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VICE MAGAZINE VOLUME 14 NUMBER 2 THE BORDERS ISSUE

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2016 Vol. 14 No. 2

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

VOLUME 14 NUMBER 2 FEATURES

26 CUTTINGS Two Artists Explore Visual Trickery Using Found Objects PHOTOS BY ANNIE COLLINGE AND SARAH MAY

36 MIGRANT HELL Bulgaria’s ATV-riding immigrant hunter is the face of Europe’s new right-wing vigilante movement.

BY AARON LAKE SMITH

44 AT THE GATE Entering Europe with the Last Refugees to Make the Aegean Crossing

BRIEFS

FIELD NOTES

NEWS / STATS / CULTURE

REVIEWS / COMMENTARY / EPHEMERA

10 MASTHEAD

68 REVIEWS

12 EMPLOYEES OF THE MONTH

71 VOICES

PHOTOS BY ELLIOT ROSS

56 CHINA’S 21ST-CENTURY EUNUCHS Doctors at private clinics are destroying men’s penises, tricking women into aborting healthy fetuses, and killing patients through negligence—so why are American companies investing millions?

BY R. W. McMORROW

14 PROFILE Getting to Know Saxophonist Kamasi Washington and His Father Rickey

78 EXPOSURE 80 BEHIND THE COVER 81 ARTIFACT

16 HOT SPOTS Argentina, Japan, Cuba, and More...

18 NEWS The Regime, Rebels, Jihadists, and NGOs in Syria Are Fighting for Control of the Country’s Wheat

22 HOW DOES IT WORK? Body Modification Beyond Tattoos

24 Q&A Jigsaw’s Yasmin Green On the Human Right to the Web 8 VICE

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Founders Suroosh Alvi Shane Smith

Co-Presidents Andrew Creighton James Schwab

VICE MAGAZINE

VICE.COM

Global Editor-in-Chief Ellis Jones

Global Head of Content Alex Miller

General Manager Hosi Simon

Designer Benjamin Thomson

Cover Photo Elliot Ross

Global Deputy Editor Wes Enzinna

Excecutive Editor Jonathan Smith

Publisher Michael Slonim

Junior Designer Ashley Goodall

Global Senior Editors Jacob Z. Gross Erika Allen

Online Editor AU/NZ Julian Morgans

Commerical Director Alex Light

Marketing Manager Leah Consunji

Deputy Editor AU/NZ Maddison Connaughton

Sales & Marketing Director AU/NZ Jamie Bewer

Operations Manager Reuben Ruiter

Words Ana Cecilia Alvarez Emma Beals Wilbert L. Cooper Thessaly La Force David Garber Julian Gewirtz David Givens Sofia Groopman Haisam Hussein Sarah Jeong Aaron Lake Smith R.W. McMorrow Sarah Mimms Alice Newell-Hanson Kari Paul Emerson Rosenthal

Australia & New Zealand Editorial Director Royce Akers Australia Assistant Editor Isabelle Hellyer Photo Editor Elizabeth Renstrom Copy Editor Alex Norcia Art Editor Nicholas Gazin

Managing Editor Native, AU/NZ Ingrid Kesa

Chief Creative Officer Eddy Moretti

CONTRIBUTORS

Strategic Planner Alice Kimberley

Fashion Editor Wendy Syfret

Sales Director, Vic Phillip Normansell

Nosiey Editor Tim Scott

Sales Lewis Gilbert Miles Readman Scarlett Smout Lachie Wallman

Thump Editor Issy Beech

Fiction Editor Amie Barridale

Sports Editors Ben Clement Ben Stanley

Photo Editor-at-Large Matther Leifheit

TCP Editor Katherine Gillespe

Design Director Matt Schoen

Editor, NZ Frances Morton

Art Direction & Layout inkubator.ca

Staff Writer, NZ Beatrice Hazlehurst

Marketing & Business Development, NZ David Benge Sales, NZ Georgia Cherrie Head of Communications Josh Gardiner Communications Asst.

Lucy Brown Digital Producer Todd Andrews Ad Operations Micah Greenwood Simon Keck Stephanie Winkler

Project Coordinator Jemma Cole Senior Producer Katy Roberts Producers Anu Hasbold Ramona Teleçican Story Developer Andrew Kavanagh Post Production Manager Greg Cooper Video Editor Jaime Snyder Finance Warren Rodrigues Finance Assistant Yujie Nie Web Development Jesse Knight Brady Bryant Interns Hannah Butterworth Greta Levy Scott Renton Tosha Van Veenendaal

Project Management Damien Miller Georgia Field Renee Helena Brittany Stella

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Photos Nathan Bajar Annie Collinge David Hagerman Shaniqwa Jarvis Matt Lutton Sarah May Kaleigh Rogers Shane J Smith Li Wei Illustration Haisam Hussein Zoe Ligon Adam Mignanelli Kitron Neuschatz

ALL SUBMISSIONS PROPERTY OF VICE MAGAZINE INC. THE ENTIRE CONTENT IS A COPYRIGHT OF VICE MAGAZINE PUBLISHING INC. AND CANNOT BE REPRODUCED IN WHOLE OR IN PART WITHOUT WRITTEN AUTHORISATION OF THE PUBLISHERS. VICE Australia Pty Ltd and its related entities (“VICE”) makes no guarantees, warranties or representations of any kind, whether express or implied, as to the accuracy, reliability, or completeness of the information provided. VICE will not be liable for incorrect use of the information and will assume no responsibility for consequences that may result from the use of the information.

VICE is not responsible for damages of any kind arising out of use, reference to, or reliance on such information. While all reasonable care is taken, VICE will not assume responsibility for unsolicited material.

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EMPLOYEES OF THE MONTH

EMMA BEALS See THE POWER OF HUNGER, page 18

ISSY BEECH See SMACKWAVE, page 70

ELLIOT ROSS See THE COVER and AT THE GATE, page 44

R. W. McMORROW See CHINA’S 21st-CENTURY EUNUCHS, page 56

Emma Beals is a journalist and producer focused on the rise of ISIS and conflicts in Syria and Iraq. She has reported from Turkey, Iraq, and Lebanon, and has travelled into rebel-held Syria. She has written for global publications and produced TV news and documentaries for the BBC, VICE, and others. She was a reporting fellow for the International Women’s Media Fund, and serves on the elected board of representatives for Frontline Freelance Register, which strives to improve safety for freelance journalists working in conflict zones.

Issy Beech has just joined VICE as the editor of THUMP in Australia and New Zealand—that’s the channel where we talk about electronic music, drugs, and raves. She’s well qualified for the job. DJ by night, writer by day, Issy’s work has appeared in Oyster and the Lifted Brow. Before finding a desk in our office, she spent a few years writing full time at the Thousands. Expect to see more from her this year on THUMP as she unearths lost vinyls, discusses club ethics and shares internet obscurities.

Our cover photographer, Elliot Ross, hails from rural Colorado, but he has since travelled across the globe to document men and women in geographic isolation. For previous projects, he has gone to a remote mining township in the Australian Outback, rural farming communities in the American West, and villages in southeast Haiti.

One of his most recent trips took him to the Greek islands, where he photographed the plight of refugees arriving there, a selection of which we feature in this issue.

As a Fulbright scholar in China, R. W. McMorrow worked and lived in a helmet factory, and wrote about it for Harper’s. He has planted six mu of rice on the North China Plain and written about a village fighting off demolition for six years running and the secret route to being in the Communist Party of China. He’s proudest of his mental maps of Chinese cities, which track non-squatter toilets and the best kung pao chicken. With a feature in this issue, he plans to smuggle stacks of VICE magazine into China to evade online censors.

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BRIEFS Two Shows and One Conversation with Kamasi Washington

BY WILBERT L. COOPER PORTRAIT BY SHANE J. SMITH

efore I met Kamasi Washington, I met his father. Rickey was standing behind a merchandise table at Le Poisson Rouge in the West Village about an hour before one of Kamasi’s first major solo shows in New York City. At the time, I didn’t know that Rickey was the father of the saxophonist whose contributions to Kendrick Lamar’s landmark album To Pimp a Butterfly and his own debut, The Epic, have introduced a new generation to the social consciousness, expressive modal, and fusionjazz grooves of the civil rights era. I also didn’t know that Rickey was a talented woodwind musician in his own right, who had a career playing

B

sessions with legends such as Diana Ross and the Temptations. Honestly, I just thought Rickey was some old dude trying to hustle me out of $35.

“My brother,” he called to me as I strolled past.

“You better get this box set tonight.” He held a hefty cardboard slab in the air. “Otherwise, you’re going to end up paying a fortune on eBay.” Rickey was pitching me The Epic, Kamasi’s 17-song opus that has everything from an ecstatic ode to Malcolm X to a saccharine yet soulful cover of Claude Debussy’s “Clair de Lune.”

The 170-minute saga gets its name not from its length, but a dream the musician had about a young warrior battling to become a “guard,” a

position held by a powerful and aging warrior. The record’s opening track, “Change of the Guard,” tells this grand tale sonically, with sweeping strings from a 32-piece orchestra, the angelic voices of a choir, and the swinging soul jazz of Kamasi’s ten-piece band.

Thanks to widespread critical praise and highprofile collaborations with popular artists like Flying Lotus and Kendrick Lamar, Kamasi’s position in the pantheon of music now mirrors that of the young warrior from his dream. His three-record debut—which won the inaugural American Music Prize and made nearly every major “Best of 2015” list, from Pitchfork to Rolling

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Stone—has positioned Kamasi as a jazz emissary who’s ushering in a new musical movement.

This rapid rise seems unlikely for a kid who grew up in Inglewood, California, in the 90s, an incredibly violent era in South Central, when it was probably more prodigious to learn gang signs than study chord changes. But as Kamasi would tell me later, his success was not by chance. Instead, it’s the outgrowth of the fervent love of his father. evening at Le Poisson Rouge, I sat with Kamasi and Rickey in a room at Dumont NYC, a hotel on 34th Street. The men were in town for yet another sold-out show, this time at Webster Hall—an even bigger venue— and they filled me in on the pivotal role that the elder Washington had played in his son’s life.

“Papa was a rolling stone,” Rickey laughingly sang to me. “Where he laid his hat was his home.”

The absence of Rickey’s father, who was also a musician, draws a stark contrast to his close relationship with Kamasi. Rickey told me that he only met his dad once when he was young. On that day, his father promised him the world. Unfortunately, that new bike and those trips to basketball games never materialized. It wasn’t until Kamasi was born that Rickey tried to reunite with his old man. “I needed a man in my life to help me figure out how to deal with it all. I looked up my father, and I found his brother, who told me he had just died,” Rickey said. “Going through that was the precipice for me deciding to break the chain.”

MONTHS AFTER THAT

born in 1981, Rickey was a successful musician. He fronted and played woodwinds in the Raw Soul Express, a group that mixed funk with elegant musical compositions. And as a producer, arranger, and session musician, Rickey’s star was rising.

“My career was taking off. But I realized that all of my friends who had taken that route didn’t own homes, didn’t have health insurance, and left their family. They left their kids. So I gave it thought, and I said, Well, you know, my father didn’t take care of me. So it’s my responsibility to take care of my children.”

Instead of going back out on the road, Rickey took a job as a music teacher in Inglewood, so he could remain a fixture in his son’s life.

“I prayed for Kamasi to be the one,” Rickey told me. “I prayed he would bring people together, and he would be a powerful force, and I prayed that he would do great things.”

