Agbonlahor in action (Photo by Dagur Brynjólfsson, via)

It took Aston Villa captain – he's technically still captain – Gabriel Agbonlahor just under a month to dramatically and irreparably rupture his career. He has revolutionised the concept of having a bad week at the office, realigning the bar for failure so high that the majority of would-be fuck-uppers will now barely be able to snatch a glimpse of the frame. Take a bow, Gabriel – we're knighting you for your services to ruining everything.

Let's begin at the beginning. For almost the entire season, Aston Villa have been bottom of the league. It took until their game against Man United on the 16th of April for the plug to be finally, mercifully yanked from the sputtering life-support machine that's been sustaining their residency in the top-flight of English football. After a season of unceasing misery and torment they were relegated after a 1-0 loss.

They sink to the Championship as unquestionably one of the worst sides in Premier League history. Dreadful beyond comedy. Rotten beyond wildest belief. The soggy full-stop on a half-decade of rank mismanagement and institutional decay.

Agbonlahor wasn't in the match day squad, let alone the first 11, on the day they went down, as he'd already been placed in ominous sounding "intensive measures", informed to stay away from the first team by interim manager Eric Black. The Mirror reported that he wasn't fit enough for selection because he was more than a stone overweight.

A few days before, he'd been photographed on holiday in Dubai puffing on something that looked like a shisha pipe. This isn't illegal, but football players are obviously not supposed to be smoking tobacco between games. He was reprimanded by the manager.

In an act of almost charming childishness, a few days after he got back from Dubai, he pulled a sicky just before the club's defeat to Bournemouth. Agbonlahor had been training with the squad all week but called the night before to say he thought he had a virus.

A week later – in fact, on the very same night that Villa's relegation was confirmed in a match Agbonlahor didn't play in – he was out in London, pictured at the Mayfair Hotel scowling into an iPhone camera, laughing gas canisters scattered at his feet. Like night follows day, he was suspended yet again.

At the time of writing, there have been reports that Villa are looking to sack him, which might prove tricky with two years left on his £60,000 a week contract and the impending financial armageddon of relegation to come. He's now been told to stay away from the training ground entirely, but the "Flabby Gabby" tabloid headlines roll on.

Football pundits have of course been merciless. Ex-Villa defender Shaun Teale labelled him "a fucking disgrace", and Talksport host Stan Collymore divulged that he'd rang Agbonlahor directly for a heated exchange in which they apparently "tore strips off each other". On social media things have been even less measured - we don't need to list everything that's been said here, safe to say if you search for Agbonlahor and an expletive of your choice you will find hundreds of irate Villa fans and goading bystanders. Even his actual mum did an interview saying she always knew he'd go off the rails and she's not surprised Villa have gone down.

Normally, when a public figure who hasn't actually committed a crime receives this level of abuse, there is someone calling for restraint. There's a vast and ever-growing awareness of the psychological impact that toxic online scorn can inflict. But tolerance is not on the table here; it seems that Gabriel Agbonlahor and the overpaid, overfed, overindulged universe of top-flight football has managed to make itself the exception; the last acceptable target of abuse in Britain.

But I've got to admit: I feel a bit bad for him. Agbonlahor came through the youth ranks, a local lad made good, erupting to prominence age 19 during the 2006-7 season as an exciting talent, full of pace and incisive finishing, with a knack for goals in big games. He collected a few caps for the England team in various drab friendlies at the fag end of the early 2000s. Then he levelled out, stagnated. The numbers got worse, the pace declined, the hamstrings tightened, the waistline expanded. Seeing him now is like bumping into the alpha-male punchy lads from secondary school, still slightly baffled as to why the prime of their life ended before their 21st birthday. It's all a bit sad, really.

So I say a sad farewell to you, Gabby, as there's surely no way back from this. From now on, there will be plenty of time for as many shisha pipes and £900 bottles of Moet as you like.

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

ZERO K
Don DeLillo

Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo's first novel about the superrich, is a fascinating failure. Published in 2003, it follows a 28-year-old billionaire named Eric Packer over the course of a day that he spends, for the most part, stuck in traffic in the backseat of his marble-floored limousine. Unanchored from coherent characters, it reads as a series of oblique set pieces and thesis statements rather than a fully considered novel.

But the seeds of Zero K, his latest, significantly more successful work, are planted in that lesser one. "Great men historically expected to live forever," one of Packer's many female interlocutors says to him, "even as they supervised construction of their monumental tombs on the far bank of the river, the west bank, where the sun goes down." She speculates about the mind, consisting of "everything you ever were and will be," being preserved on disk once the body dies. "Will it happen someday? Sooner than we think because everything happens sooner than we think."

In Zero K, it's happening. DeLillo famously wrote in White Noise that "all plots tend to move deathward." That's certainly been the case in his novels. From the ancient-language-obsessed murder cult of The Names to Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra to the sinister museumgoer obsessively watching a 24-hour version of Psycho in Point Omega, his books have often considered death, by violence in particular. The stories of his characters are defined by their relationship to killing or the killed. But Zero K's plot doesn't move deathward. Instead, it explores the implications of death's dwindling dominion.

The novel concerns an extremely rich man named Ross Lockhart, whose younger wife, Artis, is dying of a debilitating illness. He summons his son, Jeffrey, the novel's narrator, to a secret cryogenics facility to see his wife's cutting-edge entombment, and, despite their seeming lack of affection, to keep him company during the run-up to her "cryonic suspension." Ross claims to be a true believer in this process. "Another god," he says to his skeptical son. "Not so different, it turns out, from some of the earlier ones. Except that it's real, it's true, it delivers." He has, it becomes clear, invested a great deal of his fortune in the facility, which, if all goes according to plan, will eventually house him, too.

The son's measured voice cracks the hermetic vibe of recent DeLillo novels like Falling Man and Point Omega. He provides a perspective that, uncharacteristically for later DeLillo, aligns with the reader's. He is confused and repelled by, but also helplessly sympathetic to, his egomaniacal father's desire to thwart death on behalf of the woman he loves. Though the novel's abstract, philosophical concern with death and the afterlife seems at first to promise a deepening of DeLillo's late-period chill, Zero K, through its depiction of this ambivalent familial bond, reveals itself as perhaps the author's most fully animated exploration of human feeling.

The cryogenics compound is a veritable museum of DeLillo interests, with screens showing disturbing footage of death, including, not for the first time in his work, men in the process of self-immolation and crowds running away from an unseen catastrophe. These motifs have something of a retrospective montage quality about them—remember when he asked if "the future belongs to crowds"?—but elsewhere, DeLillo attempts to map fresh territory.

The most startling example of this is a brief, Beckettian section in which the reader becomes privy to Artis's interior monologue after she has entered her suspended state. "I think I am someone," reads one such passage. "There is someone here and I feel it in me or with me. But where is here and how long am I here and am I only what is here." This is terrifying, and it suggests that the procedure allows some vestige of personhood to remain active, perhaps forever. It isn't until nearly the end of the novel that DeLillo implies this monologue may in fact have been the work of the narrator's imagination, restoring the essential unknowablity of death to the novel.

At a crucial point, Ross decides that he wants to "join" his wife in her suspended state sooner than he'd planned, ending his natural life early. Jeffrey grapples with his father's decision. "It denied everything he'd ever said and done," he thinks. "It made a comic strip of his life, or of mine." Later, a woman who works at the facility speaks, approvingly, of the suspension process to a group of recruits as the final word in solipsism: "You are completely outside the narrative of what we refer to as history. There are no horizons here. We are pledged to an inwardness, a deep probing focus on who and where we are... You are about to become, each of you, a single life in touch only with yourself."

This begins to answer the unsettling question DeLillo raises in the novel: What happens when plots—lives—cease to "move deathward"? They become, he suggests, unstuck from history, and from other people. The arc of a human life, with all its struggles, might show as little progress as Charlie Brown's. —ANDREW MARTIN

THE WITCH: A NEW-ENGLAND FOLKTALE
A24

Imagine how pious a person would have to be to get kicked out of a Puritan township for it. This is the patriarch of the family in The Witch, who in the opening scene is pushed out of the village, shouting about the gospel as the gate locks behind him and his family. Father William, mother Katherine, daughter Thomasin, and son Caleb set up their new household at the edge of a forest. They seem to encounter other people only when Katherine gives birth to them: Their homestead is a kingdom of seven, including a pair of kindergarten-aged twins and an infant. Life at the edge of the forest is nightmarish before anything witchy occurs: gray skies, hard labor, self-flagellating prayer, the twins skipping and shrieking obnoxiously around the farmyard, playing with a black billy goat. Then Thomasin plays peek-a-boo with the baby, and in the moment her eyes are closed, the child disappears. From that point on, the family is visited by evils tailored to each person's weaknesses and desires. As eerie and gruesome as the film is, it's difficult to share the family's religiously rooted terror. Except for Thomasin, they are more scared of hell than of gore—less concerned that their baby is missing than that it wasn't baptized first. —RACHEL RIEDERER

A LOADED GUN
Jerome Charyn
Bellevue Literary Press

"She had no equal as a poet, she has no equal now." She is Emily Dickinson, and A Loaded Gun, Jerome Charyn's ecstatic new book, aims to rescue her from early critics like Edmund Wilson and Allen Tate, who gave us the familiar portrait of the helpless spinster cloistered in Amherst, Massachusetts. Instead, we get Dickinson the diva and flirt. Charyn admits this isn't exactly news: A countermovement, focusing on Dickinson's ferocity, highly choreographed self-presentation, and sexual heat, has been going strong since 1951. What's left for Charyn, then, is to outdo the competition in enthusiasm. In thematically arranged chapters describing the centers of her emotional world, from the family's maid, Margaret Maher, to Dickinson's dog, Carlo, the poet "swaggers" and "leaps," tossing "imperial fire." Entranced digressions compare her to van Gogh for fearlessness, Joseph Cornell and his ballerina loves for ethereality, and the patients of Oliver Sacks in their rage for cosmic order. Charyn both insists on the likely inaccuracy of his biographical interpretations of her poems, yet offers them anyway: In this sense, he may be the perversely perfect critic for the poet who wandered "The House of Supposition — / The Glimmering Frontier that / Skirts the Acres of Perhaps—." —LAURA KOLBE

MAPPLETHORPE: LOOK AT THE PICTURES
HBO

"I don't even acknowledge that it's art. I don't even acknowledge that the fellow who did it was an artist. I think he was a jerk," says Jesse Helms of Robert Mapplethorpe in the opening sequence of HBO's new documentary Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures. It is 1989, and Helms, the famously conservative senator from North Carolina, is addressing the Senate about Mapplethorpe's final exhibition, which continued to tour after the photographer's death from AIDS earlier that year. The show, The Perfect Moment, featured some of the sexually explicit images for which Mapplethorpe is best known, including Helmut and Brooks, NYC, a photograph, composed with Steichen still-life perfection, of one man fisting another; and Lou, NYC, a picture of a man jamming his own finger into his penis, similarly shocking and beautiful in form. The question Helms puts to the Senate, whether tax dollars should be spent to fund the showing of this "obscene" work, made Mapplethorpe a household name.

Helms's words are ironic in the context of this celebratory documentary, which follows the creation of, and is premiering this month to coincide with, a retrospective of Mapplethorpe's work so large that it is being shared between the Getty Museum and the LA County Museum of Art. Yet Helms's statements frame the film's ambitions perfectly. Through the lens of Mapplethorpe's work and life, the documentary concerns itself with the questions of what defines art and what makes an artist (and, also, whether this particular artist was a jerk—there, it may not entirely disagree with Helms). The film examines the way that Mapplethorpe conceived of art as an act of introspection—how he used his own experiences as his canvas, taking pristine and emotionally penetrating portraits of friends (think: Diane Arbus and Nan Goldin) and documenting his sex life with the same aesthetic.

