand, but never felt "trapped" by my body. I said in the Guardian that transitioning was about "re-launching the symbiotic relationship between my body and mind from a starting point that felt right". I stand by that.

There's so much in the book about struggling for money and taking low-paying jobs. There are two factors: one is being a writer, particularly one who writes online a lot, which isn't lucrative; the other is being trans and experiencing discrimination and this affecting your income. I wonder where you are in your relationship to making a living as a writer, especially with your growing audience.
Things haven't changed that much. Writing online is nowhere near as lucrative as some people think. When I was writing for the Guardian, a lot of the criticism seemed to spring from the assumption that every time I published something, it would add another storey to my house, and that I was spending any spare money on getting wasted in the Groucho Club, which wasn't the case (with one exception).

One of the things I think the Internet has done is make it less difficult for diverse voices to break in: I think the Guardian took a chance on me because I was cheap. Securing this representation is important, but I wouldn't recommend trying to make a career from blogging. Most people I know who do so for prominent publications have day jobs. There's another factor between my writing and my gender my mental health. Some of my problems were attendant on my dysphoria, some not, but depression and anxiety were big barriers. You throw that in with my politics opposed to everything from a radical left position and it's not a recipe for a happy relationship with capitalism.

Near the end, you say, "It's weird being on an even keel, I sort of miss the chaos." Do you feel the chaos has passed?
The lack of stability that came with transition itself feels like it's resolved, although it has some effects on my employment prospects, since I couldn't focus on a career in my twenties like many people. If I go somewhere now, I don't feel being trans has to be a big issue, and I like it not to be. Getting misgendered or heckled in the street happens rarely; and in situations where I don't have to speak, hardly at all. Some days I feel good about where I am physically, others less so, but that's still not the same as gender dysphoria, with its all-consuming sense that my body and the way I was expected to behave because of it were fundamentally wrong. I feel less weighed down than I used to, but I'll always have a transsexual history. I've learned to be proud of that, though.

The media stuff remains a constant process of victory and defeat, so that still feels chaotic. I've been on the front line for five years and I want to move away from it. Psychologically it's been draining.

Withdrawing from social media, especially Twitter with its bitter arguments, has helped. I think it's terrible for writing. I can't think of anything less healthy for an author than being able to measure their audience down to the last digit, not just in general but for each piece. As someone who's devoted to shining a light on marginal culture, Twitter is a disaster. It was one thing to suspect no one was reading when I wrote for Filmwaves. It's quite another for Twitter to tell me that two people "favourited" my blog on Croatian artist Sanja Ivekovi.

There's such a compelling quality in the book where we have a sense of being with you through your days, so I thought I'd ask in closing: what was your day like yesterday?
What was my day like yesterday? I went back to my therapist for the first time in eighteen months, partly to discuss the effect that writing the book had had on me, and what it was like to return to all the memories in it. Then I did a podcast where I talked about my relationship with the media, then went for a drink with friends in Leytonstone.

It seems like it was a nice day.
It was pleasant enough.

Juliet Jacques will be in conversation with novelist Chloe Aridjis about the cruxes of writing and identity and the problems of performance and confessional writing at the London Review Bookshop on September 29th. Book tickets here.

More like this on VICE:

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Read: The Berenst(E)ain Bears Conspiracy Theory That Has Convinced the Internet There Are Parallel Universes

Colorado's Waterton Canyon park has been closed to visitors for over two weeks because of the presence of a couple of families of bearsbut it's not the animals themselves that are causing problems, but the throngs of visitors who are trying to take with them.

"The current situation is not conducive for the safety of our visitors or the wellbeing of the wildlife," Brandon Ransom, Denver Water's manager of recreation, told ABC 7.

"We've actually seen people using selfie sticks," he said, adding some would get "within ten feet of wild bears."