Long before the release of The Epic, it was clear to Rickey that his prayers for Kamasi had been answered. The boy was a prodigy. “Kamasi would sit at the piano for hours and just amuse himself.

WHEN KAMASI WAS

He had stick-to-itiveness, which is one of the greatest gifts. There are so many gifted musicians who only go so far with their talent. But the person who has stick-to-itiveness can traverse the difficulty and become a master. I saw that in Kamasi.”

His ascension to the marquee of Webster Hall wasn’t without its trials and tribulations. Growing up in Inglewood in the 90s was dangerous.

Kamasi’s mother lived in a Crip neighbourhood, and his father lived in a Blood neighbourhood, so he had friends on both sides of the ghetto war.

At that time, the homicide rate in his neighbourhood was one of the highest in the country, and gang life had a stranglehold over pop culture, creating an allure that was hard to resist.

“There’s like a culture, a pressure to kind of take on a negative self image. You don’t see it as negative self-image, but it’s there whenever you’re eleven years old, and your goal in life is to be a gangster, to have people be afraid of you,” Kamasi said. “I don’t think my dad even realized how indoctrinated I was. Every other word out of my mouth was ‘cuz.’”

“The person who has stick-to-itiveness can traverse the difficulty and become a master. I saw that in Kamasi.”

Rickey fought against the seduction of the streets by instilling in Kamasi an appreciation for his heritage. In an early memory of his father, Kamasi remembers Rickey trying to get him to say he was an “African American,” not just an American. Rickey even named Kamasi in honour of the ancient capital city of the Ashanti Kingdom, a place that has become symbolic for African unity.

Rickey always tried to keep Kamasi busy and out of trouble, giving him chores and books like The Autobiography of Malcolm X. “We learned at a young age, with our dad, that even if you weren’t doing something, you had to look like you were, or some hard labour was coming your way,” Kamasi said. “That’s the reason I started practicing music—when I was practicing, Pops left me alone.”

To that end, Rickey built a recording studio in his bachelor pad and let Kamasi’s friends come over to jam. Keeping them inside the crib playing music was better than having them out on the streets. There were drums, keyboards, pianos,

mics, and lots of food and video games in the house. The boys had everything they needed.

“There wasn’t a woman there to make things more structured,” Rickey said. “So they could stay up late. As long as they were doing something positive, I didn’t mind.”

As Kamasi directed his focus to mastering his saxophone, Rickey continued to push him in subtle but important ways.

“When I was about seventeen, I had a group called the Young Jazz Giants. We played all originals. When we would finish playing, people would be like, ‘Oh my God, that was so nice, that was so great,’” Kamasi said. “But Pops would never tell us we were the best. He would give it to us straight, like, ‘You’re out of tune. You’re dropping beats.’”

Today, although Kamasi has shared the stage with everyone from Snoop Dogg to Pharaoh Sanders, his proudest moment as a performer just might be the day his father actually gave him some props.

“It was a jazz-band concert during my senior year of high school,” he said. “I was used to Pops coming up and telling me what I did wrong. I was like… Oh, here it comes. And he walked up, and he was like, ‘Man, that sounded good.’ And we all looked at one another like, That’s it? It sounded good? It was a major moment for all of us that night because Pops didn’t have a critique.”

TODAY, RICKEY DOESN’T have any critiques about

the musician or the man his son has become. The changing of the guard has actually happened.

Kamasi has picked up where his father left off, and he has taken their shared love of music further than anyone—besides Rickey—could have imagined. And this is just the beginning. After touring the world in support of The Epic, Kamasi recently revealed to Rolling Stone that he’s already planning his sophomore album, featuring “a thirtytwo-piece saxophone thing.” It’s through Kamasi’s fervent drive to push his art forward that you can see the culmination of Rickey’s sacrifices and love.

You can also see it when they are onstage together. After hanging out in the hotel, I saw them that night at Webster Hall. Fifteen hundred fans howled when Kamasi stopped the show to bring out his Pops.

Rickey stepped into the glow of the purple stage lights and looked out into crowd. He gripped his golden flute in his hand, glanced at his son, then closed his eyes and began to blow.

Soon Kamasi joined in, and the two tones intertwined and sprawled out from the stage. The vibes hit the folks in the front, and stretched through the crowd to me in the back by the merch table.

They’d transformed their love into sound.

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BRIEFS / HOT SPOTS

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO VICE A roundup of the latest cultural reports and the biggest international news stories we’re covering on our digital platforms this month.

NEW YORK Pat Cleveland was a pioneering model. Her new memoir charts her journey from the tenements of Harlem to the runways of Halston.

VICE’S FASHION CHANNEL

LOS ANGELES Songwriter Will Toledo and his band, Car Seat Headrest, debut a new record, Teens of Denial.

VICE’S MUSIC CHANNEL

CUBA Following relaxed travel restrictions for Americans to the island, the city of Santiago de Cuba hosted Manana, the country’s first-ever electronic music festival.

VICE’S ELECTRONIC MUSIC CHANNEL

CUBA: PATINADORES

ARGENTINA Five deaths at Time Warp, a music festival in Buenos Aires, led local officials to impose a citywide ban on electronic music events.

VICE’S ELECTRONIC MUSIC CHANNEL

Professional skaters Ishod Wair, Andrew Reynolds, and Lucien Clarke take a trip to Havana to explore youth culture through the lens of skateboarding.

VICE’S SPORT CHANNEL

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AUSTRALIA: TRUMP JUNIOR

LONDON The legendary Dame Vivienne Westwood, one of the original architects of punk, revolutionized the fashion industry and now campaigns for worldwide environmental-policy reform.

VICE’S FASHION CHANNEL

Fifteen-year-old Edward Bourke is Australia’s most fervent Donald Trump supporter: a young man with a passion for policy, family history, and rare coins. On a day out in city, Edward shares his vision for a better Australia.

SEOUL: THE SUSHI CHEF

RÉUNION ISLAND This island was once an international surfing destination, but changes in its ecosystem have led to an increasing number of shark attacks.

VICE’S TECHNOLOGY CHANNEL

JAPAN Chef Toyoung was a ceramicist, but when she became preoccupied by what food would be served in the bowls she made, she decided to open her own gimbap restaurant.

Old-school Japanese photographer Hiroyuki Ito’s self-published monograph is a love letter to the country he left behind for New York in 1992.

VICE’S FOOD CHANNEL

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BRIEFS / NEWS

The Power of Hunger The Regime, Rebels, Jihadists, and NGOs in Syria Are Fighting for Control of the Country’s Wheat

BY EMMA BEALS, PHOTOS BY DAVID HAGERMAN

he catalysts for Syria’s civil war, and the roles that various commodities have played in it, have been vigorously debated, but since the beginning of the conflict, seeds, wheat, and bread have been at the heart of the problem. Focusing on oil as the most powerful and influential resource overlooks the importance of the country’s food supply and the power wielded by whoever controls it.

“There’s a lack of food,” said Abu Wael, a resident of rural Homs, one of the first regions to rise up against President Bashar al Assad’s government in 2011. “It has been like this for the past four years, and it has been worsening. Bread is provided every three or four days. Before, it was available on a daily basis. There is no regular passage of wheat or bread.” Despite multiple United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions on humanitarian access and billions of dollars in global aid, the Syrian government still largely controls the flow of food to residents, even from international NGOs. Access to food is a weapon of war in Syria. Assad has used siege tactics to starve out rebel-held areas, and his military has bombed breadlines and bakeries from the air. As the war has escalated, limited access to agriculture and the food-production cycle has caused the formerly self-sustaining country to resort to importing wheat and other foodstuffs—facilitated by Russia and Iran, its military allies—to feed the population in governmentheld areas. This support is arguably just as useful as the military support the countries afford Assad’s regime.

But in the besieged areas and northern Syria, large international NGOs are partnering with local NGOs to wrest control of the food cycle away from a previously centralized, government-run system, so civilians might regain agency in their lives.

“Syria is the most complicated humanitarian intervention in history, in my opinion,” said Daniele Donati, deputy director of the Emergency and Rehabilitation Division of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO). “We aren’t talking about a food crisis. We’re talking about a livelihood crisis. We are trying to support people to not have additional reasons to leave their land.”

“The main reason people are fleeing is airstrikes,” Rami Alkatib, a Syrian development worker based in southern Turkey, told me. “But if we support agriculture, we easily maintain that people will stay in their areas. Most of the opposition-held areas are agricultural areas. You have airstrikes in the sky and no food on the ground, so there’s no way people will stay.” According to Donati, fixing the agriculture problems in Syria goes beyond feeding the hungry; it’s a vehicle for peace.

T

SYRIA’S STAPLE FOOD IS bread. Syrians eat the round, flat pieces, often sold by the dozen, with nearly every meal. Historically, the country has had a centralized system around its primary food source; the government provided seeds, subsidized wheat production, bought back crops, and regulated flour production, along with the baking and sale of bread.

Investments from the Assad government and the occasional international commercial partner, such as Nestlé, made Syria a “food-secure” nation by the end of the 20th century. The nation was producing enough wheat to feed its population without relying on imports and was seen as a bright light in an unstable and arid region.

But between 2007 and 2011, environmental disaster wreaked havoc on the country; drought hit the agricultural sector hard. Wheat production dropped by 50 percent, and food prices increased by nearly a third in 2008 alone. Despite a brief recovery after that particularly poor harvest year, the combination of lower yields, higher input costs, and official policies that remained focused on market liberalization put rural denizens out of work, and in early 2011, people took to the streets. Rural discontent may not have been the cause of the revolution, but the drought’s impact on the countryside drove support for the anti-regime protests.

Soon after, Assad enacted some early reforms in the agricultural sector: scaling back privatization, increasing subsidies, waiving farmers’ debts, and setting up emergency funds for the rural poor. To keep the consumers

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happy, the regime began importing wheat from Eastern Europe to meet demand, but it wasn’t enough.

As protests gave way to all-out war, and the country tried to adjust to the sudden disruption of daily life, the government devised a devastating strategy to combat rebel forces: It bombed the increasingly long bakery lines caused by the scarcity of wheat in contested areas of the city. These bombings have continued throughout the conflict; in a recent attack, Russian airstrikes reportedly struck a bakery that had provided bread for nearly 45,000 people.

The regime and the rebels battled for territory, including grain silos and bakeries in the northeast region, and when jihadist groups saw an opportunity in the chaos, they also sought control over these vital resources. The files of Haji Bakr, an Islamic State mastermind, retrieved by Der Spiegel, indicate that ISIS had a detailed plan on how to take control of the largest flour mill in northern Syria. Once ISIS did, the group applied a typically disciplined approach to the production cycle in an attempt to feed the populations in areas it controlled to win their support.

ISIS propaganda videos extoll the virtues of its agricultural production, with shots of grain silos full to the brim with seed, farmers toiling in well-irrigated fields, and workers filling sacks

of grain to make bread. But videos filmed by a rival rebel group seem to counter ISIS’s agrarian propaganda. The footage, which has yet to be verified, suggests that ISIS is doing a brisk trade and selling grain back to the regime. This is not as far-fetched as it seems: In 2013, before ISIS declared itself an entity in the country, rebels and regime forces in Idlib Province managed to come to a temporary truce. The rebels sent wheat to the regime side for milling and then got most of it back as flour, while the regime kept some for its own use.