The documentary does not shy away from Mapplethorpe's more explicit work, including Self-Portrait (1978), which shows the artist in chaps with a bullwhip inserted in his anus, his head turned toward the camera, defiantly putting a face on BDSM just five years after homosexuality made its way out of the DSM. Mapplethorpe is at its best when it shows that even now, while some of the acts may no longer shock, his photos are just as striking as they were 40 years ago; perfectly composed depictions of "dirty" sex are perhaps all the more powerful given the current proliferation of haphazard ones. —SOFIA GROOPMAN

HUMAN PERFORMANCE
Parquet Courts
Rough Trade

The headline here is that the icy, art-punk ennui of Parquet Courts' past is in thaw. The most surprising moments on their fifth album, those most worth revisiting, are the moments of robust and even romantic power pop. Between songwriters Austin Brown and Andrew Savage, Brown keeps closer to the band's oblique post-punk wellspring, while Savage runs restlessly across punk's more approachable expanded field. For your consideration: the jump from the monotonic Sister Ray spiel "One Man, No City" to the jaunty, lovesick Costello send-up and recent single "Berlin Got Blurry." It's this dynamic that has kept Parquet Courts from succumbing to rock's nostalgia epidemic, but of the two, it's Savage who proves inspired enough to invoke and evoke in equal measure. "Two Dead Cops," with grim topicality, burns undiminished within the continuum of punk anthems. Conversely, his portrait of a relationship on the title track is hauntingly personal, the lyrics effortless and surreal: "I'd never felt it. / I'd never heard. / I told you I loved you, did I even deserve it / when you returned it?" To the radical negation of his 80s forebears, Savage offers a revision, an assertion of meaning that can only be found at the end of a path of erasure and self-doubt. —RYAN MEEHAN

FIREWATCH
Campo Santo

A personal story told on a grand canvas, Firewatch is narrative gaming painted in vivid sunset hues. It's the late 1980s, and you're Henry, a 40-something who's dropped out of life for a summer of spotting fires in Shoshone National Park. He's supposedly alone in and around his tower, his sole companion a voice on the other end of a walkie-talkie, his boss, Delilah. It sounds like a dull setup, but this first-person adventure, the debut title from the San Francisco–based indie studio Campo Santo, masterfully plays on gamer expectations. It's a four-hour experience during which you're certain all manner of bad shit is about to befall Henry—a beast in the wilderness, maybe an alien conspiracy. Yet it almost never does, at least not in predictable ways. The most significant terrors out there are those Henry carries with him—he's here to make sense of a marriage wrecked by his wife's early-onset Alzheimer's. That tragedy is revealed within the first ten minutes, but to tell you anything else about this game's story would compromise its greatest asset. You won't actually fight any blazes in Firewatch, but you will be moved by one of the most intimate and enveloping dramas ever delivered in a video game. —MIKE DIVER

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

San Francisco's AT&T Park. Photo via Flickr user jcookfisher

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

Every spring, for the decade I've spent writing and caring too much about baseball (and for many years before), a great performance of reason occurs across Major League Baseball. Front offices fill out rosters through an efficient process of human resources arbitrage, built on thousands of points of narrowly sliced data. Mostly, they're in pursuit of the "perfect hunch." The game doesn't listen to reason.

Through the years, in that same pursuit, I've seen cities around the country spending public money to build stadiums for sports teams, even though it's almost always bad business. Here are some stats on a few:

6: The number of teams that ditched Florida, home to many teams' spring training programs, between 2003 and 2010. Arizona has gifted sweetheart subsidies and publicly funded stadiums for MLB teams to get them to leave the Sunshine State.

8 or 9: The number of Arizona cities found to have lost money with spring training facilities, according to a 2013 study.

$81 million: The value of a bond that Fort Myers, Florida, floated to construct a new stadium for the Red Sox when they asked for new facilities in 2010. The city's taxpayers had paid for a stadium to be built 18 years earlier.

$500 million: The amount that Miami-Dade County borrowed to cover its part of the $634 million stadium and parking complex built for the Miami Marlins' regular season, which opened in 2012. By the time the county pays off those bonds, in 2048, it will have paid $2.4 billion.

16: The number of times the Red Sox played at the new multimillion-dollar stadium.

All this spending isn't reasonable, at the preseason scale or even for the big league games, but if you're being reasonable about sports, you're doing it wrong. After all, there is nothing reasonable about entrusting some fraction of your emotional well-being to beefy strangers chasing a ball, but we do it anyway.

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

Illustration by Sam Taylor

This is the VICE Interview. Each week we ask a different famous and/or interesting person the same set of questions in a bid to peek deep into their psyche.

If you grew up with a TV and parents who prioritised the four basic channels, you'll know the bespectacled face of Louis Theroux. He's Britain's answer to Michael Moore or Werner Herzog, managing to be awkward, kind and probing, all at the same time.

On Sunday, Theroux's latest documentary, Drinking to Oblivion, took a decidedly sobering look at the lives of British alcoholics. It marks the start of a busy year for Theroux, who has another documentary about brain injury coming next month, before he releases his first feature film My Scientology Movie later this year – a film which has already angered scientologists so much they've responded with their own documentary about Theroux.

Which conspiracy theories do you believe?
I'm not a natural conspiracy theory believer. I tend to be a bit of a sceptic. I don't believe that aliens have visited Earth, or that alien life has been covered up by the US government. I think we landed on the moon. However, I do believe that the key decisions are made by an oligarchic semi-clique of powerful people. I believe in vested interests and a group looking after itself. I've been really struck recently that the American political system is not really a democracy. But that's not a conspiracy theory is it? It's fact.

What film or TV show makes you cry?
Very rarely would that happen. There's no TV show on a regular basis that does. In real life I cry, but not often. I'll tell you one thing that made me cry: it's a bit embarrassing to admit, but I was being interviewed on a Dutch TV show and they showed me a clip of my programme about parents of children with autism. There's a scene where a mum is seen trying to deal with her kid's behaviour and I started talking about it and in the act of talking I was aware I had that weird wobbly-voice almost-crying thing. I hadn't felt emotional in that way at the time of filming, but by being removed from it and watching it back I was really quite upset.

What would be your last meal?
I've thought about that one before. If you're on death row, they do put themselves out to accommodate the request, as I understand. It probably varies from state to state, but within maybe 10 miles or so they'll go and get it from the place you request. I really like good New York-style pizza. Good, not gourmet. I got a taste for it while being there. There's a place in Brooklyn famous for it and often has long lines of people going up to it. I'll probably ask that they got me some pizza from there.

If you won the lottery tomorrow, would you carry on with what you're doing, change jobs, or stop working?
I feel about my work the way some people feel about their holiday. Not to say I don't get stressed, because I do, but I feel taken out of my normal life and exposed to a different world. There's a departure from the norm that is refreshing. With holidays, I get stressed about hotels and flights and all that stuff. I don't worry about any of that when I'm on location because I have the luxury of not being the producer or director of my programs, just the presenter. It's probably a bit infantilising but I basically just get to be the child and I like it.

What's the most disgusting injury or illness you've ever had?
At Christmas, I don't know how or why, I got something called orchitis. Basically, one of my testicles swelled up to two or three times its normal size and it was extremely painful. Due to a bit of a mix-up, I ended up going to three different NHS hospitals, and at each one someone had to examine the feel of my "ball". I was very aware that they might know who I was. And I was aware that they might know I was aware that they might know who I was. Yet you've just got to do it; clearly the alternative is not getting critical medical attention. Anyway, I took antibiotics and it did go down after three or four days, but it was pretty embarrassing. I mention it because maybe as men we feel a little embarrassed about talking about our testicles when it comes to health. Perhaps we need to get a little more comfortable with saying the word testicles.

Something which was disgusting was when I did a documentary on female bodybuilders, and one of the male fans got me to roll around in the wood on his property after being boxed to death by some muscly women. "Yeah, roll around, roll around!" he yelled. I did about three or four takes. I later discovered that there was poison ivy all over the place, and I got sores on the vast proportion of my body. I remember the sores was so purulent that I would sort of drip discharge onto my desk as I was attempting to write an article. It was horrible. I suddenly realised that everyone in America would know if they had poison ivy on their land and became convinced he did it on purpose. It was almost sort of a psychopathic act for that guy to do that.

Photo by Carl Wilson

When in your life have you been truly overcome with fear?
I remember as a kid, I was at the bus stop showing off to some friends and some other kids came by and I mouthed to one of them: "What are you looking at?" They wandered off and my friends got on their bus. I was waiting for the 37 when the other kids came back and then was totally overcome by fear. I don't think it even got physical. Maybe it did. Possibly he punched me. I was going, "It's nothing, nothing, nothing, I'm so sorry".

I was a worrywart as a child. I have a very good recollection of my childhood and I can remember before I could read, I became worried that I'd never be able to read. And thinking that when you grow up you have to pay taxes and I didn't know how. Worrying about things that I really had no reason to be worrying about. I do still worry a lot. I have to sort of consciously dig my way out of it.

Complete the sentence: The problem with young people today is...
...they're young and I'm not and they remind me that I'm not. I feel so old. I see them having fun and think maybe I didn't have enough fun when I was younger. I've got no choice in the matter of getting old.

What's the closest you've come to having a stalker?
When I was at school I got a Valentine's card from a girl who was in the year above, or maybe even two years above. I didn't know who she was, I just knew she was a bit older. I was only about 15 at the time. Inside the card itself there was a poem which was very macabre and it talked about the temptation of the razor's edge, veiled references to suicide – and as much as I was love-starved and wanted to have a girlfriend, even at that age knew there was something about it sending danger signs. I didn't even want to know who it was from. I just sort of put it out of my mind.

What was your worst phase?
I think I'm in it now. You wouldn't know while you're in it, that's the whole point, isn't it? That's the illusory nature of progress. But when I was 15/16, it wasn't great. I had been an OK-looking, outgoing boy and then puberty hit relatively late and it just took me. My nose got really big more or less overnight, my hair and skin got oily and physically I became a bit of a mess. I'm still basically dealing with the fallout from that.

What picture of you, that's been taken this year, do you think you look nicest in?
In one of the publicity photos for Drinking to Oblivion, I'm in Brighton with a contributor called Joe and Joe's a good-looking guy. The pair of us are like world-weary detectives on an ITV drama. It looks like a reboot of Dalziel and Pascoe. We've got that craggy, 'I'm not taking any nonsense' look. Also because the documentary is on a serious subject, I don't have to smile in the publicity photos. When I smile my cheeks pop out and I look like a squirrel or a chipmunk. I definitely look better if I'm not smiling.

The nice picture

Would you have sex with a robot?
I think I'd have a bit of a problem with it. Have you seen Ex Machina? Especially since I'm married, I just think it would be too creepy. It's maybe another way we've lost intimacy and ways of expressing closeness. It could be alien and ultimately unsatisfying.

Do you think drink or drugs can make you happy?
Definitely, but only for short periods. If I have a few margaritas, especially the way I make them at home, I am happier. But it's like you've taken it out of the tank and it's not there the next day. You've depleted your reserves of serotonin. I'm in favour of legalising cannabis. I don't think that's controversial to say, is it? In America it's more or less legal in various places. I'm less keen on the idea of hard drugs.

What's the nicest thing you own?
I live in London, but my wife and I have a house in LA that we lived in for a couple of years. She grew up in a hot climate and liked the idea of living abroad somewhere warmer. But I don't really own any frivolous things. You know what, I definitely think I should get some. I'm going to.

If you were a wrestler, what song would you come into the ring to?
"100 Miles and Runnin'" by N.W.A.. I like old-school rap and hip-hop. The only thing I don't like much is metal.

Louis Theroux: Drinking to Oblivion is available on BBC iPlayer now. His film on brain injury will air on BBC Two in May.

@hannahrosewens

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An accused government sniper. Sirte, the 20th of October, 2011. 16:00:02.

Michael Christopher Brown's new book, Libyan Sugar, is about the Libyan revolution. Then again, in many ways, it's not. It's about being a photographer and bearing witness to life-changing events. It's about family and the lengths people go to in order to test themselves.

Alongside his stunning, often harrowing photos of the years of upheaval and violence that wracked Libya, Brown includes text messages and emails from family imploring him to return, forwarding news bulletins, asking after him. The juxtaposition of his intimate, diarised personal life with the images of extreme violence on a geopolitical scale is both unsettling and thought-provoking.

An integral part of the book is the bombing in which Brown was injured, and photojournalists Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros were killed. We caught up with Brown to talk about the project.

WARNING: This post contains graphic images.

As Tripoli fell, thousands of Sub-Saharans took refuge in a fishing harbour as revolutionaries were rounding up Sub-Saharans, largely on the assumption they were Gaddafi supporters or mercenaries. Many if not most of these Sub-Saharans planned to escape to Europe by boat. Janzour, Tripoli, the 31st of August, 2011. 13:18:46.

VICE: In a previous interview with VICE you said that honesty in photography can be a product of being pushed beyond one's limit. Was your work in Libya, and your decision to return after numerous injuries, part of an effort to push yourself beyond your limits? And did that take your work to a level where it was fundamentally different from what it would have been were you working on less demanding terms?
Michael Christopher Brown: Yes and yes. Libya was the place where I came to that realisation you mention. After being injured a second time, life became less about photography and more about understanding a voice. I made the book for myself, so there was also a need to be transparent, for better or worse, as with a diary. Hence the inner dialogue and the inclusion of communications with family and friends. I felt the book would also be more useful to others that way, rather than just showing people a pile of war pictures.