Another spokesperson for the park described hikers trying to snap the perfect #bearselfie as making a "poor choice." That seems like a minor understatement, since bears are hulking, hairy predators that can completely decimate a puny human with a small swat of their paws. The US Forest Service has been warning against turning your back to a bear so you can snap a selfie on your iPhone's front camera since last year, but apparently people aren't listening.

This is just another addition to the endless list of reasons why selfie sticks are unholy creations.

Follow Scott onTwitter.

Kyle Kematch drives a boat on the Red River. Stills from 'Searchers: Drag the Red'

Kyle Kematch pulls the brim of his white baseball cap over his eyes to block the camera.

We're sitting at a sheltered picnic table in the midst of a sudden downpour, eating homemade chili and bannock at a feast organized by Drag the Reda Winnipeg-based volunteer group that searches the swirling, murky waters of the Red River for the bodies of Indigenous women and men who have vanished.

Kyle, one of the organizers of Drag the Red, lost his sister five years ago, and my question about her provokes tears.

"Her name is Amber Rose Marie Guiboche," he tells me. Her case is still unsolved.

A year ago, he and Bernadette Smith, who also lost her sister, started trawling the river and scanning its banks after the body of 15-year-old Tina Fontaine was pulled out of the muddy water. Since then, the small team has ballooned into more than 100 volunteers who look for evidence and remains, and hold vigils for lost loved ones.

In the last year, nine bodies have been found in the river, including Fontaine's. Two of them were discovered in July alone. Though Drag the Red hasn't found a body yet, the searchers believe their DIY equipmenta rope that pulls a heavy bar with hooks along the river bedhas helped loosen remains that were stuck at the bottom.

Across Canada, missing and murdered Indigenous women are making headlines, and their families are accusing police of not doing enough. Drag the Red has taken it upon themselves to do what could be considered police work. They don't receive any government funding and local law enforcement refuses to help them, insisting the river is too dangerous for dive teams.

Searchers: Drag the Red

Since 1980, more than 1,200 Indigenous women have been murdered or reported missing in Canada. In June, the RCMP released an updated report on the national crisis, announcing they had reduced the number of unsolved cases from 225 to 204. But in the year since their last update, 11 more Indigenous women disappeared, and 32 more were killed.

Kyle hopes his sister is alive and well. But, he says, "if she is in there, I want to get her back."

He remembers Amber as an outgoing party girl.

"She was only 20, she liked to have fun, she liked to go out and meet new people. She was very nice. Very, very nice girl."

Kyle and Amber bonded after the deaths of both their mother and sister. In 1999, their sister overdosed, and the same year, their mother jumped off one of the bridges that crosses the Red River.

"We went through hard times in '99. That's why we stuck together," he says of Amber.

The two were always talking on the phone and hanging out. But almost five years ago, Amber vanished.

She was last spotted on November 10, 2010, getting into a red pickup truck near the intersection of William Avenue and Isabel Street, which Kyle describes as a rough, low-income neighborhood.

"Women sell their bodies over there," Kyle says of the area where she was last seen.

Police told his family Amber was a sex worker.

"Even if she was, she's a human being," he says.

Police described her as a Caucasian woman with a slight build. She was wearing a white hoodie, skinny jeans, a black belt, and pink-and-white tennis shoes when she disappeared.

A year ago, Winnipeg police released a sketch of someone they think is connected to Amber's case: A 30-year-old white man with short reddish hair, light red or blond stubble, and hairy arms. He was wearing a camo baseball cap at the time the 20-year-old went missing, police said.

But Kyle says police haven't been in touch with his family much about Amber's case. Their last update was that her name was spray-painted on a wall in the Toronto area, but they wouldn't say exactly where.

When I ask him what he thinks happened to her, he replies, "Someone she knows. I had a big speech with her a couple weeks before about how you can't trust nobody. Nobody, don't trust nobody."

Out on the water, Kyle's mind visits dark places.

We're in the middle of the river, dragging hooks along the clay bottom when suddenly there's a tug on the line.