Today, NGOs focus on breaking the need for these uncomfortable trades and truces between warring factions by replacing the previously centralized-production system put in place by the government. This once self-sustaining system has already fallen apart. The state owns less than half the bakeries it did before the war, the factories that supplied farmers with fertilizer and yeast are shuttered or destroyed, and seed distribution has collapsed (only a third of the prewar facilities devoted to this work are still operating).

The regime hasn’t been able to purchase wheat domestically in quantity since 2012, due to the loss of arable land to the rebels and inability to transport grain to regime-held silos.

Because of this, Assad’s government relies on humanitarian aid and purchases on credit lines from Iran and, more recently, Russia. In 2014, for instance, Iran reportedly sent 30,000 tons of food supplies to Syria. Iran and Russia easily win contracts to rebuild agricultural infrastructure in Syria because of Western sanctions on financing and banking. While Syria has always had close economic ties with both states, after 2013, these relationships became essential from a food-security standpoint.

This support, along with early manipulation of UN aid programs, has been essential to maintaining stability in government-held areas of the country. Until the UNSC passed resolutions in 2014 to allow cross-border aid into the country without the government’s permission, agricultural-aid projects weren’t able to operate without extreme secrecy. Still, the government denies humanitarian organizations access to areas in desperate need. In May, regime forces at the final checkpoint blocked the first shipment of aid brought to Daraya since November 2012.

The government’s manipulation of food access makes humanitarian intervention, aimed at creating a self-sustaining food cycle that is not sponsored by the regime, crucial.

IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation, an NGO in Reyhanli, Turkey, provides bread to Syrians. Several organizations are working to feed the region’s displaced populations and to rebuild agricultural infrastructure in Syria.

TODAY, A BAG OF BREAD in Syria costs between two and four times more than it did at the start of the unrest, depending on whether the bakery is public or private, according to statistics complied by the World Food Programme. Activists have reported that, in some locales, bread costs dozens or even hundreds of Syrian pounds more than it once did, due to shortages and the cost of bringing it to market. Often, the government solicits bribes and levies “taxes” at checkpoints on roads, in the form of confiscation of product, which push prices up beyond the higher levels caused by product scarcity.

Aid agencies have traditionally supported these displaced populations by providing food, but today, the programs range from irrigation and agriculture efforts—including seed germination—to wheat milling, rebuilding destroyed mills, and providing flour to bakeries. The problem has moved from simply bringing in supplies toward price setting and distribution of finished products.

This is a complicated process. Rami Alkatib said that for many of the projects he has set up from southern Turkey, his

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BRIEFS / NEWS

Volunteers distribute fresh bread to Syrian refugees in a village outside Reyhanli. Some NGO workers have had to pay off soldiers to get into besieged areas.

organization procures seeds from government areas and then smuggles them into besieged areas. Alkatib and Abu Wael both told me that they have to deal with corrupt merchants and paying off soldiers to get into the area, and funding for their programs is short. The FAO, for example, reports its emergency agriculture projects were underfunded by more than 70 percent last year, meaning its interventions are less than perfect. “We are talking about second best,” Donati said. “In a situation where the access is so volatile.”

Still, these aid workers believe that their focus on creating agriculture jobs to remedy food scarcity will solve the displacement issue. Alkatib said he has seen families return from the internally displaced person camps at the border of Turkey and Syria, where food is available. “There is impact,” he said. “We reported the return of sixty to eighty families to the area because of the self-sufficiency.” Gardening projects have enabled residents to be self-reliant, even when basic supplies, like wheat flour, aren’t available, due to the blockades.

“Now they are making bread from different seeds. They used to make it from flour. Now they are making it from bulgur or other herbs.”

In rural Homs, Wael has set up a wheat-growing program where the seeds and mills are in place, but they’re not meeting the needs in the area. Even with the seeds and mills in place,

fuel shortages remain an obstacle, as it’s needed not only for transporting the materials but to run the generators that power the mills and bakeries.

Beyond local consumption needs and providing livelihoods for residents, maintaining crops is an integral part of maintaining societal structures. Civil-society organizations, like the Local Coordination Committees of Syria, see wheat and bread as the best way to enact taxes and levies, which pay for services for the population. “For the opposition-held areas, they are doing whatever they can to remain self-sufficient for nine months of the year or something,” Alkatib said. “The local councils are generating revenue by having the wheat and baking it and selling to the people to fulfil the price of the wheat they are buying from local farmers.”

It’s no secret that Wael and Alkatib, and their partner NGOs, may have copied the jihadists’ strategy in trying to gain control of the population with wheat and bread. But more important, they’re working to allow regular Syrians, those most impacted by the ongoing war, to take control of their own livelihoods.

Peaceful resolution or a political solution to the conflict remains elusive, but Wael told me he is proud to “bring life and an activity cycle to the community and restore natural balance,” however small. When you’re living under siege, a little normalcy goes a long way.

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BRIEFS / HOW DOES IT WORK?

Body Modification

SUBDERMAL HORNS

Silicone implants are pushed under the skin and moved into place.

BY HAISAM HUSSEIN

The art of tattooing has been around for thousands of years, and we all know at least one person who has one or more tattoos. But what about the more unusual forms of body modification that involve cutting and shaping the body? Traditional tribal practices such as scarification and earlobe stretching have become a part of our culture and can occasionally be seen on the streets. So keep your eyes peeled.

TONGUE SPLITTING

The tongue is split, and each side is stitched or cauterized until it heals.

LOBE STRETCHING

Ear lobes go through a gradual stretching process to fit discs of different widths.

CORSET PIERCING

Material is strung through two parallel lines of hooped piercings and pulled taut to create a corset effect.

WAIST TRAINING

Corsets are worn to force the waist into unnaturally slim sizes. Trouble breathing and nerve damage have been recorded.

BONE LENGTHENING

Leg bones are broken in two, and the separate ends are attached to rods that gradually move apart.

New bone fills the gaps.

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METAL MOHAWK

TREPANATION

CHEEK GAUGES

Spikes are attached to subdermal anchors.

A small hole is drilled into the skull to increase energy and expand consciousness.

The cheek is pierced, stretched, and kept open with a round eyelet.

SCLERAL TATTOOING

ELFIN EARS

Permanent ink is injected into the whites of the eyes.

Ear cartilage is cut and shaped, and the skin is sewn back together.

LIP PLATES

TOOTH FILING

NECK STRETCHING

These originated among tribes in Africa and South America.

This is a traditional tribal practice in which teeth are filed to sharp points.

An increasingly tall stack of coiled rings compresses the collarbone and pushes the shoulders down.

SYNTHOL INJECTIONS

SCARIFICATION

APOTEMNOPHILIA

An oil-rich mixture is injected deep into the muscle to enlarge the appearance. Misuse can make for lumpy, deformed muscles.

These marks are achieved by cutting, branding, abrasion, or chemical corrosion.

The resulting scar tissue leaves a permanent raised ridge.

This is an extreme reason for modifying one’s body. Those suffering from apotemnophilia experience an intense desire to amputate a perfectly healthy limb and often don’t feel relief until they do.

PEARLING

Beads of metal, plastic, or silicone are placed under the skin of the penis to create bumps that may heighten a partner’s pleasure. Or not.

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BRIEFS / Q&A

Censorship and the Future of the Internet Jigsaw’s Yasmin Green On the Human Right to the Web

BY KARI PAUL, PORTRAIT BY SHANIQWA JARVIS

wo-thirds of the world population lacks access to the internet, and from Mark Zuckerberg’s ambitious plan to connect the next 5 billion people to Google’s floating internet balloons, private companies and governments alike are working harder than ever to expand access to the web.

But simply having an internet connection is not a guarantee of access to information: With censorship spreading through repressive countries, internet freedom declined for the fifth year in a row in 2015, according to a Freedom House report. As head of research and development at tech incubator Jigsaw, a subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet, Yasmin Green develops products to cut through these barriers. We caught up with her and asked about the most pressing problems facing us as we race to connect the rest of the world.

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VICE: What does Jigsaw do, and what makes its approach unique?

Yasmin Green: We use technology to solve geopolitical problems, but what is special about our approach is where we get our inspiration: directly from people who are on the front lines of conflict or oppression. There is not a product we make that didn’t start with a trip to the field to understand the human experience and the role of technology within it.

Can you tell me about uProxy?

It’s one of the projects we’ve been developing as part of our overall goal to end repressive censorship. It is essentially a tunnel built through national firewalls—the invisible borders that governments erect—so that people in those countries can have access to an open internet.

There are proxies that exist already, but uProxy has special characteristics: It’s an open-source project, which means anyone in the world can contribute code, and it’s peer-to-peer, meaning you get your access to a free and open internet directly from someone you know, like a friend or family member, which means it’s trusted. It is

decentralized, so it doesn’t show up on anyone’s radar. It’s about really giving people access to the free and open internet with just a few clicks.

Did you have a specific population in mind?

We want to build the tools that we can to help realize an internet without borders. We have this situation where three billion people are using the internet today, and the next three billion coming online are not going to be in the same environment—they aren’t going to be in Palo Alto or Chelsea Market. They are going to be in places where conflict is rising and repression is really severe. So our mandate is to think about how you would develop products when

“Access to information is a fundamental human right, and everyone in the world deserves to have that right.” you are thinking about the next three billion coming online, because their world is going to be ridden with conflict and oppression in the physical world, but those threats that are going to manifest online as well. We have the privilege at Jigsaw of taking this unique perspective on product development.

Does being from Iran inform your work?

I have lived in quite a few repressive environments, but being Iranian makes it acutely personal, because I have seen what a repressive government can do to the people. It means everything. It impacts not just people’s ability to access information, but to access culture, and to communicate, even their livelihood—it is very personal for me.

How do you identify what regions to target or what conflicts to prioritise?

We travel all over the world to understand what is happening in different environments, but technology does not have borders, so I could develop a product for a user in Iran, and if that product is good, it will travel around the world. That is one of the really gratifying things about developing technology: You get to see it spread.

Where does Jigsaw fit in with Google’s larger efforts to close the digital divide?

There is a lot of really important work around delivering access to the disconnected world.

The question we ask—which is equally important—is what happens when the access is there.

Are people safe and secure? Can they access a free and open internet? Or do we see the repressive and dangerous offline world manifest itself online in those areas? It is a really complementary function that we play at Jigsaw, which is trying to give people safe and secure access to an open web.

As more people become connected, what is the biggest change you expect to see?

I do think we are going to see some really profound changes in how the internet is used. We are going to see all of these geopolitical challenges that are age-old—like terrorism—mix with technology and the use of the internet, and we need to make sure our responses to those things include the internet; they have to be both online and offline.

What is the next big challenge facing internet freedom?

Recognizing that the internet is a fundamental human right, access to information is a fundamental human right, and that everyone in the world deserves to have that right. And we need to bring it to them.

Full disclosure: Jigsaw is sponsoring an upcoming series for VICE News.

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CUTTINGS

BY ANNIE COLLINGE AND SARAH MAY

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MIGRANT

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HELL

Bulgaria’s ATV-riding immigrant hunter is the face of Europe’s new right-wing vigilante movement.

BY AARON LAKE SMITH PHOTOS BY MATT LUTTON

Dinko Valev poses on his ATV at his junkyard in Yambol, Bulgaria.