You talk in the book about feeling tied to those people you spent time with. A sort of guilt about your ability to leave while the subjects of your work could not. How big a factor was that in keeping you there working?
It was a factor, but I stayed in Libya for a number of reasons. I did have compassion for the Libyan situation. There was a feeling that their war was also ours, or mine, because it was – at least at the time – considered a fight for dignity and human rights. I identified with these values, and eventually the place and people became a part of me in some way.

Revolutionaries at a hospital. Ras Lanuf, the 27th of March, 2011. 13:33:08.

What's your view on impartiality in photojournalism? I've heard wildly varying views on this from different photographers. Some find the idea of objectivity in such situations laughable. Was objectivity something you sought, or was that simply beside the point for you?
I just always do what works for me, using my own values and experience. Objectivity, subjectivity, these are just words we use to describe a process where we take a certain approach – but I wasn't interested in being in control of a process while in Libya. It seemed more like an opportunity to grow, a more creative process that in order to be useful could not be controlled. I was curious about everything. I was following my nose. This is also partly why I used a phone to take pictures and jumped in trucks evacuating soldiers from the frontline and so on. I wanted to remove myself from the process of photography, of its control and its history. I used the same tool Libyans used to begin, sustain and further their revolution: a mobile phone. In that sense I was taken out of my role as a photographer and became more of an observer.

The inclusion of texts and emails from your family was a surprise to me. The concern shown in them is moving in itself – but alongside images of brutal violence they become even more sobering. Was involving your family in the work a difficult decision for you?
No, it wasn't. I sought permission from family and friends. Their involvement was necessary because the book is not just about going to war; it is about going home. The idea was to be open about the experience in order to best preserve it for myself, as well as to create a character that could be identified with by others. A small percentage of people have been to war or can identify with the experience, but everyone does – more or less – have friends and family and can understand love. And perhaps they know loved ones who have been, or are in, war. In the texts, then, are paths into the photographs. Ultimately, what I discovered while pulling away from my family, my girlfriend, close friends, was that my life was less about some quest or war, however necessary it may have been or have seemed at the time, than it was about love. But I needed to go through the process in order to understand that.

Remains of a body. Abu Salim hospital, Tripoli, the 28th of August, 2011. 12:56:48.

There are a lot of very graphic images in Libyan Sugar. It's something people at times moralise over in reporting. How would you describe your views on depicting the dead, or very graphic injuries? What role do these images play for you in the context of the wider project?
Images depicting the dead – very graphic images – these are images of war and they are essential. War is also surreal and at times incredibly beautiful. Those sorts of images are also in the book. The real extremes of human emotion, as a society is turned on its head, when people are tested, these are emotions that can only be experienced in war and they lie between life and death. So at opposite ends of this spectrum we have beautiful moments contrasted with horrific moments. That's one reason why I aligned texts from my mother with images of brutality. I included a number of these images. I saw many bodies, hundreds of them throughout the year. The images we see in many publications – say of men on patrol or bombs exploding – that's not war. That is something else – advertising, perhaps. We don't see true war pictures often because they do not inspire war; they inspire mass numbers of citizens to stop wars.

How did the bombing that killed Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, and injured you, change they way you see yourself and the work you did in Libya?
There is a lot I could say about this, and I talk about it in detail in the book. In immediate terms it made me step back and analyse what I was doing with my life. For several months after I didn't really do anything, nor did I have the energy to.

That day we had spent hours moving in and out of a building on Tripoli Street. There were snipers nearby, and rebel fighters trying to smoke them out with burning tires. It was very intense. We went back to our safe house to get more film and recharge batteries at one point, and some of of us were initially inclined to stay, though Tim was ready to head right back out. In the end, my not wanting to miss anything led to me wanting to go back out with Tim in spite of my misgivings. I wasn't listening to myself, and because of that I wound up back on that street that afternoon when the bombing happened. After that, my sense of self-criticism became sharp. I had some guilt for a while, but overall I'm a more intuitive individual today, largely due to that. I don't always make the right choices, but as a result of those events I am closer to my gut and better understand the reasons why I have certain motivations. These thoughts are in the book and in the video installations that I hope to show later this year.

How useful to you was it to make this book? A reader might feel that composing this piece of work has put parts of your experience into context and given it all some sense of meaning.
Making the book was a cathartic experience. It took several years and various iterations, and that it exists now on my desk is a bit surreal. It has also helped to release some weight I've carried around since, as now that experience exists in a physical space outside myself.

Thanks, Michael.

See more images from Libyan Sugar below:

Unguarded weapons depot. Between Sirte and Waddan, the 26th of October, 2011. 15:21:06.

A rally in Benghazi on the 8th of April, 2011. 18:34:41.

Unidentified. Hikma hospital, Misrata, the 18th of April, 2011. 12:03:04.

Maurice Flowers is drowning. He is submerged. He feels as if there is no way back to the surface. In the first scene of Flowers, a Channel 4 comedy-drama that'll be on every night this week, the middle-aged children's book author, played by The Mighty Boosh's Julian Barratt, takes the noose his magician father used as a prop and tries to hang himself from a tree in his garden. To Maurice, suicide now seems like the only way he can handle the relentless "invisible monster" that is his depression. But the rope fails in its task and Maurice is left to try and find his way back to the surface, or sink into the depths.

"The rest of the series refers back to that moment in different ways," says Will Sharpe, the show's writer and director, "and the most important thing for me in that sequence was to feel, quite quickly, that you got a sense of what it might be like to be Maurice, or at least where he might be at."

Over six episodes, Maurice struggles to tell his wife Deborah (Olivia Colman) and twin children Donald and Amy (Daniel Rigby and Sophia di Martino) what is going on.

They have their own problems. Donald and Amy are 25-years old and living at home. Haunted by their environment, they have pitted themselves against each other. They are both stuck. They are both self-destructive. Neither of them fit in.

Determined to keep the family together, their mother's optimism is starting to fade as she realises she may not be able to live with her husband any more. She also thinks he's engaging in a secret affair with his Japanese illustrator, Shun, who lives in the shed Maurice spends all his time in.

Will Sharpe as Shun (Photo: Channel 4)

Not content with writing and directing the whole series while still in his twenties, Will Sharpe, whose mother is Japanese, plays Shun. Shun is fond of drawing pornographic manga featuring characters like Mr Gay, a superhero burdened with a constant, painful hard-on. But like the rest of the characters in the show, there is tragedy as well as comedy in Shun, his seemingly boundless enthusiasm masking a traumatic past.

This melding of comedy and drama makes Flowers an unusual series, in that it doesn't fit easily into any of the banal strait jackets TV often likes to force its shows into. This isn't genre comedy. If you're into Mrs Brown's Boys and comedy quiz shows, look elsewhere. There's plenty of surrealism and some broad accents, but the comedy in Flowers comes from a truthful place.

Speaking about Maurice's character, Sharpe tells me he was trying to make an "honest representation of how he might feel". At no point does the show make fun of Maurice and his problem. Rather, Sharpe looked to find "the comedy around that issue".

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When I meet him in Soho, Julian Barratt is disarmingly honest about his affinity with Maurice. "He's stuck and a bit childlike," Barratt says of his character. "When you're depressed, you can't get out of the way of yourself – you don't know what you're doing to yourself. I relate to that because I suffer from that, as well. As an artist, you're always trying to figure a way out of the lack of self-worth or the lack of self-belief that you have."

He pauses. "I don't know why I do what I do, but I feel as though I can relate to it... sometimes it helps. But if you're constantly trying to get worth from creating things, you're on a hiding to nowhere, really, because you only ever feel good when you've done something, and then when the work dries up or you're not able to work, you feel pretty awful, like you're not valid as a human being."

Now in his late forties, married to fellow comedian and actor Julia Davis, and the father of two young children, Barratt still moves all over the creative landscape – one minute he's a writer, the next he's an actor, then he's a musician. Sometimes he's all three at the same time. Sometimes he's something else. He questions what he's doing and thinks deeply about it. He says he's often self-destructive in auditions. He seems to still be in search of something. Talking to him, there are moments when I find myself wanting to grab him by the shoulders and say, "Mate, don't be so hard on yourself." But that kind of searching and questioning is integral to what he or any other artist does.

Barratt says he finds it hard to make decisions and that he doesn't know quite how to define himself. He plays the guitar every day and still wants to be in a band. "I feel a bit like a musician who is somehow doing this other stuff. I don't really feel time passing when I'm doing music," he says. "Maybe that's just the nature of writing. When you're writing a narrative it's just fucking hard work – it's a struggle, I find."

The Flowers family (Photo: Channel 4)

In person, Barratt looks like a bohemian badger, his salt and pepper beard and flowing cardigan adding to the air of noble integrity he brought to iconic roles like "preacher man" Dan Ashcroft in Nathan Barley and jazz fanatic Howard Moon in The Mighty Boosh. Even before he became a father, Barratt seemed like a father to what he calls "the Boosh family": "On tour, I'd be searching for the old pubs with real fires, and Noel would be going, 'I hate those places, they smell of farts and men smoking pipes'".

His struggle with sleeping prepared Barratt for fatherhood and was in sharp contrast to the dreamier Fielding. "Noel sleeps incredibly well," he says, "which is one of the main things I'm jealous of with him – his ability to fucking sleep anywhere. He just has loads of sleep, excessive sleep."

Various news outlets have reported that Barratt and Fielding are reuniting for a new series of the Boosh. "Not really, no," says Barratt. "We've talked about it. People keep saying we're writing together. We've talked about doing it, so that's not really the same." Still, Barratt says that he'd "love to do it again" and that, if Fielding is also game, he's sure something will happen.

Barratt signed up to do Flowers after meeting with the show's producer, Naomi De Pear. They were talking about another project, but De Pear realised Barratt would be perfect as Maurice. Apart from anything else, he was wearing a jumper that seemed very character-appropriate. Barratt loved Black Pond, the film Sharpe co-directed with Tom Kingsley, and had always wanted to work with Olivia Colman. She'd always wanted to work with him, and the contrast between the sunny Colman, who is brilliant, and the darker Barratt is very effective.

The Grubbs, by Staffan Gnosspelius

Part of Maurice's darkness is expressed in the children's books he writes, which concern the Grubbs, a family of goblins. Images of the Grubbs are used at intervals throughout the show. In order to make this convincing, Will Sharpe and Naomi De Pear, both producing a television show for the first time, needed to find an illustrator who knew what he was doing.

And so I make my way to a former printing factory in South London. Now an artist's studio, Swedish illustrator Staffan Gnosspelius has worked here for the last six years. Gnosspelius provides the illustrations of the Grubbs used in Flowers. "For me, Flowers is the Grubbs. And I really like the Grubbs. They got style," he says, before suggesting a spin-off series just about the goblin family.

The Swede also makes children's books and, like Maurice, whose publishers tell him his work is way too morose, he has struggled in a market that can be afraid of art that isn't shiny and bright. Gnosspelius' work is funny, but it is also unafraid of the dark.

Sharpe and De Pear are with me in the studio. It's the first time Sharpe and Gnosspelius have met, even though they've been working together over email and phone for months. Sharpe says he can identify with the illustrator's need to do what comes naturally to him. "There was a period when I was pitching stuff and it felt like I was trying to second-guess what was zeitgeisty and what might get made," he says. "Flowers is the result of trying to be un-cynical and to do what felt right. I can relate to the feeling of being fake."

The result is a show like many that Sharpe admires – Transparent, Louie, Grandma's House are three he names – one that sits outside the parameters of genre and that is not afraid to talk about emotions without always making a joke, while also being very funny. This is challenging work. It's brilliant work. It's the kind of work we don't see enough of on British television. It will make you laugh. It will break your heart. But it will make you feel, in the end, as though there is a way back from the depths to the surface.

Flowers starts tonight at 10PM on Channel 4, and will continue every night this week.

@oscarrickettnow

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(Photo by Chris Bethell)

Throughout the course of last year, the number of people in England sleeping rough increased by almost a third. Following the release of those bleak new statistics, Jon Sparkes, chief executive of the homeless charity Crisis, said that more needs to be done to stop people falling into homelessness in the first place.

But what about those already sleeping rough or living in temporary accommodation? What kind of obstacles must be overcome to find permanent housing? I spoke to five formerly homeless people to find out how they got off the streets for good.