It's not tough to pull up. Kyle inspects the hooks: A plastic bag and a pair of pantiesnot an unusual find for the draggers.

"Why is there so much underwear in the river?" I ask.

"I don't know," he replies. "Yeah, your mind goes crazy. Is there a female down there? I don't know."

"Where does your mind go when you find a pair of underwear?" I ask.

"Come home if you're there," he answers. "Please let me help you. Let me help you."

The searchers often spot eagles overhead, which they think of as watching over them. Police boats also watch them, but don't help with the search.

"I wish they would actually do it themselves," Kyle told me, the first time I met him on a dock at the edge of the river. "There's lots of evidence in there and that's a fact."

Staff Sgt. Rob Riffle, who is in charge of the Winnipeg Police dive unit and river patrol, told VICE they won't help "because it's not a good allocation of our resources.

"Basically it's like looking for a needle in a haystack when you don't even know there's a needle there," he said.

Pulling up on the rope after feeling something in the water

When a body falls into the river, it fills with water and sinks, Riffle explained. Within a few days in the warmer months, it decomposes and gas bubbles form, which make the body float to the surface. Eventually it will sink to the bottom again, where it breaks down until there is nothing left but bone.

None of the bodies that were found in the last year were found at the bottom of the river, he said: They floated to the surface, where they were pulled out.

Riffle contends that skeletal remains at the bottom of the river are impossible to find with hooks or by divers.

"It's black water diving here, so away, near Selkirk Avenue and King Street, at 6:30 AM.

Claudette called her sister Tina and left a message saying a truck driver was being pushy and she felt unsafe. She wanted her sister to pick her up. But her sister didn't have minutes on her phone and only heard the message after Claudette went missing.

On a Facebook group dedicated to the memory of the mother of four, friends and family remembered her hazel eyes, beautiful smile, and quick wit.

Her fianc, Matthew Bushby, posted that she delivered a baby girl instead of the boy they expected, and they had to think of a name. When she couldn't decide, he said, "Patience, Claudette." She then chose the name Patience. "Why? Because I don't have any patience," she told him.

Patience was two weeks old when her mother went missing.

It took ten days for police to look at Claudette's case after she was reported missing, Bernadette told VICE. She said they only looked at her case because the family pressured them.

Bernadette believes Winnipeg police didn't treat her sister's case the same way they do when a white resident goes missing.

"There was one case last summer where they actually went door to door, knocking on doors. When my sister went missing, that wasn't the same response, you know. There was no police knocking door to door and asking if, you know, they had information, or they had seen anything."

According to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, "Police have failed to adequately prevent and protect Indigenous women and girls from killings and disappearances, extreme forms of violence, and have failed to diligently and promptly investigate these acts."

"I definitely think there is a double standard when it comes to Indigenous people," Bernadette said. "And I think that's been created through the history of Canada and the government and policies that have been put in place. You know, women are treated less than, and if you are Indigenous, that's even more so. Because you know, we're considered disposable, like no one's gonna miss us, or care about us, when in reality, we all have families that care about us."

Kyle agrees that police don't treat every missing persons case equally. They dedicated more resources to the recent case of missing white woman Thelma Krull, who disappeared July 11, than they have to cases of missing Indigenous people, he said.

"I think they're not doing enough for Aboriginal people," Kyle says of police.

Drag the Red volunteers helped search for Krull. He believes police set the bar high with their search for her.

"They could do more, they could do more, they showed everybody they could do more. They searched for that woman for a long time, and they're still searching for her."

Follow Hilary Beaumont on Twitter.

Image via Flickr user BagoGames

Read: We Asked a Theoretical Physicist How Time Travel in the Terminator Movies Works

Aging badass and ex-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has been tapped to replace Donald Trump as the host of NBC's The Celebrity Apprentice, reports Entertainment Weekly.