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T OPPOSITE PAGE, ABOVE: Valev and one of his employees OPPOSITE PAGE, BELOW: In this building in Pastrogor, refugees wait for the government to decide if they will be permitted to stay in Bulgaria.

his February, a 30-year-old former wrestler and scrapyard owner named Dinko Valev rose to international notoriety after uploading cellphone videos of his migrant hunting in the remote, mountainous Strandzha region of Bulgaria, near its border with Turkey. In one of his films, initially posted on his Facebook account, he interrogates a 20-something Afghan man he has captured, before delivering him to the authorities. “You’re a terrorist?” Valev asks. The man widens his eyes and laughs uncomfortably. “Me? No.” In another, filmed like a homemade extreme-sports video, Valev gallops atop his ATV before the video cuts to the 15 migrants—his captured quarry—whom he has made lie facedown in the dirt, one after another. “Me and my boys were riding today and look what we found,” he narrates. “Who are these people? How long is this going to continue?”

Valev’s videos have the same disturbing quality of amateur brawls or other dispatches from the deep web, but their most frightening quality may be that they’ve made him a hero in Bulgaria. And Valev isn’t alone. A group of camo-clad nationalists called the Organization for the Protection of Bulgarian Citizens (OZBG) has also made a sport of capturing groups of migrants on its playfully named “walks in the woods” since September 2015. In March, Prime Minister Boyko Borisov publicly praised the group and instructed the head of Bulgaria’s border police to present the men with an award for their “volunteer” service. While officials have since backpedaled on their praise, and Valev was charged in March 2016 with allegedly violating human rights, the government’s newfound opprobrium hasn’t done much to halt the spread of the migrant-hunting phenomenon. In Valev’s case, it seems to have even increased his burgeoning folk-hero status. A recent Bulgarian TV poll found that 84 percent of the respondents approved of his and others’ volunteer-patrolling actions. One well-known Bulgarian news anchor described him as a “superhero” who fights off migrants “with his bare hands.”

Bulgaria is one of the poorest countries in the EU. It also has the misfortune of sitting on the front lines of Europe, sharing a 139-mile land border with Turkey and a 292-mile mountainous border with northern Greece, territories through which as many as 50,000 asylum seekers have passed since 2011. In their mounting alarm, the government has built 50 miles of razor-wire fence along the Turkish border, which the executive director of Frontex, the European Union’s border agency, has called “the most important land border in the EU.” Bulgaria plans to finish the fence this summer. Meanwhile, as government officials waffle on how to deal with migration and vigilantes, others are exploiting the desperation for profit. In February, a video was leaked showing 60 people crossing the Bulgarian-Turkish border with the help of traffickers, as border guards apparently looked on. In March, a probe from the Bulgarian Ministry of Interior led to the arrest of five border police officers, including a commander, for smuggling.

Amid this confusion and chaos, some Bulgarians on the southern frontier have taken it upon themselves to make the country as inhospitable to asylum seekers as possible.

Approaches like Valev’s, in this sense, echo the attempt by some anti-immigrant activists in the United States to make the country so unpleasant that migrants choose “voluntary deportation”

over resettlement. Valev and the OZBG are the most prominent faces of this effort, but other armed-vigilante patrols have been sprouting up and following their lead, also hoping to be turned into patriotic heroes. Bulgaria is a “failure, the government is corrupt, and you have an oligarchy ruling the country,” says Iliana Savova, the director of the Refugee and Migrant Program for the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee. “The easiest way to divert attention from your own doings [is to focus on] someone who is easy to spot and put the blame on them.”

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here is talk of erecting a statue of Valev in Yambol. His admirers compare him to Vasil Levski, the country’s 19thcentury national-liberation hero who fought for the ideals of the French Revolution and dreamed of a pluralistic, ethnically heterogeneous, and religiously tolerant Bulgaria. In late March, when Valev was brought in to a local-police precinct for questioning on charges stemming from his ATV rides, a crowd of several dozen people gathered to support him, donning Bulgarian flags as capes and chanting, “Heart and soul of Bulgaria!” and “Dinko is a hero!” “The Helsinki Committee are total losers,” Valev told news cameras as he arrived, flashing a winning, Donald Trump– like smile. “I just don’t care… I did what should’ve been done.”

Yambol is a reedy little burned-out city of ruined Communistera manufacturing plants and warehouses near the southeastern Turkish border, on the banks of the overgrown Tundzha River.

It isn’t well regarded in the rest of Bulgaria, and before, people knew the town only for a comically bad music video filmed there, where an Uncle Fester–like local rapper mugged around the streets with a stuffed raven on his shoulder, droning, “Yamboolllll… it’s the city.”

Valev met me in front of the tiny mall of Yambol in a green-camo tracksuit. He resembles Vin Diesel—his favorite actor—and has a giant tattoo of an ornate Orthodox cross on his chest, as well as a full sleeve of tribals, which he shows off at every opportunity. His goonish right-hand man, Dennis, accompanied him. Local men seemed to come out of nowhere to shake Valev’s hand and congratulate him. Inside the mall, a grandmother watching her granddaughter on a kiddie ride whipped around and said, “Dinko’s here!” and came over to shake his hand and tell him what a good boy he was. Inside the mall’s café, two young baristas doted on him as he leaned back in his chair and ordered cake.

Valev insists that he was spurred to vigilante action one day when, while riding his ATV through forest trails along the border, a group of migrants allegedly jumped out of the bushes and tried to stab him. After that, he began patrolling with a group of friends on ATVs. On the first patrol, they detained around a dozen migrants. Soon, he claims, a jihadist website put a $4,000 bounty on his head. “I had seen them before, but I didn’t start hunting them until they attacked me,” he said. “I’m basically a nobody, but it needed to start somewhere.”

He was agitated because he said the border police had been harassing him, something he attributed to their corruption and involvement in smuggling. “The border police are being paid off to smuggle in migrants, one hundred percent,” Valev said.

Even though little evidence exists that border corruption is as widespread as Valev asserts, a real demographic fear underlies the hysteria. With the closure of the Western Balkan transit route from the Greek Aegean islands up through Macedonia and into Western Europe this March, many of Bulgaria’s politicians and citizens are worried about the country turning into a

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major alternative pathway for migrants. On the Greek border, the Bulgarian police have been holding drills with water cannons where hundreds of actors pretending to be migrants throw stones at the officers. Bulgarian officials have also begun holding naval exercises along the country’s eastern Black Sea coast in preparation for the possibility that migrants will begin using the route en masse. “If smugglers find a way to transport people via the Black Sea like they have over the Mediterranean,” says Yavor Siderov, a political scientist based in Sofia, “it’s not out of the question” that that route could become a major corridor.

After finishing his cake, Valev had to go to work at the junkyard he owns and operates. We hopped in his white Mercedes CLS350, with a crucifix and Orthodox icons dangling from the rearview mirror. Before my trip, I’d read about his fleet of vehicles, which, in addition to the Mercedes, includes a Hummer, a Porsche SUV, a decommissioned armoured personnel vehicle, and of course, ATVs. He also has 20 horses. There are various rumours and questions of how he could make so much money running a junkyard. Some, such as Savova from the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee, allege that he is actually involved in smuggling himself and the vigilantism is a front, an accusation he calls “bullshit.” Other allegations link him to the Bulgarian mafia. The paper Capital purported that Valev’s hidden junkyard business partner is likely Kamen Zhelev, who a couple of years ago pled no contest to running a nightmarish, Godfather-style debt-collection company called Creditline. According to Capital, “debtors were beaten with slaps, punches, kicks, stripped of their clothes, and threatened with fornication, cruel punishment, setting their legs on fire, and extraction of their fingernails with pliers.”

The scrapyard, on the edge of town where Yambol meets grassy fields, is a vast, bus-filled blacktop surrounded by the husks of abandoned factories. About a dozen employees tore apart buses with sledgehammers and blowtorches. When Valev stepped out of his car, his employees swarmed around him. He doled out stacks of cash and talked into the various cellphones they held out to him.

“Hey, little Gypsy, come over here,” he called out. “I’ll fuck your mother.” His employees were at-will workers, paid 50 to 60 leva per bus they broke down—around $32. Most were Roma men—still subject to widespread prejudice and occupying the bottom caste of Bulgarian society—but there was one recently arrived African man, Jamal, from the Ivory Coast.

I asked Valev how he could employ immigrants in his business while he was hunting others on the border. His answer reminded me of the kind of thing people say in America. “I have nothing against the people who already live here,” he said.

“It’s the people who are invading that I have a problem with.”

Later in the afternoon, a Bulgarian TV crew showed up.

Valev gave an impromptu interview about being stopped by the border police a couple of nights before for an expired registration on his car. “The refugees cross the border, and what do the police do? Nothing,” he said. “I’m just disappointed they’re looking for a fight with me.” When a Der Spiegel video crew arrived, Valev tried a couple of words in German, before reverting to English: “Whatchu want from me? Whatchu want now?

You wanna see me on the ATV?”

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he next day, I visited an asylum centre on the edge of a tiny border village called Pastrogor. Here, people wait for months while a government panel processes their asylum applications, watching their video interviews in order

Valev insists that he was spurred to vigilante action one day when, while riding his ATV through forest trails along the border, a group of migrants allegedly jumped out of the bushes and tried to stab him. to decide whether or not they’ve been through enough horror to be permitted to live and work in Europe. I’d been told that Syrians were given priority over other nationalities. A rusting, military-like bunker, surrounded by a metal fence, buttressed by mountains and fields, and protected by a guard, it looked like a minimum-security prison. On arriving, some residents gathered around a large open window to wave.

In Bulgaria, there are currently around a half dozen migrant centres for those attempting the legal asylum process, and three detention centres for those who have been apprehended while trying to cross illegally (this is where those caught by vigilante groups typically end up). Most of the facilities are in bad shape, being formerly disused buildings or barracks, in out-of-the-way areas, and the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee reports that one near Yambol, in the village of Elhovo, was temporarily closed down for violations and “deplorable sanitary and living conditions,” according to Savova. According to Bordermonitoring Bulgaria, an NGO, white-power graffiti and swastikas covers another facility in the capital of Sofia. Asylum seekers are provided with meals, but there are no kitchens and few other support services, as they wait and try to gain the legal right to stay in Bulgaria.

Officials refused us entry into the Pastrogor facility, but two men ventured out in the light drizzle to say hello: Idriss, a cheery middle-aged gentleman in a green smock from the Ivory Coast, and a Kurdish man who went by Rom, who had fled northern Syria. Idriss described himself as the “senior refugee” in the centre; he had been there for four months, telling and retelling his story to officials, and then waiting to see if he would be given refugee status. He had converted to Christianity back in the Ivory Coast before leaving his family behind to come to Europe. Both he and Rom had elected to come in over the official border crossing at the nearby town of Svilengrad and had gotten caught on purpose, the first step in the official asylum process.

“Everywhere in Europe is now barbed wire,” Idriss said.

“Crossing the frontier is now very risky. I’m here in Bulgaria, and I’d like to stay in Bulgaria.” He spoke a little Bulgarian, and knew of Jamal, the man from the Ivory Coast who worked for Valev. I asked him why he had chosen to come here instead of attempting the treacherous Aegean crossing to Greece, like many others, in the hopes of landing in countries with a more robust support system for refugees, like Germany or Sweden. The very real fear of drowning, he suggested, had determined his route (1,361 have died or gone missing in 2016 alone). “Before you do something, you have to think very deeply,” he said. “With the sea, you don’t know what could have happened by now.”

(Savova later told me that it was unlikely that Idriss would receive refugee status—no one from the Ivory Coast had been granted asylum in Bulgaria.)

OPPOSITE PAGE, ABOVE: Valev feeds his dogs at his junkyard.