MARK HARVEY

The road to homelessness started when I sustained an injury while working as a cameraman. After being off sick for a while, my employers found a way to sack me, which left me very depressed, because I'd been working there for 15 years. One day, while in a particularly low mood, I randomly decided to hop on a train to Weymouth and live on the streets there. I'd never been there before and knew nothing about the place; I chose it at random from the departures list at Victoria Station. As you can gather, my mind was heavily clouded by depression at the time.

I spent six months sleeping rough in Weymouth, and then came back to London and did the same thing there for three months. The fact that I was so down all the time made it difficult for me to think straight, which was one of the reasons I avoided seeking help for so long. I was in a constant state of disbelief, thinking, 'How did I go from working a professional job to waking up shivering on the pavement like this?'

When it got to September, I couldn't face another winter on the streets, so I went to Ealing Council and asked them for help. They sent me to another department to get the necessary paperwork to get a room in a hostel, but I had a panic attack and ended up running out. Looking back, I think that was partly because of the strain my brain was under from getting so little food or sleep. It took me two weeks to build up the confidence to go back there, apologise and pick up the documents. Luckily, the effort paid off, because I managed to get a place in a hostel in Southall.

I was eventually introduced to a housing organisation called Paradigm, who paid for me to move into a tiny box room in a house. Since then, I've helped found an organisation called City Harvest that delivers food to homeless charities. That's provided me with a sense of purpose. When I talk to the recipients of the food, it's obvious that we're making a big difference, which makes me feel better when I get a bit down. I haven't quite dealt with all of the issues that caused me to become homeless, but I'm getting there one step at a time. There's no chance of me going back on the streets, because I've found a way of giving something back, and am enjoying doing something positive.

AMY VARLE

When I was 16 I went off the rails a bit after the breakdown of my parents' relationship. One thing led to another and I ended up moving into a hostel for young people, where I stayed for ten months. I was lucky, because it was of quite a high quality, and the standard of care and support that I received was great.

The local council eventually offered me a flat. Everyone else thought it was a shit-hole, but after being in a hostel for so long, I thought, 'Oh my god, this is a palace!' The flat had been sat there for two years, because all the other people who had looked at it had turned it down, which tells you something about it. But to me, it was perfection.

Fortunately, I managed to get a job relatively quickly – but this was pre-recession, so I'd imagine it's now far more difficult for someone who has recently experienced homelessness to find work. Because of my experiences, I naturally ended up gravitating towards working in the field of housing. I now manage a company called People's Property Shop, which works with homeless charities across the North West. I take pride in helping the vulnerable with their housing needs.

Through my work, I've learned that the issue of homelessness isn't caused by a lack of housing; the main problem is getting support to the people who need it. Many previously homeless people who have just gained accommodation are also vulnerable and require ongoing advice and assistance. Landlords aren't social workers, and aren't in the position to deal with some tenants' complex problems. I was lucky to be able to get my life on track and put my previous situation behind me. Unfortunately, many don't receive the same opportunities that I had.

DAVID TOVEY

While studying at university I became very ill, due to my HIV-positive status, and found myself unable to work. My family weren't in a position to help me out financially, so I ended up getting two months behind on my rent. I attempted to get assistance from the council, but they told me I wasn't entitled to housing benefit because I was a student. This triggered a severe case of depression, and I tried to kill myself by taking an overdose. Upon recovery, I returned home from hospital to find that the landlord had changed the locks. This left me with no choice but to live in my car for the next six months.

I repeatedly asked Islington Council for help, but their attitude was that I would be OK because I had a car to sleep in. There were also specific criteria that I needed to meet in order for them to re-house me, and I didn't make the grade because I hadn't paid my outstanding rent. In reality, a large percentage of homeless people end up with no fixed abode for this reason.

I eventually managed to get a place in a cold-weather shelter, and was later accepted into a homeless hostel, where I stayed for a year. I was lucky, as charities can't keep up with the demand for beds in hostels because there are too many people without permanent accommodation. They're trying, though, and I would definitely advise those who find themselves in the circumstances that I was in to seek help from charitable organisations rather than the government.

Because I'd previously served in the army, I was able to seek assistance from the Veterans' Nomination Scheme, who sorted me out with a house. Certain councils are obliged to house two homeless ex-servicemen a year as part of this programme, which was a lifesaver. I'm fortunate enough to have managed to forge a successful career as an artist since my homeless days, but being isolated and self-destructive for so long is not an easy thing to get over. I'm still rebuilding my life now, and it first started to fall apart in 2011. It takes a considerable amount of time and effort to get back to normal after a period of homelessness, but it isn't impossible, and I'm definitely making good progress.

ANASTASJA KATZINOVA

At age 15, I ran away from home. At the time, I was a suicidal, agoraphobic self-harmer, and the education system had given up on me. I ended up hitch-hiking to Scotland and sofa-surfing with my boyfriend for about six months. I started drinking copiously and taking drugs to blot out the seriousness of my situation. Because of this, I was unwelcome everywhere I went.

I'd been through a lot already at that stage, but never knew what it really meant to feel like scum until I experienced homelessness. I felt anchorless and realised how little I really knew about the adult world. Once I'd burnt my bridges in Scotland, I returned to my hometown and ended up in a relationship with a man ten years older than me. He probably saved my life in many ways, but it was a toxic, controlling relationship. I eventually left him and briefly moved back in with my family, but my stepdad didn't want me around and kicked me out.

After a lot of persuasion, I ended up getting my own room in a six-bedroom multi-occupant house. The landlord was a hippy called Les, who had a genuine desire to help others. In my semi-rural hometown, there were virtually no services to help people with the type of problems I had, so if he hadn't taken me in, I know for a fact I wouldn't be here now. I owe him a lot.

It was sometimes difficult living in a communal environment, as there was often conflict, gossip and power struggles, but there was also a genuine sense of community, and I developed lifelong friendships. I also developed a much stronger relationship with my mum. We had both been through hell, but once I had my own room, our relationship became a lot more secure.

I'm very lucky to have been able to get an education in my thirties and now run my own freelance writing business, Word Magick. However, the feeling that I was once one of life's losers has never completely left me. That has definitely made me more determined to succeed.

HUGO SUGG

I plucked up the courage to leave an unhealthy relationship with an older man shortly after my 18th birthday. I stayed with someone I thought was a friend, but unfortunately he assaulted me while I was asleep in a completely unprovoked attack. I didn't even know what was going on at the time, and it was totally unexpected. He was arrested and jailed, and I was left homeless.

I spent the period between November of 2008 and January of 2009 sofa-surfing, with no stable accommodation. My friends were very supportive, but I still felt under an extreme amount of pressure and had to leave college because of the stress. The upside to this was that it gave me more time to concentrate on gaining permanent accommodation. I asked a local charity called the Supported Housing for Young People's Project (SHYPP) for help, and they supported me both physically and psychologically. They offered me places to stay when my friends couldn't put me up, and provided food and counselling.

One night, I was unable to find anyone to stay with and ended up sleeping in a cash point lobby. I had no covers to provide me with warmth, and it was the scariest night of my life. During all the time that I was homeless, I felt a constant urge to commit suicide. I would walk across a bridge over a river several times a day, imagining throwing myself off it into the water. I genuinely felt as if I wanted to end my life.

Fortunately, after a while, the SHYPP helped me get housed in supported accommodation. Around three days after moving in, I had a breakdown, which was clearly a result of all the stress that I'd been under. My hair started falling out, I couldn't eat, I found myself unable to get out of bed and wanted to kill myself. These feelings of despair and severe depression continued for nine months after I got housed, but luckily eventually subsided. The horrors of being homeless still haunt me today, although I have grown stronger and more able to deal with them. I wouldn't wish homelessness on anyone, as it was degrading and soul destroying.

David Tovey is currently designing clothes for Hopeful Traders, a company that collaborates with homeless-affected artists, and Hugo Sugg is running a homelessness awareness campaign.

@Nickchesterv

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Maester Aemon, elder brother to Aegon "Egg" Targaryen of Dunk and Egg non-fame. Photo courtesy of HBO

Season six of Game of Thrones is the beginning of the end. Although HBO would be thrilled to see the show bring them subscribers galore into perpetuity, show creators David Benioff and D. B. Weiss have made it clear that they are not going to extend this show forever. Including the ten episodes of the current season, which premiered last night, there are 23 hours left (which might, to be fair, take us three years to reach). George R. R. Martin has long promised us it will be "bittersweet" at best, which seems his way of saying it's going to be brutal, not that that's any departure from the first five seasons of the show, where at any point you may be flayed, skull-crushed, or crossbowed on the john.

So even as the new season takes us in exciting new directions—a shift from war among kings to looming conflicts among queens (Cersei, Daenerys, Sansa, Margaery Tyrell, and Ellaria Sand)—and we brace for the death of any likeable character on the show, there's reason to be optimistic about future stories drawing from the rich history of Westeros and Essos. There have been no meaningful discussions about spin-offs yet, but in a recent interview, George R. R. Martin came up with an idea, saying, "The most natural follow-up would be an adaptation of my Dunk and Egg stories."

This is a great plan. The novellas are short chivalric romances that offer neat little stories against the wide backdrop of the history of Westeros. They deploy familiar storytelling elements, are filled with excellent action set pieces, and center around two fun characters. In fact, the humor in the first episode of last night's season premiere displays the promise of lighter, less self-aggrandizing fare, set in this world. The banter between the Onion Knight Ser Davos and Aliser Thorne, Jon Snow's murderer, in which Davos orders mutton in the middle of a tense negotiation, reminded me of everything I liked about the character. Similarly, the Dothraki debate on "what is the best in life" ends far too soon. The show needs humor to offset the portentous threats and prophecies. In Dunk and Egg, such light banter would accompany the jousts, duels, romance, feasts, and even that most deadly of Westerosi traditions—a wedding.

These stories follow the adventures and education of Ser Duncan the Tall—"Dunk"—and the young Prince Aegon Targaryen—"Egg." Fans of the show first heard of Egg when Maester Aemon revealed his identity as a Targaryen to Jon Snow at the end of the first season. (Aemon was Aegon's elder brother. Aemon refused the throne and joined the Night's Watch to avoid any potential conflict over the throne.) In the books, both Dunk and Egg show up from time to time in references to the many rebellions and wars over the Iron Throne. The first novella, The Hedge Knight, follows Duncan, an orphan from Flea Bottom in King's Landing who became a squire to an itinerant, low-status knight. It opens as he buries his former master, takes his armor, and heads to a nearby tournament to make his fortune. On the way, he acquires a stable boy as his squire, and together the big teenager and slender boy wander through the tournament and festival grounds replete with princes and lords, whores and armorers, and a particularly comely puppeteer. There's fighting and politics, a nasty Targaryen embracing his inner Joffrey, and a trial by combat. In the end, Dunk and Egg reject offers of comfortable life in a castle, and instead head off to their next adventure. Dunk thinks that through this travel, he can teach Egg to be a good prince who treats people honorably.

The second book, The Sworn Sword, finds the pair in service to a very poor local knight who runs afoul of the richer neighbor, the Red Widow. Here, the story turns on questions of history and loyalty. What does it mean to be truly loyal to one's liege lord? In the third book, The Mystery Knight, another tournament beckons, this one replete with secret identities, the economics of tournament gambling, and a dragon's egg. Martin has said that he's mapped out six to 12 more stories detailing the adventures of the pair as they head towards their destiny. Egg will become King Aegon V and Dunk will be his Lord Commander of the King's Guard. Not bad for an orphan from Flea Bottom.

The novellas are not especially original, but as I said about Star Wars last winter, originality is highly overrated. They conform to expectations in precisely the ways that A Song of Ice and Fire does not. Martin famously launched into his series with the desire to avoid rags-to-riches clichés, but rather created elite powerful families and slammed them into internecine conflict. Martin gave us a classic hero, Ned Stark—then killed him. Martin gave us an elder son to avenge his father's death, Rob Stark, and then offed him, too. In contrast, Dunk comes from poverty and rises to great heights through both the strength of his arms and his good character, a story you've heard plenty of times before. The first novella especially, like the Heath Ledger movie A Knight's Tale, both play around the rich cultural legacy of chivalric romance.

Egg's trajectory, meanwhile, kept reminding me of Wart in The Sword in the Stone, book one of T. H. White's classic retelling of the King Arthur myth, in which Merlin teaches the future king to be a good person and ruler. Thanks to his education, Arthur became a good and just king. Similarly, thanks to his time as Egg, Aegon did everything possible to make his kingdom more just, especially for the peasantry. He even allowed his children to marry for love, rather than for politics.