"I have always been a huge fan of The Celebrity Apprentice and the way it showcases the challenges and triumphs of business and teamwork," Schwarzenegger said in a statement, apparently forgetting that the show mostly eschews all that stuff in favor of delightful reality TV clusterfucks, like Arsenio Hall going batshit crazy and accidentally channeling Truman Capote.

"I am thrilled to bring my experience to the boardroom and to continue to raise millions for charity," he continued.

As EW pointed out, NBC and the Donald parted ways after the business magnate announced his presidential bid and began courting the white supremacist vote.

Schwarzenegger will make his debut in the Apprentice boardroom during the 2016-2017 season, where he'll ask all the essential questions, like "Who is your daddy and what does he do?" and "Why do you cry?"

Supporters march in solidarity with refugees in London. Photo by Jake Lewis.

After being described in terminology usually reserved for Biblical plagues by David Cameron, and having endured calls for their extermination whilst drowning in the Mediterranean by Katie Hopkins, the refugees that managed to survive the asylum gauntlet that runs from the battlefields of the Middle East to the borders of the Schengen zone have finally earned themselves some sympathy. Well done chaps, you deserve it. Economic migrants, though? They're a whole 'nother story. Fuck those guys.

An unintended consequence of this outpouring of basic human empathy is that, in their attempts to catch up with popular sentiment, cynical conservative back-pedalling has drawn a very clear line in the sand: refugees? Kinda OK. Economic migrants? Bad. Having been an "economic migrant" myself once upon a time, I resent my ilk being transformed into shadowy, job-stealing bogeymen opportunistically exploiting global conflict for our own gain.

If you were to subscribe to right-wing rhetoric, you'd think that economic migrants read news reports on Syrian atrocities like they're Linkedin references looking for new opportunities to move. There are certainly people surfing this migratory wave that aren't fleeing war and probable death, but their situation isn't the equivalent of moving to Dubai for a tax-free pay rise, or relocating to Berlin because of London's absurd rent prices, nor is it equatable with marring your gay Dutch friend so you can stay in the UK, like this moneyed Ukrainian girl that I know.

Walking the first steps on the road that leads you towards scurrying across the Hungarian border while fascist camera women trip up your children isn't something driven by lifestyle, it's fuelled by hopelessness. Calling them economic "migrants" diminishes their struggle. What they really are like my family and I once were is economic refugees.

A banner at the Refugees Welcome march in London. Photo by Jake Lewis.

I was born in Belgrade just a couple of years before the Yugoslav experiment turned genocidal. Although we never witnessed the horrors that our neighbours in Sarajevo and Vukovar did, we still experienced all the everyday knock-on effects that come with living in a warzone: things like hyperinflation, sanctions, petrol rationing and food shortages.

Growing up, I was told stories of how, on payday, people had to decide between sprinting to the shop to spend all their earnings on basic necessities, or legging it to the nearest spiv to exchange them for Deutsche Marks. Because the value of the dinar was dropping in real time, you had to figure out which was more cost effective mere metres and minutes factored into your thought process. The military reality of war didn't reach Serbia until the Nato bombing campaign of 1999, but civil society crumbled while kleptocracy and organised crime filled its void before that.

Under western sanctions, the black market economy thrived: people would drive over the border to Hungary, stock up on petrol and cigarettes, then drive back to hustle them off at marked up prices. Belgrade's murder rate doubled within a single year. Key figures in the Milosevic regime were suspected of peddling heroin. Crooked politicians and mobsters never had it so good. To maintain a sense of normality during Nato bombing raids, nightclubs would open in the day then shut at dusk, giving people time to make it home before the next wailing of the bomb sirens.

Our lives, admittedly, weren't at risk, nor were we forced from our homes, which disqualified us and many other ethnic Serbs within Serbia's borders from refugee status. Most people don't realise how narrow the criterium is: to qualify for asylum, you usually have to be at direct risk of persecution or death. My family didn't put in a bogus asylum application nor did we attempt storm the Calais tunnel; we were granted a visa based on my parents' professional qualifications. We weren't in danger of being maimed physically, but our prospects in life were.