OPPOSITE PAGE, BELOW: One of Valev’s employees uses a blowtorch to dissemble a bus into scrap metal.

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Rom had f led Kurdish-held territory in northern Syria, where locals are conscripted into militias, because he didn’t want to f ight ISIS. “This one here,” Rom’s friend said. “He’s not a f ighter.”

OPPOSITE PAGE, ABOVE: Valev, left, at a celebration held in his honour in Sofia OPPOSITE PAGE, BELOW: A Turkish flag seen from the village of Rezovo, Bulgaria. This town is located on the coastal border, and the small canal is all that separates the two countries.

Rom spoke very little English and no Bulgarian, but he indicated that he hoped to make it to Germany. Several months earlier, he had fled Kurdish-held territory in northern Syria, where locals are conscripted into militias, because he didn’t want to fight ISIS, or Daesh. “Syria good, very good, but the government not good,” he said. “Huge problem of Kurds with Daesh. Fire, fire.”

“What he’s trying to say,” Idriss interrupted, “is that for the Kurds, Daesh is attacking them.” He put a hand on his friend’s shoulder and smiled. “This one, he’s not a fighter.” Everyone laughed.

While Idriss and Rom were in a purgatorial position, others have been far less lucky. Vigilante groups have captured more than a hundred who have entered the country illegally.

Bulgarian border guards, according to Human Rights Watch, have beaten and extorted others. In October 2015, a border guard shot one Afghan asylum seeker dead, and this March, two bodies were discovered near one of the mountainous “forest highway” crossings by a town called Malko Tornovo. That same month, according to the BBC, the mayor of a village, Topòlovgrad, asked the ministry of defence for 30 AK-47s, armored personnel carriers, and other military gear to equip his “volunteer border patrol” of 200 local men. The town wanted to take control of two frontier stations and turn them into patroltraining centres. The mayor eventually withdrew his request, claiming it had been misunderstood, but it seemed that the situation was only getting more dangerous.

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ne evening, I found myself on the back patio of the only posh hotel-restaurant in Topòlovgrad. The town is small and dusty, like Yambol, minus the rapper and his stuffed raven. I had come to meet with an ex-smuggler who I’ll call Tim. (I agreed not to reveal his identity as a condition of our interview.) For the entire half hour that we spoke, Tim ate nothing, drank nothing, and didn’t smoke.

He said he had gotten into the business when some smugglers sidled up to him at a local café, accompanied by a translator, and said, “Hey, can I ask you something?” They gave him money and said he could keep it if he helped guide some strangers through the forests and into Bulgaria. He agreed.

On his first trip, he said he made around $800 per person, to lead a group of five across the frontier. Someone had placed numbered stones in the forest, he explained, and he was told to wait at one to pick up the group of refugees. He said a Turkish man in the border city of Edirne coordinated the whole thing.

“Sometimes there is a deal between the cops, and sometimes there isn’t,” Tim said. He said he would sometimes see border agents in the woods when he walked migrants through the pine trees. “They might see me,” he said, but then they would “walk away from me as if they hadn’t.”

As he continued to work for the smugglers, however, the number of people he trafficked increased while the price per person decreased. “The price varies,” he said. “It’s one price when the refugees come alone, but the prices go up if they bring their families.” Eventually, due to the construction of the border fence, the traffickers shifted from the forests to a system of minibuses and trucks. Police evenutally caught Tim driving a minibus full of refugees, and he’s now on probation.

Oddly enough, I had been introduced to Tim by an acquaintance of Valev’s—Dimitar Semerdjiev, one of Topòlovgrad’s most prominent businessmen. A fit middle-aged man with a Paulie Walnuts tracksuit whose nickname is the “Boss,” he was the deputy for the local mayor who had announced the formation of a volunteer patrol. I was also curious about Semerdjiev’s alleged mafia connections—he said he owned several hotels, and I read that he kept a pet tiger and was the brother of the right-hand man for one of Bulgaria’s most infamous mafia figures, Brendo, a.k.a. the “Cocaine King.” When I’d asked him what people like him in Topòlovgrad thought of those who were involved in the smuggling trade, he’d quipped, “Do you want to meet one?” Ten minutes later, we were at Semerdjiev’s hotel with Tim. The nature of their relationship was unclear, but Tim called Semerdjiev the “Boss.”

It’s easy to understand why someone like Tim would get into smuggling, and why someone like Semerdjiev would “hate” smugglers, as he told me he did. One-fifth of the Bulgarian population makes under $170 a month—less than a fifth of the amount Tim received for one day of smuggling work.

Meanwhile, 2 million Bulgarians are migrants themselves, going elsewhere in Europe to make money—often to the same countries in Western Europe where refugees hope to end up.

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efore I left Bulgaria, I went with Valev to the country’s capital, Sofia. A group of concerned citizens planned to award him a medal of honour for his migrant hunting. We arrived at the monument of the Tsar Liberator, across from the Bulgarian National Assembly, where about 20 or so nationalists held an unpermitted rally around PA speakers blaring military anthems. One guy wore a shirt that said: no islam in europe!

As Valev strutted up to the podium and began his speech, it occurred to me that migrant hunting for him seemed primarily like a kind of sport rather than a real political or ideological commitment—one that, however cruelly, fit into his concept of Bulgarian patriotism and was reaffirmed with widespread fame and respect. After all, he hung out with and employed immigrants, and the tally of people he’s apprehended was only in the double digits. As such, his actions seemed intended to function mostly as an advertisement to would-be migrants (Don’t come to Bulgaria) and as an advertisement for his own supposed manly prowess. This, perhaps, is why Valev has become a hero to some: He’s conveying a popular if morally repugnant message of xenophobia that many in Europe are increasingly embracing. And yet this message is also wishful thinking. As the wars in Iraq and Syria continue unabated, and the EU seems unable to address the refugee crisis, Bulgaria will increasingly find itself caught up in the conflict.

“We need to protect our homeland,” Valev shouted out to the crowd of cheering supporters, before peeling out in his Mercedes and fleeing the scene. “I want people to stay here in this country, and not leave it.”

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AT THE GATE

BY ELLIOT ROSS

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Since the beginning of last year, more than a million asylum seekers, about half fleeing war and starvation in Syria, have attempted to reach Europe by crossing the Aegean Sea from Turkey to Greek islands such as Lesbos and Chios.

Despite the dangers of traversing the heavily policed waters on crowded inflatable rafts, landing on Greek shores has been the surest route to refugee status in Europe. Once they arrive, asylum seekers are housed in camps like Moria, on Lesbos, while they wait to receive refugee status and find out if they can move farther into Europe.

This March, in an attempt to stem the flow of refugees to the Continent, the EU and Turkey reached a deal designed to cut off the Aegean route. In a move that humanitarian groups argue violates international law, Europe’s border agency began sending asylum seekers entering Europe through the Greek islands back to Turkey. The gate to Europe relied on by so many has been effectively closed. (In exchange, Turkish citizens were promised visa-free travel in Europe and a resumption of EU membership talks.) In January, photographer Elliot Ross documented the arrival of some of the last asylum seekers entering Europe through the Greek islands.

Orange life vests discarded by asylum seekers ring Lesbos’s coastline.

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THIS PAGE, ABOVE: A volunteer helps an elderly woman off a raft recently arrived on the shores of Lesbos.

BELOW: Car tire inner tubes dot the waters off the coast of Lesbos.

The tubes serve as makeshift flotation devices for those who cannot afford proper life preserves, which are often subject to extreme price gouging.

OPPOSITE PAGE: Blankets provided by the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees pile up in an abandoned building on the Greek island of Leros as refugees shed bulk in preparation for advancing farther into Europe.

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THIS PAGE: Mohamed, a Syrian refugee, awaits registration in a stairwell in an abandoned building on Leros.

OPPOSITE PAGE: An asylum seeker from Algeria gets his hair cut on Leros. Deemed an economic migrant, he has been barred from travelling beyond Greece.

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Trees in the Moria camp have been stripped of their branches for use as firewood. More-recent arrivals have resorted to burning clothing and blankets to stave off freezing temperatures.

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THIS PAGE, ABOVE: Sana Waled Gazmate Mardini and Mohammed Shaher Mardini stand in an abandoned building on Leros. Mohammed owned a group of lingerie factories in Damascus, where his wife, Sana, served as general manager, before the couple fled the war.

BELOW: Mohammed, a 15-year-old boy from Beirut, sits flanked by his uncle and father at the Eleonas camp, in Athens. The boat carrying Mohammed and his family from Turkey capsized, and the Greek coast guard rescued everyone on board and brought them ashore. They were among the lucky ones. Last year, more than 3,700 refugees drowned trying to cross into Europe.

OPPOSITE PAGE: Faradj Aissa looks out the window of an empty building on Leros.

Volunteers provide asylum seekers with sandwiches and bottled water while they await registration with Greek authorities.

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THIS PAGE: A Congolese man waits in the Eleonas camp. His refugee application having been denied, he will most likely be deported back to the Democratic Republic of Congo.

OPPOSITE PAGE: Sanaa Karom poses for a portrait just moments after receiving papers giving her refugee status in the EU. Karom fled Aleppo, Syria, with a handful of women and girls whom ISIS fighters had tried to make their sex slaves.

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&+,1$Ć6 67 &(1785<

Doctors at private clinics are destroying men’s penises, tricking women into aborting healthy fetuses, and killing patients through negligence—so why are American companies investing millions?

BY R. W. McMORROW, PHOTOS BY LI WEI

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(818&+6

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2

n the afternoon of September 30, 2015, 23-year-old Little Huang stood on the roof of the 11-story Shenzhen Health and Family Planning Commission building, ready to jump to his death. In the lot below, Chinese officials’ cars looked about the size of matchboxes, and the clamour of a nearby construction site filtered up as a dull hum. As Little Huang peered through the light haze toward the hills of Hong Kong, he dialed a 25-year-old man named Junjun. “We’re on the roof,” he said.

“Bring alcohol and water bottles.”* Junjun exited the metro at Cui Zhu station, stopped for rice alcohol and water bottles, then rode the elevator of the whitetiled building to the tenth floor. There a staircase wound up to the crumbling concrete roof, where he found that Little Huang had now scaled even higher, to the top of a mechanical shed that seemed to sway in the breeze over the building’s edge.

Two other young men Junjun recognized, Mr. Wang and Mr. Peng, stood with Little Huang. Junjun was nervous, but Little Huang cajoled him to climb up, too. The men wore matching white ball caps. Characters on the front explained the reason they threatened to jump: black-hearted men’s hospitals destroyed our well-being.

All four men, like more than a thousand across China who communicate with one another in online patient chat groups, say they were duped into surgeries that doctors worldwide have determined pose great risk and have little scientific merit: a dorsal neurectomy that severs penile nerves, ostensibly to cure premature-ejaculation issues, though Chinese physicians sell the surgery with whatever explanation will likely get the person on the operating table. As a result of the surgeries, Junjun, Little Huang, Mr. Wang, and Mr. Peng’s penises have gone completely numb, they can’t get full erections, and some experience searing pain, probably from neuromas, which result from nerve trauma. No known corrective surgery or therapy exists. All four men, who are in their 20s, may never have offspring. They refer to themselves as “China’s 21st-century eunuchs.”