Alas, like Camelot, it's all going to end in fire. Both Martin and White are, in fact, extremely interested in the corrupting nature of power (as were plenty of medieval writers of romance). When power derives from force of arms and status of birth, inequality and injustice necessarily increase. That's why, like last night's episode, each of the novellas begin with dead bodies: Dunk's master, random criminals, accused traitors in the books; Jon Snow and Myrcella Baratheon (Jamie's and Cersei's poisoned daughter) in the show. Students of Westerosi history will know that Aegon was a good king. For his efforts, his lords rebelled to protect their power over the peasantry, his good children abandoned their duties for love, and he was left with only the "mad king" Aerys to succeed him. In Westeros, death wins, regardless of good intent. After all, as the meme says, "What part of valar morghulis (everybody dies) did you not understand?

Follow David on Twitter.

Photo by Miguel Rosan/Getty Images

For many African Americans, recent allegations of child molestation against Afrika Bambaataa are deeply unsettling, and not just because they suggest abuse of the lives and bodies of innocent children. The accusations also represent an attack on a hero of the black community, a man generally regarded as a godfather of hip-hop culture. Compared with the Bill Cosby rape saga, there are real differences in scale of the alleged crimes on one hand, and the nature of the celebrity's star power on the other, but it's fair to say some of the same alarm bells are going off in black communities across America.

It should come as no surprise that the social malaise of sexual abuse is colorblind, even if white males are more likely to be perpetrators of sexual assault. Famed Hollywood figures Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, and Bryan Singer have been the subject of disturbing accusations of child sexual abuse over the years, but as Molly Lambert recently wrote for MTV News, "Bambaataa's position is more tenuous... because he is not protected financially or insulated from the backlash" in the way many white men are.

As a survivor of child sexual abuse myself, which began at the age of 13 at the hands of a trusted member of the clergy, the accusations against Bambaataa are less shocking to me than the fact that our society continues to ignore the prevalence of child molestation. And there appears to be a willful blindness, in particular, when that abuse targets young boys.

At issue in the allegations against Bambaataa is the statute of limitations in New York State. Despite its reputation as a center of liberal progressive politics, New York has the dubious distinction of having one of the most restrictive limitations on child sexual abuse—on par with that of Mississippi and Alabama. Victims can only sue until they reach the age of 23, and children who allege abuse in public institutions, like schools or foster care, are forced to file an "intent to sue" within 90 days of the original incident.

Ronald Savage, the New York native who was the first to bring claims of sexual assault against Bambaataa earlier this month—at least three others have since come forward—is sharing his story, in part, to bring attention to the statute and boost efforts to overturn it.

"I think the statute of limitations is unfair for victims," Savage told the Daily News. "It took me all of these years to speak about this. I was embarrassed. I was ashamed."

Given the psychological and emotional toll—and time—it takes for a child to admit to being abused, the restrictive statute seems to this survivor like a prima facie case of a law doing more to protect the perpetrator than the victim.

Bambaataa's accusers also seem to offer some insight into the suffering, in silence, of young black boys who are molested, raped, or sexually exploited. That image is not one with which American society in general, or the African American community in particular, has been forced to contend with any frequency.

Our media generally frames victims of sexual abuse as white and female. And the national discourse on the subject of molestation and rape is largely within a heteronormative paradigm. The concept of male-on-male child sexual abuse is seen as something that rarely happens; when it does, the perpetrator is often dismissed as a sexually deviant recluse.

The idea of mainstream, straight-identified men—prominent, successful ones, even—molesting young boys is still deemed an anomaly. That misconception may prove all the more confounding for young black boys in a society in which role models are hard to come by.

In 2013, Rutgers University research found that young black boys—regardless of sexual orientation—feel tremendous pressure to grow up and become strong black men who are "armored to battle racism and social barriers with a veneer of hyper-masculinity." The pressure to be tough, in control, and emotionally stoic is heightened, and in a society that has often rendered African American males invisible—that is, reduced to stereotypes and caricatures—it becomes increasingly burdensome for them to admit to being violated in the most intimate and intense ways fathomable.

Savage's tears, as he described to a New York tabloid his struggles with suicidal thoughts and an inability to maintain intimate relationships, seem to me a legitimate glimpse into emotional scars that never heal.

Q-Tip and Afrika Bambaataa on November 11, 2011, in New York City. (Photo by Johnny Nunez/WireImage)

For his part, Bambaataa's attorney released a statement to Rolling Stone, insisting the allegations represent a "reckless disregard for the truth" and are being made by "a lesser-known person seeking publicity." Savage has since responded that he is not looking for a financial settlement, but instead seeks relief from the dark secrets that have haunted him. Another (so far anonymous) accuser bolstered Savage's claims when he told the same paper, "I know what Ronald Savage is saying is true because did it to me."

Another young man, Hassan Campbell, called Bambaataa "a pervert" and remembers being abused as early as 12 years old. For Campbell, the hip-hop icon served as a father figure before the abuse began.

This is the sad truth at the heart of these allegations: Afrika Bambaataa's legendary stature in the community meant people trusted him—a trust he had earned, but it appears may have also betrayed.

Bambaataa, 59, was born Kevin Donovan and grew up in the Bronx River Projects. He became a successful gang leader, but he famously sought a new path after a trip to Africa as a young man. That began with changing his name and disavowing a life of crime and violence, after which he turned to music and DJing—forming what is now the Universal Zulu Nation (UZN). His 1982 song "Planet Rock" and the 1986 album of the same name remain seminal works in the foundation of modern-day hip-hop music and culture. UZN has branches worldwide, spreading not only hip-hop musically, but also messages of empowerment, non-violence, community, and support for the rights of indigenous peoples.

Such is the dilemma for victims of powerful men: In the mind of a child, it is almost impossible to comprehend, let alone confront, the duality of being outwardly good while committing unconscionable evil.

Black Sexual Abuse Survivors (BSAS) is an online support network that allows victims and survivors to share their stories. Dwight, a 36-year-old musician living in Florida and active in the group's online forum, told me about his experience in light of the accusations against Bambaataa. Though he did not feel comfortable sharing his last name, he claims he was molested by a well-known minister in Philadelphia and Delaware, beginning when he was 11 years old. Dwight says state officials initially pursued charges when he was 15, but that the case was dropped for lack of physical evidence.

"As a musician, I have always admired Afrika Bambaataa, but when I read stories like those of the men accusing him, I see myself. I believe in my heart they are telling the truth, because as a survivor, I am finally telling my own."

Meanwhile, the truth remains elusive. Following the initial allegations, Bambaatta has doubled down on his assertion that the claims are false and suggested they're part of a larger plot against him. But due to the restrictive statute of limitations, no criminal trial is possible to bring evidence or discovery that might unveil what happened so many years ago. Perhaps, for this reason, we as a society must ask if the law is designed to protect the innocence of children or the deviance of perpetrators.

As Toni Morrison famously wrote, referring to the violent rape of a young black girl in The Bluest Eye, "We acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live. We are wrong, of course, but it doesn't matter. It's too late... much, much, much too late."

Edward Wyckoff Williams is a television producer, correspondent, and writer living in New York City. Follow him on Twitter.

Cartoonist Chester Brown's self-illustration. All images courtesy Chester Brown

Creating a 270-page comic book about why Jesus "thought prostitution was a good thing" is typical Chester Brown: total nerd. Total shit-disturber. Zero fucks given.

When family members and survivors of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School filed suit against Bushmaster in December 2014, it seemed a lot like a lost cause. After all, a 2005 federal law called the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) was designed to prevent people from holding gun manufacturers accountable for wrongful deaths. Even last week, when a Connecticut judge shot down a motion to dismiss the suit, experts said she was just delaying an inevitable dismissal later down the line.

But then last Tuesday, that same judge, Barbara Bellis, of Connecticut's Superior Court, issued another ruling that determined the suit would be more than symbolic. Specifically, she said the discovery process could begin immediately and set a tentative trial date for April 3, 2018. A jury hearing the case would be historic, but Katherine Mesner-Hage, an attorney for the plaintiffs, says that getting the gun company to open its books for discovery is arguably just as huge.

That's because she and her co-council have constructed a creative PLCAA exemption, claiming, in essence, that the gun Adam Lanza used in the Sandy Hook massacre was specifically marketed as a killing machine. As part of discovery, they'll dig through the gunmaker's internal company memos and try to prove that the company was negligent.

I spoke to Mesner-Hage about how the gun industry became so protected from civil suits, what she and the other lawyers for the Sandy Hook survivors hope to find in discovery, and how their legal strategy is similar to the one used against Big Tobacco in the 90s.

VICE: What are you hoping to find in discovery that will be such a big deal?
Katherine Mesner-Hage: We're looking for documents, and we're looking to depose key people at Remington especially, but also at the distributor and the retail level. We're asking for internal memos about how to market the AR-15 and how to market specifically the patrolman's carbine, which is the one that Adam Lanza used.

We want to depose the head of marketing. We want to talk to the people at the company who are making the decisions about marketing. That's how we build our case, although the marketing speaks for itself on one level. This is our chance to kind of peel back the curtain and see what's really going on. One of the things about discovery in general is that you don't know what you're looking for before you start.

Has any other case against a gun company gotten to the discovery stage since PLCAA was passed? What are the broader implications of this recent decision?
I can't think of any case that's gotten to the point in which discovery was open in the post-PLCAA era. For the most part, the answer is no. You get thrown out on a motion to dismiss. A handful of cases, or less, have gone all the way. I'm not sure if you know about the case in Wisconsin that got a verdict in 2015.

The one where two officers were shot?
Yes, exactly, the Badger case in which someone got a weapon through a straw sale. That's when you buy a gun for someone who can't have one. And if the store has reason to know they're participating in a straw sale, that can give rise to a cause of action that is not barred by PLCAA. So, random trivia, but the lawyer representing the gun store in that case is representing Remington in our case.

Wow. Let's talk about your strategy: Is yours the first case to consider the marketing materials of the gun companies a cause for action?
Yes. That definitely doesn't have any post-PLCAA predecessor. And certainly nothing has gotten to open discovery. So I think it's safe to say some extremely passionate, articulate Democratic representatives and senators speaking out against the bill and describing exactly how unprecedented it was and how it would shut the courthouse doors to so many deserving plaintiffs. But they were outnumbered.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

All images courtesy of Film911.net

A handsome blonde man lies on a gurney with his medical gown pulled up over his hairy, distended belly. His legs are propped up and covered by a sheet. He rubs the thatch of fur over his abdomen and then suddenly perks up. "Oh, I can feel you moving inside of me," he says to the imaginary baby in his non-existent uterus. "You really want to get out of there, don't you?" In just a few moments, this same man will give birth to his child, which is a not especially lifelike doll.

Someone, somewhere, is masturbating to this scene.

Like many of the videos on Film911.net, a site devoted to only the most special of specialty porn, this one features no nudity, no dongs, no anal, and no money shots (unless you count the man finally popping out a baby after 20 minutes of straining a money shot).

MPREG, as the genre of pregnant man erotica is known, is just one of many incredibly niche categories at Film911.net. Others genres include "heartbeat" videos, where a shirtless dude runs on a treadmill and then viewers hear his racing heart through a stethoscope. There's "vore," short for carnivore, where one hungry dude pretends to swallow another dude whole and let him live in his stomach before "vomiting" him back up alive so we can see that he survived the ordeal, Jonah in the whale style. The " stuffing" series features models, often shirtless, being forced to eat large quantities of food and then showing off the burrito babies in their bellies. "Inflation" videos show guys blown up like hot air balloons with their bellies sticking out. Finally, there are "belly button worship" and "gut punching," both of which are exactly what they sound like. All of these genres are safe for work.

Jay*, the founder of Film911, admits there aren't a ton of gay guys who are into scenes of manly men sprouting baby bumps. Still, he says the site turns a tidy profit, at least in part because of its niche offering. People who want to watch a dude get his belly button played with for minutes on end aren't always able to find a scene to their liking on more mainstream tube sites, and so they will happily pay 911Films between $15 and $20 to download a single video. (There are also a few extended edits that include nudity and jerking off for a slight upcharge.) Even though the number of paying customers is only in the hundreds, ponying up that money for each new scene eventually adds up. Jay releases something in one of his categories about every other week.

According to Jay, the appeal of these types of videos comes from an attraction to domination. "It's the idea of someone dominating someone else," he told VICE. "There is a lot of domination and submission. The vore videos aren't about cannibalism, they're about swallowing someone whole, which is a way of dominating them. The pregnancy thing is different altogether but the CPR series with the gut punch videos, I think there is that element happening in those videos as well."