Watch Drag the Red: Meet the Volunteers Searching for Bodies in Winnipeg's Red River

Serbia currently sits eighth in the "world misery index". With youth unemployment perpetually fixed at around 50 percent and an average monthly salary that reportedly clocks in at 287 (average, that is, plenty earn less). I'll happily concede that the hardship of staying would have been utterly banal compared to what the populations of Aleppo or Kabul or Srebrenica have suffered, but I won't quietly accept being demonised by some posh Tory twat whose biggest personal hardship is his resemblance to a condom.

It's interesting how contradictory the Tory stance on economic migrants is to their purported ideals. For a party that worships at the altar of Thatcherism, that preaches the gospel of deregulation and deifies the free market, their stance on migration contradicts their core neoliberal principles. It appears that a borderless, globalised world is great when it allows corporations to exploit cheap labour in developing nations, but when those principles are applied in the opposite direction they're countered with bureaucratic razor wire and land mines.

But the Conservatives aren't the only offenders: a member of Germany's Christian Democratic-led caucus, who happen to be led by a certain Angela Merkel, the current It Girl for beleaguered peoples everywhere, recently declared "economic distress is no grounds for asylum. We don't want migration into the social welfare system." Yeah, because people who've trekked across an entire continent(s) come across as really fucking work-shy. I'm sure all they really want to do is sit around scratching their arse whilst watching German daytime TV at the taxpayers' expense.

This current hysteria surrounding economic migrants makes a mockery of the humanist principles that European nations are usually so keen to espouse. What it essentially says is that ambition and self-advancement are a privilege reserved for a Schengen zone elite, while the rest of the world should be content with simply being alive. Rather than being the spiritual home of progressive, liberal ideals that it's usually depicted as, Europe is a continent with a caste system, one built upon nationality and enforced by visas.

@slandr

More from VICE on the refugee crisis:

Hanging Out with Jubilant Jeremy Corbyn Fans at London's Refugees Welcome March

This Is What It's Really Like to Be a Refugee in Britain Today

We Watched Nazis Fight Anti-Fascists in Dover on Saturday

A cannabis cookie (photo via Wikimedia)

You'll never guess what: some study that claims to show links between prolonged cannabis usage and prediabetes has been slammed by pro-cannabis campaigners. I know, right?

The study, conducted by the University of Minnesota on more than 3,000 Americans, reported that 65 percent of regular cannabis users are at higher risk of developing the sugary disease, while those who have used it "more than a hundred times" had a 50 percent higher chance of getting it. While no biological link between the two has been found, there is a suspicion that the diabetes is brought on by the munchies.

A spokesperson from the NHS said that the intense hunger generated by bong hits to the brain "can lead users to snack on foods with a high calorie and sugar content, but with little in the way of nutritional value" and that "if maintained on a long-term basis, this type of diet can lead to obesity, which is a risk factor for type 2 diabetes".

Stoners across the world have put a lot of work into debunking and shouting down claims that weed can negatively impact your health over the years. This time round it's no different.

"The interpretation of this awful research is both dangerous and unethical to the point where even the NHS themselves have published an immediate rebuttal. Diabetes own website refers to the potential benefits of cannabis to those suffering from diabetes and GW Pharmaceuticals are currently doing research on the efficacy of cannabinoids with some great results so far," says John Liebling, head of United Patients Alliance a cannabis advocacy group that launched its UK branch last year.

No study into the negative effects of regular cannabis consumption are ever going to be taken at face value while weed remains illegal, so the red hot defence of it and continued fight for its availability, medicinal or not. What we can agree on, though, is that eating four bags of Haribo and three litres of Dr Pepper at 2AM is not doing anyone any favours.