Sham penile surgeries are just one part of a much larger system of poorly regulated and corrupt private healthcare in China. In other instances of medical malfeasance, physicians at private clinics have bargained with patients during surgery, female patients have been tricked into aborting healthy fetuses, and there have been many documented deaths as a result of physician negligence. Pseudoscientific medical devices are in wide use, as is the practice of proffering false diagnoses, as more than 60 private hospitals have done to Chinese undercover journalists in the past six years. Meanwhile, the number of private hospitals in China is blossoming—between 2005 and 2015, 9,326 new facilities opened their doors. Today they make up nearly half of all hospitals in China. That proportion will likely grow as ongoing Chinese healthcare reforms aim to increase private investment in the sector and government-run insurance schemes expand to cover private healthcare facilities. American funds including Morgan Stanley Private Equity Asia, a division of Morgan Stanley, are pouring in millions of dollars as well.

By 3 PM, security guards, health officials, firemen, and police officers had clambered up to the roof to try to dissuade Little Huang, Junjun, and the two others from jumping. The

men drank their rice alcohol and dialed local Chinese newspapers and TV stations. If they had to jump, well, they didn’t want to be sober. A small crowd gathered on the sidewalk, but the media never came.

At nightfall, the men remained on the mechanical shed, and the gaggle of health officials grew impatient. When one of them approached the foot of the structure, gazing up at the patients, Little Huang and Mr. Wang screamed out their demands: find experts to treat them; arrest the physicians and nurses who conned them; ban the surgery that had made them all “eunuchs”; and pay for them to collectively undergo medical testing, the first step in legally proving the harm the surgery had caused. Until now, more traditional petitions and street protests had failed to gain the men attention, so they vowed to stay on the roof until city health officials took action.

“You caused this!” Little Huang screamed, tears streaming down his cheeks. “Victims have come to you before, and you do nothing! If there was oversight of these hospitals, would this happen?”

Finally, hours after the protest began, health officials relented and said they would meet the patients’ demands, but only if they promised to come down to a negotiating room. The men were wary. Mr. Wang felt they needed to leave a bargaining chip on the roof. They chose Junjun—as the meekest of the four men he was the most easily badgered into staying put. If the negotiations failed, the men agreed, he would jump.

“I told them if they left me, I wouldn’t stay,” Junjun said. “I wouldn’t be able to last on my own.”

Ten minutes after Little Huang, Mr. Wang, and Mr. Peng climbed down, health official Huang Penghui, who oversaw the hospital where Junjun had received the surgery, stepped forward. He held up his phone and told Junjun he’d sealed off operating room 7 in Shenzhen City Hospital, the clinic where the surgery was done four months earlier. Eventually, Junjun

OPENING SPREAD, LEFT: Shenzhen Qiaoyuan Clinic, where Little Huang received treatment OPENING SPREAD, RIGHT: Junjun hidden behind his allegedly forged patient consent form OPPOSITE PAGE: Little Huang in the Shenzhen factory town where he lives

THIS PAGE: The eunuchs protest in front of the Shenzhen Health and Family Planning Commission.

* The names of victims have been changed to protect their identities.

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Mr. Xie, one of the victims, holding up the medical records for his dorsal neurectomy surgery

came down and looked at the phone himself. A photo showed a white strip of paper pasted over the door that read: sealed off.

“Look,” the official said. “What more can we do?”

%

y day, Junjun tests applications at an IT company. “If this didn’t happen to me,” he says, his voice high and wispy, “I’d be white-collar in a couple of years, even getting married.” He is a small, pudgy man with full cheeks and big, black sorrowful eyes. “Now basically all I have left is the ability to pee.”

The story of Junjun’s treatment is typical. On May 9, 2015, he accompanied his colleagues to get a physical done at a health checkup centre, an annual routine for many workplaces in China. Test results indicated his prostate was slightly enlarged with possible calcification. The physician recommended he visit a hospital.

Junjun wasn’t worried—he’d always been in good health.

But he didn’t know where to go for further testing. In reality, he had two distinct options: an overcrowded public hospital, where a physician might see a hundred patients each day, or a private healthcare facility. Businessmen from Putian, a city in Fujian Province, own most of China’s private hospitals and clinics. Their interests are united by the Putian Health Industry Association (PHIA), which represents some 8,600 Putianowned private hospitals, or about 70 percent of China’s private hospitals. Many advertise widely on Baidu, China’s equivalent of Google, and last year, using its collective influence, the PHIA boycotted the search engine, demanding an end to the annual aggressive price increases for keyword advertisements.

Junjun turned to Baidu for help. On his phone’s browser, he searched “prostate exam” and clicked on the first link. He didn’t know it was an ad; Baidu search results blur the line between paid and unpaid links. Once on the website for Shenzhen City Hospital, a chat popped up: “ Hello, I’m Shenzhen City Hospital’s online physician, what can I help you with?”

Junjun described his physical results, and the online physician quickly convinced him to set up an appointment for a prostate checkup. On job websites where private hospitals recruit these “online physicians,” the qualifications make clear that the position is for salesmen—many are paid on a commission basis. Baidu searches provide the traffic. In turn, PHIA-member hospitals in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou (China’s three largest cities by GDP) contribute 10 to 15 percent of Baidu’s advertising revenues, analysts at Nomura, a Japanese investment bank, estimated last year.

On the morning of May 16, Junjun went in for the checkup.

The hospital was in the heart of Shenzhen, where the skyscrapers partition the sky into distinct rectangles and squares.

Dongmen market was nearby, too, and Junjun was looking forward to buying new clothes after the checkup.

A friendly nurse led him into an examination room, where a licensed surgeon, Dr. Tang Congxiang, waited with his assistant. When Junjun mentioned the possible prostate calcification, Dr. Tang said he would need another full physical done. The male assistant led him to the cashier, where Junjun paid 651 yuan [$100].

The tests began—blood, urine, penile sensitivity, STDs, prostate exam, and semen analysis, for which Junjun was brought to

a room upstairs and set up with porn videos. Then the assistant led him back to the lobby and told him to wait for the results.

Since Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms started the transformation of China’s economy in 1978, private clinics and hospitals have slowly opened and expanded into medical fields like STD treatment, gynecology, andrology (men’s health), and reproductive medicine, where patient demand for privacy is high, a detail not generally offered in public hospitals. Private clinics and hospitals advertise widely—on the radio, public buses and billboards, even packing discount-abortion cards into pregnancy tests, to rope in patients. They provide such a large portion of advertising revenue for some local newspapers that when Qingdao’s Metropolis Convenience Daily published patient complaints about a PHIA-member-owned men’s hospital in 2010, and the hospital president retaliated by leading a group of knife-wielding thugs to ransack the newspaper office and slash five reporters, it was the newspaper that ended up shutting down after all hospital advertising was pulled from its pages. The hospital remains open.

When the test results came in, the physician’s assistant led Junjun back to the examination room, and Dr. Tang questioned him about his sexual history. Junjun disclosed he was single and a virgin. Then Dr. Tang hit Junjun with the diagnoses: urinary tract infection (UTI), overly long foreskin, low sperm count with low motility, and prostate calcification. He was in bad shape—the root problem was the foreskin. Junjun’s long foreskin had caused the infection, he remembers Dr. Tang explaining, which in turn caused the prostate calcification and the ensuing prostate crystals. The foreskin had to go.

“He told me I needed treatment immediately,” Junjun says, even though he had no symptoms. “It was serious. He scared me. He told me I needed to be circumcised. When I said I didn’t want to, Dr. Tang just repeated it again and again. He said other hospitals couldn’t cure these diseases, but their hospital had imported medical technology to cure these problems.”

Dr. Faysal Yafi, a professor of urology at Tulane University School of Medicine, told me a man who has a UTI is not generally circumcised unless recurrent infections become a problem and that prostate calcification and prostate crystals alone do not require treatment.

Oversight of private hospitals and clinics is minimal. Some so-called physicians work without licenses. Even those physicians with licenses generally rise through a vocational education system that requires less academic study, which oftentimes precludes them from positions in public hospitals. In online chat groups for private-hospital hiring, physicians advertise their abilities by touting their “average patient spend,” meaning how much money they can get out of each patient. Most of the posts list figures in the range of $450 to $600 per patient, akin to China’s average monthly wage.

“I was a little bit worried and scared,” Junjun says. “I couldn’t believe all these things. But I thought, well, a doctor wouldn’t trick me.” Eventually, Junjun agreed to the surgery, and the doctor’s assistant followed him to the cashier and waited as Junjun paid $220 for the circumcision and anesthesia.

None of the dozens of patients I interviewed could articulate why they agreed to surgery or believed their diagnoses. But Zhan Guotuan, one of China’s pioneering healthcare entrepreneurs and an honorary chairman of the PHIA, offered clues in

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a 2014 interview with Chinaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Entrepreneur magazine. â&#x20AC;&#x153;There are tricks for scamming money,â&#x20AC;? he said. â&#x20AC;&#x153;One is the so-called hospital guide. After you enter, someone follows you like a shadow, like a retail salesperson, constantly brainwashing and scaring youâ&#x20AC;Ś denying you the opportunity for independent thought or time to consult friends and family.â&#x20AC;? â&#x20AC;&#x153;I wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t paying attention to the details,â&#x20AC;? Junjun says. â&#x20AC;&#x153;The assistant was always following me, leading me. I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have any time to think.â&#x20AC;? He was soon on the operating table. Dr. Tang injected local anesthesia and began the surgery. During the course of the operation, Junjun recalls Dr. Tang telling him he had too many nerves. â&#x20AC;&#x153;It was my first time ever having surgery,â&#x20AC;? Junjun says. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I was scared.â&#x20AC;? So while he was anesthetised and on the operating table, according to Junjun, the doctor pushed him to agree to a dorsal neurectomy as well, to get rid of the extra nerves, for an additional $430. Not knowing what the surgery was, but told it needed to be done, Junjun agreed. (Shenzhen TV ran a short segment on Junjun that suggested the hospital had forged his signature on the dorsal neurectomy patient consent form. Dr. Tang declined our request for comment.)

After the surgery, Dr. Tang advised Junjun he needed to use an â&#x20AC;&#x153;imported medical deviceâ&#x20AC;? to break up the prostate crystals, which would be urinated out. It was expensive, about $12 a minute, but heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d be healed in an hourâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s time, the doctor promised. Again, the doctorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s assistant followed him to the cashier, where Junjun paid for the neurectomy and an hour of therapy with the device. Heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d now spent $1,500, more than two monthsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; salary. The $150 in cash heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d brought along was gone, and now his bank account was empty too. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d already done the surgery,â&#x20AC;? he says. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I thought, It doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t matter about the money, and I can spend a little bit more if it will cure me, so I said OK.â&#x20AC;?

The assistant led him upstairs to a room that held the imported medical device. It resembled an MRI machine, and a nurse operated it from a separate computer control station.

When Junjun lay down on the machineâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s patient table, a cylindrical fixture extended down toward his groin like a zooming microscope. Soon a red light beamed at his prostate region. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have any feeling at all when I was under the red light,â&#x20AC;? Junjun says. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I just saw the light coming out of the machine. I was in a daze. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know what I was thinking.â&#x20AC;?

When an hour under the red light was nearly up, Dr. Tang returned. â&#x20AC;&#x153;The doctor said one hour wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be enough. He said I needed to do another hour. When I told him I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have enough money, he said, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;If you donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have enough money, just borrow some. Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve just done the surgery, so the treatment is most effective now. If you wait to do more red light, the results will not be the same.â&#x20AC;&#x2122;â&#x20AC;? Junjun dialed a classmate, who came with a bankcard, and Shenzhen City Hospital charged another $740. He was led back to the machine for another hour of red-light therapy.