The company started about three years ago when Jay realized "There was no content out there catering to what I'm into. I own a production company, so why don't I produce content geared toward what I'm into?" Jay owns a "regular" film business, but started making his own videos for Film911 in 2013 with models he found on Craigslist, through amateur modeling sites, and through recommendations from friends. He says he gets lots of attractive, muscular straight guys to be in his films who wouldn't otherwise do porn. They don't mind pretending to be swallowed whole as long as they can keep their clothes on and don't have to touch another dick.

Overhead is kept low by doing the shoots mostly in Jay's house, and he started co-starring in some of the videos to keep costs down. However, he's reinvested in the business, buying tons of sets and props, especially of the medial variety for the MPREG and heartbeat videos.

Jay initially marketed his videos directly to fetish communities through message boards, selling each scene piecemeal, but eventually built his website as a hub for all the different wares. As the site grew, more and more people with more and more odd sexual appetites approached him about making movies. "I had never heard of these things before, but when people told me what they were into, I was like, 'Wow that's different,'" Jay says. "There are certain people who tell me their ideas and send me their scripts and feedback all the time. I'm very connected to them and they've driven the business in the right direction."

The scripts for the scene aren't written out word for word, but Jay or one of his fetishy collaborators will come up with scenarios and then the actors improvise from there.

"I guess it's just like any acting skill," Conner, who stars in one of the most popular pregnancy videos on the site, says about pretending he's going to give birth or that he just got swallowed by another swole bro. Conner works with Jay on his legit film business as well, but when he showed his boss how well he could push out his stomach, he was immediately hired to star in racier fare. Conner, who is gay, is often the man found worshiping muscles and belly buttons on Film911.

Like most businesses, in the fetish porn world one has to evolve or die, and so Jay is currently branching out into new areas. One of his models recently lost a leg in a motorcycle accident and approached Jay about making some amputee fetish films. He's going to produce a few and see how they perform.

According to the internet's informal Rule 34, if you can dream something up, there is porn of it. And as long as there are people thinking about how sexy stethoscopes are and how they wish they could live inside a dude's ripped stomach for a few minutes, they'll be able to find that porn on Film911.

Follow Brian Moylan on Twitter.

At their request, Jay and Conner's last names have been withheld.

Keep out. All photos by John Howard

It's no secret that the American military is a fairly messed up institution. If it's not being exposed for failing to combat the high rates of sexual assault and rape of female officers in the Oscar-nominated documentary The Invisible War, it's being investigated for concealing the deaths of multiple civilians in Afghanistan during the US occupation of the country (read Jeremy Scahill's book Dirty Wars if you're interested in that one).

Yet, even with such a sullied reputation, it may come as a shock to learn that, in 1966, the American military accidentally dropped four atomic bombs on Spain, but managed to minimise the incident to the extent that it's been virtually washed clean from history. A mixture of savvy PR from the US government and patchy reporting from international media means that most of us don't even know it happened.

So here's what happened: on the 17th of January, 1966, a US B52 bomber collided with a refuelling aircraft in Spanish airspace. The crash meant that four hydrogen bombs were dropped. Two hit the ground at speed, imploding and releasing plutonium into the soil of the Andalusian town of Palomares. Meanwhile, parachutes were deployed on the other two bombs. One hit the ground without detonating and the other landed in the Mediterranean Sea still intact.

Professor John Howard is an American academic, author and photographer. He has spent the last five or so years travelling to Palomares in order to document the remains of the nuclear disaster with his camera. While he can't physically photograph the remains of the plutonium – despite the fact it still sits within the soil – he instead captures the ramifications of this military nightmare on the people, economy and landscape of Palomares.

Howard's project, entitled "White Sepulchres", was released as a full body of work earlier this year. It tells the story of the cover up and impact of the bombs through its eerie, desolate imagery, which stands in contrast to the visceral and violent images we might have seen of Chernobyl or Fukushima. We spoke to John about one of the forgotten stories of warfare in the 20th century.

Animals still graze in the affected fields

VICE: Hi John. Do you want to start by telling us how you came across the story of Palomares to begin with?
John Howard: Well, I first travelled to Andalusia in 1993, but I didn't hear about this incident until 2010. I would hear the briefest mention on the wind, and it was always imprecise. I just followed; it was like detective work. As I found out more, I became hugely angry and ashamed that I had no knowledge of it. As an American citizen by birth and an American historian by training, it was really galling. The more I looked into the bombing, the more I found further levels of concealment.

How did America cover it up?
These events are called "broken arrows". That's the code name when the US government loses or breaks a hydrogen bomb. This guy in John Woo's film Broken Arrow says, "I don't know what's scarier – losing nuclear weapons, or that it's happened so often there's actually a code name for it."

Wow.
The US admit to 32 of these "broken arrows". Eric Schlosser, an investigative journalist, estimates 100 for the 1950s alone, and for the US Air Force alone, claiming that the navy and army failed to keep track. The template for US defence in the case of a "broken arrow" is to deny, and if people find out, to minimise. This means they forever belittle the event of Palomares in their reports – "tiny little village", "sleepy". Journalists were using these demeaning, trivialising discourses, too. They were shot right through all the narratives.

Farming on radioactive soil

Didn't people notice a huge explosion at the time?
Well, one thing is crucial to understanding the US response to the incident. The bomb that landed in the Med, it took them 80 days to get it out. They brought in 32 ships, closed the sea shore. People couldn't fish – some people starved. This bomb became the object of international press attention, and very cunningly, the Air Force told navy photographers to give the press images. The thinking was to give journalists something of interest so as to shift the attention away from the land to the sea. That bomb became the lost bomb – singular – and it worked brilliantly. Then President Lyndon B Jonhson's Spanish ambassador even went swimming in the Mediterranean to prove its safety – it was the front page of the New York Times.

Why do people in Andalusia not speak about it more today?
People with financial interests in the area – wealthy people, landholders who still have agriculture there – they don't want their migrant farm workers to know they are harvesting soil that contains plutonium. Nowadays, there's also a tourism industry, and the proprietors of those venues don't want visitors to know that thousands of barrels of hot soil were filled and then shipped away for burial. Actually, not all of it was shipped away – some of it was left there and buried; a literal cover up.

What is that hazard exactly? What are the health risks from an accident like this?
We don't know how much plutonium lives on. Some have estimated that ten kilos of plutonium were spilled. To put that into perspective, one milligram of plutonium in your lung will give you lung cancer. So that's the level of severity. If a kilo or two is still on the ground, then anyone could inhale it on the wind. We know plutonium is in the food chain, but ingestion isn't as severe as inhalation, which they say is a guarantee of lung cancer. I'm not only worried about the people who have lived in Palomares a long time, but the people who pass through, who will never be told.

As agriculture has declined, the town has become a hotspot for nudism

Has anyone charted the long-term health effects?
They haven't, apart from a 150-person subset who used to have to get on the bus every year and go to Madrid for tests. They're still monitored. But because there was an exodus of half the population – 1,000 people moved away – it's hard to systematically get at their medical records. We know some people have died, we know about a leukaemia case and miscarriages. But there's little incentive for authorities to track this long-term. I think we need international, multilateral action; something like the International Court of Justice, or even the ICRP – International Commission on Radioactive Protection. The US have handled this badly for decades, Spain have, too – partly because they were in the throes of a dictatorship when it happened. So it needs to be done by a reliable international body.

Does Palomares still export produce?
Yeah. At the time the accident happened, the Germans and the UK were talking about how a lot of their produce comes from this area, but then six consecutive tomato harvests failed on the land, so the agricultural economy slowed. Now, they farm there again.

Couldn't this project end up having an effect on all that?
I'm ambivalent. Do I bring up the bombing and risk agricultural markets collapsing again? No. And yet I'm worried about those migrant workers, hands in the soil, kicking up dirt. They have the greatest likelihood of inhaling plutonium. And five years down the line, if they get cancer, we don't necessarily know where they are going to be. So attribution becomes very difficult.

A local gay club

How has the incident changed the economy in Palomares over the last 50 years?
A sex industry has sprung up for the economy. This is a destination of last resorts for nudists, the LGBT community and straight swingers. There are sex worker's adverts on telephone poles. It's a rural sex district all around the periphery of Palomares. There's a cruising ground and people come from other parts of Spain. There's one four-star nudist hotel and their menus are in four languages – German, French, English, Spanish – so they are very much catering to an international clientele. There's a drag club, the name of which translates as "Who Cares?" – a reflection on that, "Fuck, it we're gonna die anyway" attitude.

Unsold apartment blocks

In terms of the photos, was it hard to decide what to photograph? You were really capturing a sense of absence, so how did you decide what to shoot?
It's probably my foremost regret around the project that there were not more portraits. I'm very careful around consent with portraiture – I only got portraits of people I knew well for that reason. I shot at an angle or distance to ensure the anonymity of the farm workers, for example. Approaching them in the field would have created problematic discussions with overseers. I was documenting something not visible to the naked eye, so I suppose I was looking for poignant traces. The swingers club, the gay bar, the drag bar – they speak for themselves in their audacity.

Were you ever concerned for your health going to Palomares and doing the story?
Initially yes, but I dispensed with it. I decided the importance of getting the word out was more important.

Thanks, John.

@MillyAbraham

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If you're a screenwriter, and you have a question about science, you can call (844) NEED-SCI. Whether your question is about black holes, time travel, evolutionary biology, or brain surgery, Rick Loverd, or one of his colleagues at the Science and Entertainment Exchange, will answer the phone, and connect you with a scientist who is willing to inject a little bit of real-world accuracy into your movie, TV show, video game, or other entertainment property. And it's all free.

It's hard to say what's most puzzling about this service, which launched in 2008: That filmmakers would want it to exist, that scientists would be willing to help out the world's biggest sources of scientific misinformation, or that someone would pay for it to exist without asking Hollywood for anything in return.

But Loverd would push back on all these points: "Filmmakers operate in a world of a lot more structure than people give them credit for, scientists are a lot more creative than people give them credit for," he told me. And as for being free, he explained that the nonprofit aspect of his parent organization, the National Academy of Sciences, is "what makes us so powerful."

Souvenirs from the Science and Entertainment Exchange's many consulting projects

Loverd told me today the majority of requests come via email. The number is still accessible, but the phone it's connected to only rings about once a day.

As it happens, I need this kind of help. Something I do other than write articles on the internet is write screenplays, and one of them recently sold. I'm not allowed to give away plot details now, but I will say it's a thriller that takes place in the not-too-distant-future, and it's about people fighting for control of a biochemical agent with very specific properties: it has to be powerful, have a certain half-life, and must blow up under certain circumstances.

Loverd was eager to help, but there was instantly a problem: a script like mine that's already headed for production is way past what Loverd calls "that moment when you've just had an idea and you're wondering how to outline it." In other words, bad science takes root early on, and cleaning that up can be messier than if the writer starts out with a sound scientific basis.

Unlike me, major Hollywood players have found (844) NEED-SCI at the right time. For instance, when Marvel's Thor was in its early stages, the filmmakers went to Loverd's organization for advice. Mind you, Thor is about a Norse god whacking monsters with a magical hammer, so science might seem like the last topic on a storyteller's mind—but not so with Marvel. "They were looking forward already and thinking about The Avengers," Loverd said. So they needed a "grounded, plausible reason," for that Norse god to ever hang out with Tony Stark.

The team assembled by Loverd, which included physicist Sean Carroll, cooked up the canonical compromise you see in the Marvel movies. Inspired by the famous Arthur C. Clarke quote, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," they rethought all of Norse mythology as alien technology. "If you were a viking subsistence fisherman, on the shores of Norway in 900 AD, and Thor and his friends come down to hide the Tesseract on Earth, and you saw them, you would think they were gods. What they were was a very advanced race of people," he said. At one point in the finished film, Natalie Portman's character paraphrases Clarke, saying "magic's just science we don't understand yet."

My information being added to the (844)NEED-SCI computer system

I asked Loverd to place my request in the (844) NEED-SCI system, and connect me with a scientist. The internal filing system for connecting projects to scientists was impressive. Searching any topic of interest to a screenwriter—biotechnology in my case—produced an instant cornucopia of geniuses. 2,065 of them, to be exact–all of whom had been vetted.

Not long after, noted biotechnologist Andrew Hessel was on the phone with me, and he was more than happy to talk to me about my screenwriting problem. I described it in detail, along with the fictional future world in which my fictional biochemical existed. And then I was in for a scientific ass-kicking.