Though he was wary, Junjun returned the next day to continue treatment. When Dr. Tang suggested even more red-light treatment, at a cost of $930, he finally grasped heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d been conned.

In total, he spent $2,400, equivalent to about four monthsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; salary. He still owes his classmate money.

After refusing more treatment, Junjun returned home to his parentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; small apartment and searched Baidu for information

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on the procedures that Dr. Tang had done. He read about the potential side effects of dorsal neurectomies. He read patient accounts of being duped. He read of their erectile dysfunction. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I fell down, down, into a type of hell,â&#x20AC;? he says.

The next day, Junjun called Dr. Tang and asked how he could do this to him. â&#x20AC;&#x153;He said it was nothing,â&#x20AC;? Junjun claims. â&#x20AC;&#x153;He said Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d be fine.â&#x20AC;? Nurses at Shenzhen City Hospital told Junjun the same thing. â&#x20AC;&#x153;The nurse kept telling me how good this surgery is.

She has a son, so I told her Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d pay for her son to get this surgery done. Her husband, too. They could all do it for free, on me.â&#x20AC;?

When Junjun went to a public hospital to understand his options, the doctor told him heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d been tricked. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Doctors at public hospitals all know these private hospitals harm people,â&#x20AC;?

Junjun sighs. â&#x20AC;&#x153;But no one stands up and says anything.â&#x20AC;?

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Ä&#x2021;7+(<Ä&#x2020;9( 7851(' 0( ,172 $ (818&+ Ä&#x2C6; -81-81 6$,' $)7(5 +,6 3$5(176 *27 ,192/9(' 7+( +263,7$/ $*5((' 72 5(7851 +,6 75($70(17 &2676 Ä&#x2021;5(7851 0< 75($70(17 &2676" , :$17 7+(0 72 &85( 0( Ä&#x2C6; In coming weeks, his parents got involved, and after eight visits, the hospital agreed to return his treatment costs. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Return my treatment costs?â&#x20AC;? Junjun posted on an online Baidu forum. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve turned me into a eunuch. I want them to cure me.â&#x20AC;?

Reached by phone, Shenzhen City Hospitalâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s legal representative, Hu Jianfan, declined to comment for this story.

Shenzhen Luohu District Health Commission officials confirmed that Junjunâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s neurectomy was tacked on midsurgery but said Junjun had consented to the surgery. They claimed not to be responsible for clinicsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; use of medical devices and referred questions to the China Food and Drug Administration, who told me that their agency ensured the quality of devices and stated no private hospital is allowed to use unapproved machines.

Over the course of 15 months reporting this story, 25 public hospital physicians practicing in 15 Chinese cities said that patients scammed by private clinics and hospitals often end up in their waiting rooms. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Some public hospitals donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t even have an andrology department,â&#x20AC;? laments Dr. Jiang Hui, a professor at Peking University and chairman of the Chinese Society of Andrology, â&#x20AC;&#x153;so if you have these problems, and you see the advertisements, well, you get taken in and duped.â&#x20AC;?

Dr. Jiang believes in privatized healthcare, with regulation. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Oversight is difficult,â&#x20AC;? he says. â&#x20AC;&#x153;In China, there is no oversight.â&#x20AC;?

Mr. Xie visited Shenzhen Kunlun Urology Hospital, where he received a dorsal neurectomy.

$

ccording to public records and interviews, Lin Jinzong owns Shenzhen City Hospital through his company Beijing Yingcai Hospital Management. He claims to own more than 200 clinics and hospitals across China, and like most members of the PHIA, he hails from the small town of Dong Zhuang, lying on the outskirts of Putian. Lin holds the position of supervisory vice chairman in the well-delineated PHIA hierarchyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;only 15 men rank higher on the totem pole.

(Lin did not respond to repeated calls and emails to his three hospital holding companies seeking comment.)

Public records link ownership of all the clinics visited by the four Shenzhen â&#x20AC;&#x153;eunuchsâ&#x20AC;? to members of the PHIA. Little Huang visited Shenzhen Qiaoyuan Clinic, owned by Xiao Hua. Xiao also hails from Dong Zhuang, holds the rank of vice chairman in the PHIA, and operates at least ten other clinics and hospitals in China. A physician told Mr. Wang the dorsal neurectomy would cure his fertility problems at the Shenzhen Wanzhong Clinic, owned by Yang Xiandong, VICE 63

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Mr. Fang went to a People’s Armed Police hospital contracted to a PHIA member where he was made impotent.

who operates four other clinics in Guangdong Province. Yang serves as a member of the Guangdong Provincial branch of the PHIA, as does Su Kaiming, who owns the Zhongya Clinic that Mr. Peng visited.

At the top of the PHIA pyramid is the chairman, Lin Zhizhong, the principal shareholder of the Shenzhen Boai Group, thought to be China’s largest private hospital holding company. His younger brother, Lin Zhicheng, owns a stake in Guangzhou Shengya Urology Hospital,* which has given fake diagnoses to two undercover Chinese reporters in the last three years. Two miles away sits Lin Zhicheng’s Modern Hospital Guangzhou, which in 2010 rebranded as Modern Cancer Hospital Guangzhou (MCHG) to draw late-stage cancer patients from Southeast Asian countries for “new and advanced, minimally invasive” cancer treatments. (One advertisement runs: “We create MIRACLES! We bring HOPE!”) MCHG’s chief oncologist, Peng Xiaochi, holds only a master’s degree in neurology. The president of a prominent public-hospital cancer centre familiar with MCHG, who asked not to be named, noted that most of the hospital’s advertising claims are false. “The hospital only cares about money,” he said. “They will never cure late-stage cancer patients.”

The PHIA would likely not exist if it were not for Chen Deliang, born in Dong Zhuang Town in 1950. Today, at 65, he is small and frail, with a stooped back and the remains of his gray hair concentrated in two large sideburns, which reach down to his jowls. A gold Rolex and diamond ring adorn his skeletal left hand. He’s revered as the founding father of China’s private hospitals and holds the position of honorary chairman of the PHIA. “There were no doctors during the Cultural Revolution,” Chen told me on a visit to the $16 million Taoist temple complex he’s building in Dong Zhuang, explaining how he got his start as a travelling medicine man crisscrossing China with a mercury-based (read: toxic) home remedy for scabies that he pedaled on street corners. By the early 1990s, he’d branched out into private STD clinics. “We started making the big money,” Chen said, citing his trademark “gonorrhea cure” as his best seller. “In one year, we could make a million [yuan] or more.” Venereal disease was a gold mine, and Chen’s growing wealth demonstrated to his relatives, friends, and their friends the possibilities of private healthcare. (In 1998, China’s health department sent out a bulletin calling Chen’s acolytes a “gang of swindlers blanketing the country… wantonly scamming money and entrapping patients.”) Chen’s family now owns and operates more than 100 private clinics and hospitals. “As long as there is land,” Chen said, “our Putian people are there running hospitals. I created a new path.”

Chen’s family manages the hospital assets, which include Baijia, a company comprised of 17 maternity and gynecology hospitals. In January 2015, Morgan Stanley Private Equity Asia invested $38 million in Baijia. (Public records show Chen is Baijia’s second-largest shareholder; his stake is about equal to that of his nephew, Su Jinmo, who is Baijia’s president and chairman.) According to Chen, Baijia is valued at about $308 million. Since Morgan Stanley’s financing, the chain has added four new hospitals.

Baijia links doctors’ bonus pay to surgery and pharmaceutical quotas—i.e., how much they sell—according to Chen

and a gynecologist once recruited to work at a Baijia-owned facility. Baijia’s online “physicians” (actually trained salesmen) detail varying price-point abortion packages—if you’re planning to have a child in the future, they recommend the most expensive option. (Zhou Dan, a Shenzhen gynecologist who briefly worked at a private clinic with the same pricing scheme, claims they’re all the same surgery.) Baijia hospitals are also unequipped to handle patients who need emergency treatment, and when there are life-threatening complications, according to a manager of a Baijia facility, they transfer patients to local public hospitals.

In 2014, a newborn at a Baijia-owned hospital ingested amniotic fluid during delivery and needed emergency treatment, so the hospital sent the baby to a nearby public hospital, local news agency Rednet reported. After the newborn died, a Baijia spokesperson cited the transfer and declared it impossible to say which facility was responsible. They then refused to hand over the family’s medical records.

In April 2015, Chinese courts ruled two Baijia-owned hospitals negligent in the death of one newborn and responsible for inflicting another with cerebral palsy (despite both hospitals transferring the infants to public hospitals at the last minute). In the latter case, the court alleged that Baijia’s Wenzhou Oriental Maternity Hospital had falsified medical records and acted to conceal its responsibility. There is additional evidence of a number of similar cases that were settled before trial or never made it to court.

Even when treatment doesn’t end in catastrophe, patients writing on review websites relay being exploited by doctors at Baijia facilities. “Garbage hospital,” posted a patient of the Baijia-owned Maria Hospital in Changsha, Hunan. “A pelvic inflammation cost me more than $1,550 and wasn’t even cured.

They simply treat people as ATMs.” Morgan Stanley’s private-equity arm is helping Baijia expand, Chen Deliang told me, while the company prepares for a public offering. (Nick Footitt, a Morgan Stanley spokesperson, declined to comment as did Baijia officials.) Another American-invested private-equity firm, CDH Investments, has already seen a windfall from its investment in a PHIAmember-owned hospital chain, which went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in July 2015. “I’m pretty satisfied with investments in Putian hospitals,” Wang Hui, a former CDH Investments executive, told China Business News. “In most cases, every hospital starts making money after two to three years of operations.”

3

rofits from private hospitals have transformed Dong Zhuang from an impoverished farming town into the Beverly Hills of China. The town is home to 35,000 private hospital owners and their employees, about one third of the total population, according to a Dong Zhuang town official. On plots of land where sweet potatoes once grew, Rolls-Royces, Bentleys, and BMWs now park in front of great mansions of glass, onion domes, arches, and parapets. One mansion visible from Chen Deliang’s temple window stands 16 stories tall and has more than 100,000 square feet of living space, making it one of the largest homes in the world.

When I visited in February 2015, medical-device manufacturers had gathered in Dong Zhuang’s new, three-story

* Lin Zhizhong recently transferred his stake to another Putian man, but his name remains on the current building lease.

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exhibition centre for an annual medical expo. Lin Jianxing, the organizer, greeted me outside. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Two hundred [and] fifty companies from twenty-eight provinces have come to sell medical devices,â&#x20AC;? he said. The inaugural exhibition, 13 years earlier, had been held on the street, like a flea market, he explained, but now the exhibition was housed in palatial facilities. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Go on, look at all the equipment in there,â&#x20AC;? Lin urged me. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s really big and advanced.â&#x20AC;?

A medical fantasyland waited. At the booth of Dekang Medical, I tried on a Sharper Imageâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;type head massager that, the saleswoman said, treated schizophrenic voices, depression, OCD, anxiety, mania, and PTSD. A salesman at Dongnan Medical soon explained why many of the devices were built to

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resemble MRI machines. “Private hospitals need to let customers know these are valuable pieces of equipment,” he said. “The big devices entice customers in for treatment.”