"That's a stretch. In terms of just... physics," Hessel told me. "You're essentially creating something that doesn't exist in nature." But more than taking an issue with the central plot device in my movie, he simply didn't buy my fictional future, saying, "I think that premise is garbage."

Loverd, holding his organization's promotional Erlenmeyer flask

Reeling, I asked him to help me sort things out and get on a better footing. He told me it was going to be tough to do that in just one phone call. "If you really want to go into any kind of explanation—which you don't in a movie—it would require a few days of pulling papers to kind of give you a foundation," he said.

Without going into too much detail, Hassel streamlined some unnecessary aspects of my fictional invention, and schooled me on futurism. Without calling for changes to the plot of my movie, he pointed out some unnecessary bells and whistles in my idea that might send any real chemists in the audience into a rage. I said I'd see about trimming the unnecessary parts. "Just tweaking that chemistry would be kind of interesting, so you can make this work," Hessel said.

When all was said and done, we found common ground. "I really like this," he told me, adding, "there is some bizarre chemistry, but it's not super crazy."

According to Loverd's assessment of a typical consult, mine may have gotten more tough love than is typical. Ideally, he told me, "it's a little bit like taking an improv class." By contrast, mine was downright contentious for a few moments when Hessel felt like my movie misinformed people about climate change. But I had asked for his honest opinion, and when I stopped being defensive, positive results followed.

Scientists of good standing within their communities have every reason to be tough on screenwriters, and discourage them from playing fast-and-loose with the facts. For the scientist, Loverd told me, there's a "nightmare" scenario, in which a writer "misinterprets or outright manipulates the science that you give them," and that even worse would be if that writer, "takes it a step further to tell the world that you're the person that gave them that information."

Still, Loverd says he doesn't have a specific goal in mind. Screenwriters are under no pressure to reach a standard for scientific accuracy, and Loverd knows each project has different demands. His guiding philosophy is just to "create the community, and good stuff will happen."

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Kim Barker at maternal mortality class in Ghani Khel, Afghanistan by Kuni Takahashi

Tyrannical despots, vast quantities of narcotics, women seen as second-class citizens: it's hard to imagine how reporting on the war in Afghanistan could have prepared Kim Barker for Hollywood. But since her 2011 memoir The Taliban Shuffle was adapted by Tina Fey for her new film Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Barker has been getting a taste of the Hollywood lifestyle.

Barker's book is a frank, funny account of her time as a foreign correspondent in Afghanistan and Pakistan for the Chicago Tribune, and is a world away from traditionally macho blood-and-thunder frontline stories. Barker was always an unconventional war reporter, already in her thirties when the 9/11 attacks first inspired her to head overseas. She eventually worked her way up to the position of south Asia bureau chief, reporting on the the resurgence of the Taliban and painting a nuanced portrait of life in the two countries that took her from maternal health clinics to interviewing notorious warlord Pacha Khan Zadran. The book contrasts these scenes with the adrenaline-lust of journalists working in war zones and the manic lives they lead there. She describes wild parties at the "Fun House" where she lived and at the notorious L'Atmosphere bar.

These debauched nights are exuberantly recreated in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. The film wears a thin veil of fiction: Fey's character is a TV news anchor; her surname is "Baker" rather than "Barker"; Barker's friendship with documentary maker Sean Langan inevitably becomes a romance with a Scottish photographer played by Martin Freeman. But the absurd theatre of war it portrays is drawn directly from Barker's real-life journalistic experiences. As it becomes increasingly hard to get editors interested in Afghan stories, we see reporters go to ever more life-endangering lengths in search of an attention-grabbing scoop. It's a comedy with something serious to say about America's lack of interest in how its own wars are fought.

Here, Barker tells us how a prophetic New York Times review hooked Fey, what it's like watching a movie about your life and what donkey porn can tell us about democracy.

VICE: Hi Kim. You've seen unimaginable strife and tragedy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. What made you think: 'This war is going to make for a really funny book'?
Kim Barker: I wanted to write something that people would be able to read and not even realise that they were learning anything. I'm not going to pretend it's some great foreign policy book, but I think it gives people a good primer on Afghanistan and Pakistan and how we've got to the place we've got to.

In the book you write about how hard it was to convince editors to keep running stories from Afghanistan. Have we lost interest?
It was disheartening to be writing stories that you felt were really important but losing out to Iraq. You have that sense now that it's "last one out of Afghanistan, turn off the lights".

Do you think there's a lack of interest because it feels as though any change in the region was temporary?
I'm not saying nothing good has been done. There have been positive changes in Afghanistan. Having cell phones and the internet is a game changer for the media. It makes it really difficult to lock all that stuff out again like the Taliban did. You sense that if it could just get enough stability in time maybe things could change, but I don't know how long the West is interested in staying there. Things aren't going in a great direction. It's Afghanistan – and nobody wants to talk about Afghanistan.

Kim Barker in Kabul in June of 2005, Kuni Takahashi

The internet brought a certain amount of freedom, but you also stumbled across a hitherto untapped interest in donkey porn.
Yeah, when you looked in the internet cafés, the saved sites in the recent history were all porn, and bad porn: donkey porn. Folks who worked in offices had to have awkward conversations with their underlings about how you can't do that at work. People must have just been thinking: 'This exists, it's free, why not watch it all the time?' I did a lot of stories about what happens to a place where the West has been kept out, and the internet has been kept out, and then it all comes rushing in at the same time. In Afghanistan, you had folks equating democracy with freedom, sex, drugs, rock'n'roll, booze and doing whatever you want, without the more sober parts of a democracy, like voting, or what it means to be representative, or fighting corruption.

A New York Times review of your book said "she depicts herself as a sort of Tina Fey character". Then Fey made it into a movie. Was it that simple?
Apparently her people saw that mention so they got the book for her. She read it and within two weeks of the review coming out she had pushed Lorne Michaels and Paramount to option the book on her behalf. It really was that quick.

How involved were you in adapting it?
I met with the screenwriter Robert Carlock a few times, but I didn't get to look at the script. He told me from the beginning, "We've got to make this more Hollywood. It's not going to be exactly what you wrote – you understand that, don't you?"

I said: "Of course! You're probably going to give me a love interest, like make me have a relationship with the Sean character, right?" and he goes: "Yeah, we're going to have that be a romance."

Sean and I knew that if they ever made a movie out of this they would do that. It's fine, we're really good friends. Eventually they sent me the script but they told me I couldn't change anything.

Tina Fey and Martin Freeman in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

That sounds torturous.
Yeah, so I didn't read it! If I can't change it, why would I waste my time and stress out about something that I know is going to be fictionalised? My friend Rachael read it and said: "It's going to be a good movie, but you're not going to like the fact that they make you seem heroic." I'm totally not heroic. I'm anti-heroic, more than anything. I love the fact that the Kim Baker character in the movie runs towards the explosion. I would be going in the other direction, because I want to live.

Were you relieved they didn't make it a straight rom-com?
Yeah. I deliberately wrote a book that is not Eat Pray Love. That comparison pisses me off. Do women not get more than one adventure story? Eat Pray Love is a fine book, but I hate the narrative that you go to find yourself in travel and you find out that what you really need is a man. Love is great, and men are great, and I'm not saying that's a horrible ending to have, but it wasn't the book's ending.

Did you visit the set?
I went on set for two days. They had me come out for the explosion at the beginning, and it was really tedious. I was saying: "Why didn't I come out for the journalist's party scenes!" I could be an extra. That I can do.

So the partying is pretty true to life?
Well, watching them I was thinking: 'We did not have cocaine out on tables like that. We would not be wasting any booze by pouring it around like that.' Booze was a very precious commodity, so you were always trying to conserve it. A £4 bottle of Jacob's Creek would go for £30 in Afghanistan. Our parties weren't quite that druggy, they probably were that boozy and there were crazy dance parties on Thursday nights. There was definitely one party – no, two parties, maybe three – that were interrupted by bombs outside. Everything just stopped and people said: "Right, time to go to work."

What was it like watching the film for the first time? Were you worried for your journalistic reputation if they made you look like a fool?
Yeah, can you imagine? It was stressful. It took me about half the movie to sink into it and accept it was a movie. Before that I was sat there thinking: 'True, true, partially true, false, that would never happen.' Eventually I got into it. I teared up once. I was happy that it's not just jokes all the time. I think it's Tina's best role. I'm not just saying that because she's playing me.

It's funny because of the absurdity of the situation rather than just gags.
I'm excited for the film to go to Britain, because there's more of a tradition of understanding the dark humour of war. Americans are a bit more serious: "You can't joke about war. There's nothing funny about war."

I think we're hardened to it because a lot of us were raised on stuff like the Blackadder series where they muck about in the trenches for six episodes and then at the end all go over the top.
Oh my god, I'm going to have to watch that. It's horrible to watch that as a child. We just had M*A*S*H, and none of the main characters died in that except for one of the colonels in a helicopter crash.

What do you want people to take from your book, and now the film?
If there's one thing it's that most people – Afghans, Syrians, Iraqis – just want peace. They want security and for their children to be able to go to school. Whenever I'm asked about my time there I always talk about the hospitality I was shown, even in bad situations. I was taken into cracked-walled homes and offered food and drink during Ramadan, in the middle of the day when they couldn't eat or drink anything. When I think about how we treat people here in my country, and this election season and the rhetoric that we hear, I wish everybody had seen the people I saw over there and had been treated with that hospitality.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is in cinemas now. Barker's memoir of the same name (originally The Taliban Shuffle) is published by Scribe Books.

@kevinegperry

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This article originally appeared on VICE Romania

I started taking these photographs with a clear concept in mind – I was looking to create funny images of loners at the beach, photographed in a way that would not encroach on their dignity. The first attempts took place last September, in the Romanian resort Mamaia. The month wasn't chosen at random: I wanted to document the Black Sea beaches in early fall. Traditionally, September is a time when the less well-off show up at the seaside, craving moments of tranquility – trying to avoid the swarms of tourists that appear when the place is actually in season.

Throughout the making of the series, I was met with the usual suspicious stares – in spite of the fact that I constantly wore a press badge in plain sight. Actually, now that I think about it – my nerdy badge might have been the reason behind those stares.

Scroll down for more of Cristian's photos:

Read: Stop Rebooting TV Shows, You Lazy Assholes

This article originally appeared on VICE US

The cast for the 2017 Twin Peaks revival on Showtime has been announced, and it is a long and inexplicable medley of indie rockers, 90s stars, and Michael Cera,Variety reports.

Trent Reznor, Eddie Vedder, Sky Ferreira, and Sharon Van Etten will be rubbing shoulders on set with a bizarre mish-mash of actors new to the Twin Peaks universe, like Jim Belushi, Tim Roth, Matthew Lillard, and Amanda Seyfried, as well as a bunch of returning alums like Kyle MacLachlan and Peggy Lipton, who played Norma.

The staggeringly large, 217-person cast list reads more like an invitation list to the 2007 VMAs, but at least its nice to see David Lynch bringing in some new actors to the bunch since the whole concept of seeing old cast members reprising their original roles years later sounds better in theory than practice.

David Lynch's new season, which will be brimming with cameos, is set to drop next year. Read the full cast list on Facebook and try to imagine Laura Dern in a cardigan playing the Log Lady or Michael Cera talking backwards in the Black Lodge or whatever.

San Zanobi by Sandro Botticelli. Immagine via Wikimedia Commons

This article originally appeared on VICE Italy

2016 is a Jubilee Year in Rome, which means that the Vatican is coming up with thousands of initiatives aimed at getting Italians more involved with the Catholic Church. Part of this effort was the announcement that Mother Teresa of Calcutta would be canonised as a saint, this coming September.

One fundamental prerequisite for becoming a saint is that the candidate has performed a miracle – one that is scientifically inexplicable. In Mother Teresa's case, her miracle was the healing of a man "suffering from a viral brain infection that resulted in multiple abscesses with hydrocephalus," say Church officials.

Whether an act is a scientifically inexplicable miracle is a question studied and decided by the medical board of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. I got in touch with a member of that board and asked him to explain how they separate the saints from the sinners. He is a doctor and wanted to remain anonymous.

VICE: What are scientifically inexplicable miracles?
Doctor: The miracles we study are always related to sick people, to an illness that has developed a certain way. We try to discern from a scientific perspective whether this development is abnormal. In other words, whether it completely differs from clinical records and from what the medical staff treating the illness had expected to happen.

The process starts when priests or nuns who performed miracles in their life, people who are beatified or are in some phase of beatification, are suggested for sanctification. But no more than a handful of miracles are accepted of all the potential saints nominated by the Roman curia each year. If they are accepted, it's announced during the High Mass at St. Peter's square by the Pope.

What's the difference between being beatified and sanctified?
Beatification is one level lower than sanctification. It's assumed that a blessed person has performed the miracle, but it's just an assumption. The issue is always approached with skepticism, and church officials are very critical: the process is so strict because they need to avoid false or hasty sanctifications. So it's an assumption that a beatified has performed a miracle – if it's on record that they've performed a hundred, that's a different story. But even in that case, if there's no backing by the scientific committee, the Church doesn't proceed with the sanctification process.

So for sanctification, scientific evidence weighs as heavily as faith.
Exactly, every evaluation must include a scientific analysis and a subsequent acceptance or refusal of the medical situation. But it also needs the religious incentive linking the phenomenon to the person's calling upon the gravely sick person. We analyse that.

When does your committee of scientists come in?
After Church officials put a candidate forward, they send off the medical records of the candidate's miracle case, along with reports from possible witnesses claiming that the act was a miracle. The Roman curia analyses it and, if it's accepted, that's when the medical tribunal comes in.

You've been part of that tribunal – is that right?
Yes, various times. The secretary of the Congregation for Saints brings together six or seven experts from different fields, as well as three prelates who represent the Roman curia – the secretary, the undersecretary and someone taking notes. At the centre of the room there's a lawyer representing the Vatican curia, a notary and another secretary who writes up a final declaration that must then be countersigned by all those present.

After that, the tribunal starts off with the first speaker – an expert on the case. This expert has studied all the supposed miracles, and has written a report on it. We're talking about a couple of thousand pages for each report. The expert will have read the medical records, and has studied how an illness has developed.

How many of the cases you've evaluated were miracles?
I have done it about 10 times now, and there has only been one time I had to conclude a case was scientifically inexplicable. I challenged the other nine. Those challenges have always been accepted by the cardinal and the archbishop within the Roman curia. Obviously, all the specialists present their own conclusions. I've been in some heated debates with other specialists when we'd accuse each other of being too gullible or not critical enough.

What criteria do you use to evaluate those cases?
I try to objectively evaluate all aspects of the illness – its symptomatology, patterns, the results of medical exams, applied therapies and the effect of the supposed miracle. After that, I look at if and how that outcome holds up today; the cases aren't presented a month after they happen, but five, six or even 10 years after they've first been reported. So we need to take into account how things have progressed since the miracle.

What are the most common illnesses that are cured by a miracle?
Well, of course you have accidents: People drowning, getting shot, electric shocks or struck by lightning – and surviving. And then there are illnesses people suffer from that, even when properly treated, worsen over time. Then, suddenly, someone seems cured. It isn't just about a life being saved because if you're saved but end up with half your body paralysed and in a wheelchair, it most certainly isn't a miracle.

Are the accepted miracles ever updated? A miracle that happened in the 15th century can probably be explained by science today.
We only consider cases that have been recorded since the 20th century – all the older cases are simply oral tradition. People saw something happen and say they witnessed it with their own eyes. We can't do anything with that.

Do you believe in miracles?
I've had to acknowledge that they exist. There have been a few rare cases that are just beyond skepticism or criticism or cynicism. There are cases that even today, in 2016, are 100 percent inexplicable from a medical point of view. There's just no escaping from it, how ever hard you try to find an explanation. A lot of those cases involve internal body organs: Something happens to them, and then the next day everything is as it was before – no scalpel marks, no stitches, nothing. How was that possible? It just isn't, scientifically speaking.

A screen from the still-very-much-in-development 'Project Arena' (courtesy of CCP)

Wii Sports is one of the greatest video games ever made. Shut up. Wii Sports is one of the greatest video games ever made. Beyond the amazing commercial performance of the Wii's killer app – it's the second highest selling game of all time, after Tetris – what it did was bring people to the medium who'd never considered enjoying it before. Out of their seats, into the moment – swinging and punching and laughing, be that alone or with friends. Its more passive events, like bowling, proved a hit in retirement homes, whereas there are fewer local multiplayer experiences in gaming quite so breathlessly stupid as stepping into the boxing ring beside a pleasantly pissed pal. Wii Sports appealed to every demographic, every age, every ability. Wii Sports was fucking genius.

Yeah, sure, it had its problems too. Nintendo's motion-control tech wasn't up to speed with its ambitions, for one thing. Nevertheless, its role in breaking movement-sensitive video gaming open to a huge audience was unprecedented. This was pre-VR VR, in a way – we turned on Wii Sports and willingly stepped into a reality that wasn't our own, yet bore recognisable similarities. We instinctively knew what to do, how to play these games. And to me, that's something that's largely been lacking from the virtual reality experiences we're seeing on today's raft of new hardware.

I've played my share of them, from the skin-crawling horror of Capcom's Kitchen to the thrilling spaceship dogfighting of CCP's EVE: Valkyrie and onto the puzzle-solving of ustwo's Land's End and the engrossing drama of nDreams' The Assembly. Each is, in its own way, magical; but equally, they all directly appeal to existing gamers, an audience with previous experience of adventures within comparable, albeit 2D, fantasies. But now I've played the VR title that has the potential to do for this generation of gaming what Wii Sports did the previous one, smashing down the barriers of entry, turning what looks like a very closed-off sector of this industry, this culture, into a for-everyone proposition. And I cannot praise it highly enough.

"Being the breakthrough thing for VR right now is never the expectation, but it's certainly a hope, right?" So Adam Kraver tells me, during a break from watching people play his work. He's the architect programmer on Project Arena, a new suite of competitive VR games being developed at CCP's Atlanta studios. "A lot of people say that VR is an isolating experience; that it's closed off and whatnot. But when we started with VR, we were using version two Kinect cameras to incorporate full body integration, where you could bring people into the game with you. And all of a sudden it became this really social experience."

A "really social experience" is precisely what Project Arena, as it exists so far, is to me. At 2016's EVE Fanfest in Iceland, where hardcore players of CCP's sci-fi MMO come together to talk massive spaceships, interstellar coup d'etats and such like, two Project Arena experiences are on show, playable by press and regular punters alike. The feedback from all who step into both 'Volley' – a tennis-like game played using a circular net – and 'Brawl' – a Tron-recalling game in which two players throw points-scoring discs at one another while deflecting incoming ones from their rival with a gradually depleting energy shield – is unanimous: people are wild for this. I play both and don't stop smiling for three days; every reminder of my face-offs with another journalist brings a feeling of warm happiness bubbling up from the pit of my otherwise blackly cynical soul. I can't be sceptical about this, like I am so much VR. Project Arena works. CCP is sitting on a goddamn goldmine.

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"We brought 'Brawl' here last year, to Fanfest, and people loved the hell out of it," Adam continues. "We new then that we had something great, and we knew that once we had the (Oculus Rift) Touch controllers, we would be able to get something that felt like you were throwing it. Having a shield just feels fantastic – it links back to playing swords and shields when you were a kid, with a trashcan lid and a stick.

"Wii Sports and those Wii things were never an inspiration, because we came at this from another perspective. But the fact that people are having that kind of connection with it, and that resonance, is absolutely amazing."

Project Arena doesn't strike me as a home-based proposition. For one thing, its Vive set-up requires a lot of space, for the body-tracking tech to really work – and that needs doubling to go up against someone else in the same physical space. This is something that needs to live in places where people, lots of them, congregate. Leisure centres and cinema complexes; shopping malls and universities; airports and, naturally, arcades. As soon as you see this thing, you get it – this one is pretty much tennis, albeit with a glowing disc that you strike with a light paddle on the back of your forearm, arcing around a central "net"; that one is a corridor-set face-off where aggression and defence require careful balance. Both necessitate a degree of agility on the part of the participant – expect to sweat – but there's no reason why Project Arena can't expand its roster of playable options for less mobile people, just as Wii Sports offered.

This augmented video shows what it's like to play 'Brawl' in 'Project Arena'

"All of the design decisions revolve around the fact that we want this to be social, and that extends to being able to watch it and immediately know what's going on," Adam says. "We've done a lot of experiments on the game modes – we've made several iterations of 'Brawl'. At the beginning, we had two incentives, or goals. One, it had to play great, and be fun to play; but also, two, when watching it, spectating, it had to make sense, and create drama. And that's what's exciting here – seeing two people in the game, with the fluid motion, ricocheting the disc, and then looking at the people outside the game watching on the big screen and recognising when there's likely to be a scoring moment. There are shouts, hoots and hollers.

"We've received no mandate or anything saying that this has to fit the EVE universe. Really, our original mandate was to find out what the next thing in VR was, and then the thing after that. It was never: 'Go build us an EVE IP product.' But it's up to the powers at CCP as to whether or not they want to fit this into EVE. It might just be its own thing."

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I hope that it is. Skinning Project Arena to match the aesthetic of EVE, to plug directly into its universe, its 13-years-established lore, could put people off checking it out. I know I've never been tempted to try CCP's long-running multiplayer epic, and attending Fanfest doesn't change that feeling. Seeing those same uniforms, that same fantastical aesthetic, applied to what demands to be an incredibly inclusive product, could immediately alienate the curious coming from a non-gaming background. Wii Sports was simple to read and respond to, to move with, and as it stands Project Arena's two VR experiences are much the same: see projectile spinning before you, swipe it away with a sliced backhand, score a point.

More is needed between now and Project Arena reaching commercial availability, but one of those things isn't a cack-handed insertion into a world that already has enough spin-offs. Fingers crossed that CCP sees the value in stepping beyond what's made its name, forged its reputation, and cashes in on what is simply a fantastic advertisement for both the present power of VR, and its future potential.

@mikediver

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All photos by Kwele Serell

This article originally appeared on VICE US

Come on, guys. It's 2016. After going over this many, many, many times, we've all decided that wearing someone else's culture as a fashion statement shouldn't be a thing anymore. Some festivals have even gone so far as to ban headdresses.

Despite this, during Coachella this weekend, I saw a whole bunch of people wearing dashikis, bindis, cornrows, and headdresses. I wanted to know why people were still OK with wearing this stuff in the face of so much pushback. Did they feel conflicted about wearing it? Were they just unaware of the controversy? Or did they feel like it was a valid fashion choice—like the girl pictured above, sporting a headdress, who told me she absolutely did not feel weird about her outfit?

Here are some other people I encountered at Coachella who I asked to explain their questionable fashion choices.

VICE: Can you tell me what you have on?
It's a dashiki.

Do you feel weird about wearing it, because you're not black?
No. It's comfortable. I understand why somebody would wear this in the hot weather.

So that's why you're wearing this?
Yeah. Just because it's hot, and it's comfortable. It's artistic, too.

Can you guys tell me what you're wearing?
Girl 1: I'm wearing a very flowy shirt with some brown suede shorts. Very piratey. I'm kind of trying to go for that.
Girl 2: I'm wearing a long peach dress with a really warm sweater that has no sleeves, and some sandals that have really good arch support.
Girl 3: I'm wearing a romper with a bralette and some boots and a belt and like, five necklaces, and a scarf and a pound of glitter.

What about your hairstyles?
Girl 2: We've got some lovely cornrows going. All of us have cornrows.

Do you guys feel weird about wearing cornrows?
Girl 3: A little bit, just because I've never had this and I'm used to having my curly hair. It's out of my comfort zone, but I like it.

What about you?
Girl 2: I don't feel weird, no. I've had cornrows many times in my life. It's good, I like it. Really, I wore it this weekend not so much for any kind of statement but just to keep my hair out of my face and to keep it in one style for the whole weekend.

Related: Should you wear a Native American headdress to Coachella this year? Noisey made a handy flow chart.

What are you wearing today?
I'm wearing Free People. It's like a dress made out of gauze.

Do you have a Bindi on?
Yes, I do.

Do you feel weird about wearing a Bindi?
Honestly, I was a little skeptical at first because, you know, this is somebody else's culture. Projecting that and them not being comfortable with it is kind of strange.

Related: The Basic Bitch's Guide to Coachella

Can you tell me what you're wearing?
I'm wearing a dashiki. It's like my little African feel-good shirt. It's all easy breezy and I can dance real good in it.

Do you feel weird about what you're wearing?
I actually like to take pride in my clothing. Everybody thinks I'm cool. I can dance, and I feel funky in it. I put out good vibes and I feel good.

Tell me what you're wearing today.
Guy: A shirt?
Girl: Awesome clothing.

And why are you wearing this?
Guy: To... stay out of the sun?
Girl: And because it's comfortable.

Do you feel weird wearing what you're wearing at all?
Guy: No.
Girl: No. I feel free.

Follow Kwele Serell on Twitter.