At the table for Zonghen Medical, I marveled at the ZD-2001A Pafeite Shortwave Space Pulse Machine, built with a sleek egg-capsule design for patients to squeeze into, which was connected to a control station aesthetically suited to launch a 1960s-era NASA rocket. The device, a cheery attendant said, used shortwave diathermy to produce heat and treat a variety of gynecological and urological diseases. Surprisingly, the China Food and Drug Administration has approved the device for medical use, perhaps on the basis of one Chinese study, which appears to have been commissioned by the manufacturer and claims the machine cured pelvic inflammatory disease (PID) in 98 percent of patients without the use of antibiotics. A professor of reproductive epidemiology in the US, however, pointed out that antibiotics and not heat are used for the treatment of PID, as bacteria cause the disease. Studies on using diathermy to treat the pain associated with chronic PID are limited too; one of the few was carried out in the US in 1955, when physicians didn’t fully understand the bacteria associated with PID. This has not stopped Baijia-owned hospitals from stocking the ZD-2001A device and using it to treat PID. Next, at Shenzhen Yuanda Medical Instrument’s booth, I found what was likely the machine that “treated” Junjun.

Advertised as in use on the Shenzhen City Hospital website, I now stared at the “Wolman Prostate Gland Treatment System.” The machine resembled a large, open-style MRI machine, and its sleek white exterior held long English words—“Electrochemical Apparatus,” “Infrared Light.” On THIS PAGE: Front cover of the Wolman Prostate Gland Treatment System brochure.

The English spelling of “Wolman” changes page by page.

OPPOSITE PAGE: Mr. Li under the covers in a Beijing guesthouse

the patient table, a framed certificate stated the machine was made by the USA Wolman Prostate Institute, which later research revealed is a dummy company that was registered in Utah in 2011. A man named You Dongqing owns the business, and more than 100 other dummy corporations share the same address in suburban Salt Lake City.

“The red light cures prostatitis,” the salesman said, beaming proudly and handing me a brochure for the Wolman Prostate Gland Treatment System. The brochure featured a photo of the USA Wolman Prostate Institute’s research centre, which, thanks to a clearly labeled sign on the building, I quickly discovered was actually a photo of Invesco Field, where the Denver Broncos play football. “Number one seller for four years running,” the brochure read, “in use at 800 private hospitals across the nation.”

It was hard to tell, I thought, who was scamming whom.

Both the hospital owners buying the machines and the salesmen knew patients like Junjun and Little Huang would trust the advanced, “imported” machines if physicians recommended them. Information asymmetry between doctor and patient is extreme in healthcare. The traditional moral compass for physicians—the Hippocratic Oath—has fallen victim to unbridled capitalism and corruption in China, especially in private hospitals, which saw 11 percent of all visits, totalling 325.6 million, in 2014. Once primarily a trap targeting the young or naïve or uninsured, private hospital chains like Baijia are now moving upmarket and beginning to accept government-run insurance, drawing in new swaths of society as patients. But when false marketing campaigns and supposedly low prices lure people of the middle class, will they too trust the doctor in the white coat and the big machines with English lettering? “The clinic is just a hole waiting for someone to fall into,” Junjun says. “And the health department stamps it with a chop—Legal!”

2

n the night of November 3, 2015, about a month after Junjun came down off the rooftop in Shenzhen, China’s 21st-century eunuchs squeezed into a small guest room on the outskirts of Beijing. Twenty other men joined them, ages 22 to 44, all born in rural areas across China. For months, the men had communicated through an online chat group, organizing the plans for a protest in Beijing that, they hoped, would finally draw the attention of the country’s highest officials to regulate the private hospitals and find treatment for their surgically imposed erectile dysfunction.

Now, 27-year-old Mr. Li, the moderator of the online chat group, who had a dorsal neurectomy five years prior, stood with his legs pushed against the bed. He spoke loudly, so even the men packed into the bathroom could hear. Junjun was pressed into one wall, shorter than most, and he craned to see Mr. Li. “We’ve got our petition,” Mr. Li said, raising a 31-page document that Junjun had handwritten the previous day. The front page held each man’s name, hospital, and thumbprint, and inside pages included detailed narratives about each man’s injuries and attempts to seek redress. They planned to deliver it to the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) office, the Communist Party of China’s top organ for rooting out corruption and malfeasance, at 8 AM the next morning.

If the men succeeded, they hoped the Communist Party officials would be moved to action by the stories detailed in

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the petition: that of 24-year-old Mr. Xi, who now sat crosslegged on the rock-hard bed, with a scar on his wrist from where he slashed it while pleading for help in his local health commission. There was the story of nearby Mr. Yao, whose wife had divorced him after a dorsal neurectomy left him impotentâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d subsequently climbed to the roof of his local health commission to douse himself in oil and threaten to light a match. And then there was Mr. Gao, a lithe 25-year-old who was now, despite the crowded quarters, sprawled in the centre of the bed, his face flushed red from alcohol. Heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d cut off his own pinkie finger while pleading for justice, and now he used his four-and-a-half-fingered hand to wave his phone at the group.

On the phoneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s screen, Junjun and the others saw text messages from Mr. Duan, head of Mr. Gaoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s local health commission. Mr. Duan had followed Mr. Gao to Beijing to beg him not to participate in the protest, out of fear that the men would successfully attract the attention of high-level Communist officials. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Come home with us tomorrow, and weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll resolve this,â&#x20AC;? Mr. Duan had written. â&#x20AC;&#x153;No matter what you do, in the end, youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll have to return [home] for a resolution.â&#x20AC;? In another message, Mr. Duan had offered $7,730 if Mr. Gao left Beijing. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve got to last at least a couple of hours,â&#x20AC;? Mr. Gao said, confidently. His own protest back home in Shanxi, on the roof of the private hospital, had lasted at least as long and earned him his first audience with Mr. Duan. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Even if the Peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Armed Police rope off the area,â&#x20AC;? offered Mr. Wang from Shenzhen. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re not leaving.â&#x20AC;? â&#x20AC;&#x153;Theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll drag us away,â&#x20AC;? added another man. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re not breaking any laws,â&#x20AC;? Mr. Wang shouted. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Breaking the laws? They destroyed our cocks!â&#x20AC;?

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7

he next morning, after a fitful nightâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s rest in the guesthouse, the men awoke to find thick smog choking Beijing. They had not scouted the entrance to the CCDI building, and they were dismayed to discover that a blast wall, towering 20 feet tall in stretches, rings the complex. At the main gate on Pinganli Boulevard, an officer stood on a podium, with a detachment of five more standing in a roped-off cordon at his feet. Still more officers filled two public busses parked to the left and right of the entrance.

The 24 men crossed the wide boulevard and gathered opposite the gate, where only a couple of officers sat in two police vans.

On the sidewalk, the men broke into two rows. Little Huang dropped his backpack and pulled out a banner reading, national dorsal neurectomy victims. Another man to his right held up, evil hospitals scam money and murder. Junjun dropped to his knees, as did other patients in the front. As the banners went up, the men chanted, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Evil menâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hospitals, return my well-being!â&#x20AC;?

In the end, all of the protesters would spend five days in detention before being released into the custody of their local government officials, who promptly deported most of the men back to the countryside. Little Huang recently received a small settlement from his clinic. Junjun is in the process of suing Shenzhen City Hospital. The clinic, however, has received no penalties or fines, and the closed surgical room has reopened.

But on that morning in November, they still had hope. Had there been an official walking into work at the very moment the

men started their chant, he or she may have turned to see what the commotion was about. He or she may have seen the banners, may even have crossed the street to take a copy of Junjunâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s petition. Maybe he or she wouldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve read it, too, understood the menâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s suffering, and as all 24 menâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and hundreds more too scared to come to Beijingâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;dreamed, launched a project to find a cure.

Instead, in less than a minute, a large police van flashed out from a side street and pulled to a stop in front of the protesters, screening them from view. First to go were the bannersâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; officers tore and stamped them to the ground. Scuffles broke out. More police vans arrived; the first group of men was carted off, then the next. In ten minutesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; time, there was no sign of the protest or the banners or the eunuchs.

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FIELD NOTES WOMEN OF ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM Denver Art Museum

BY THESSALY LA FORCE

In 1945, two years before Jackson Pollock made his first drip paintings, Grace Hartigan, 23, moved to New York City with Ike Muse, her art professor. Muse was there to advance his career in art. Hartigan was tagging along. One night, they threw a party.

Muse had hung his paintings throughout the house. A solitary painting by Hartigan hung on the living-room wall. The guests pointed to it and congratulated Muse on his best painting yet. He was furious. He told Hartigan to stop painting. She didn’t and eventually moved out.

Hartigan is now considered one of the most important abstract expressionists for her wild use of colour and pop-culture references. (She once joked that Muse taught her more about sex than he did about art.)

Several of her most famous paintings—some of which were first collected by the Museum of Modern Art—are part of a new show of more than 50 works called Women of Abstract Expressionism, which opened this month at the Denver Art Museum. Together for the first time are Lee Krasner’s voluptuous and explosive The Seasons (1957), Helen Frankenthaler’s washed-out and blocky Jacob’s Ladder (1957), Jay DeFeo’s dense Incision (1958–61), and Elaine de Kooning’s violent Bullfight (1959). The show is less comprehensive than its title suggests, focusing only on 12 women from the two coasts. (This is due mainly to space.

The paintings—like The Seasons, almost 17 feet long—are enormous). From New York come Krasner, Hartigan, Mary Abbott, and others who worked under the movement’s elders, Pollock and Willem de Kooning. But there are also artists from the San Francisco Bay Area art scene, which was more inclusive but less conducive to fame.

In the middle of last century, men— exemplified by Picasso, Matisse, Dalí—got to be great artists. Mistresses were muses.

When Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline and other downtown artists started the Club, the famous village hangout, one of the original rules was no women allowed. But there were plenty of them. And they broke the rules. In the words of biographers Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan in the excellent De Kooning: An American Master:

The strongest female figures of the period, refusing to be pitied, became remarkably tough survivors.

They often did so not by rejecting the macho of the period, but by embracing it, showing the world that they could out-boy the boys…

Joan Mitchell had a mouth that could shame a marine and could be especially cutting about other women.

She called Helen Frankenthaler, who was known for staining her unprimed canvas with misty washes of paint, “that tampon painter.”

The abstract expressionist movement, which attempted to free itself from figurative language, was largely dismissive of the work of these women, many of whom were accused

of being too much in the shadow of more representational European traditions. A critic for ARTnews, writing in 1949 about both the work of Pollock and Krasner, said Krasner’s paintings could be seen as an attempt to “tidy up” Pollock’s more untamed gestures.

Yet reading the show’s catalogue of the same name, published by Yale University Press, it’s clear these artists approached painting with radical intuition. They, too, mined their subconscious for distinct styles, creating, as the curator, Gwen Chanzit, writes in her introduction, “painterly expressions brought on through direct or remembered experience”: Frankenthaler with her dreamy colour washes, DeFeo with her obsessive layering of paint, Hartigan with her vivid sense of scale, and experiments with the traditions of old masters.

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© 2016 Starz Entertainment, LLC. © 2016 Transactional Pictures of NY LP. All rights reserved.

The renewed attention given to these painters, thanks in a large part to recent academic scholarship, may help cast abstract expressionism in a new light.

These women pushed the boundaries of the movement in ways Willem de Kooning, who continued to play with figuration, and Pollock, who struggled with what to do after his drip paintings until his tragic death in 1956, didn’t. For instance, while the work of artists like Pollock tended to be entirely inward—“I am nature,” he famously declared—Hartigan turned toward the world. One early work of hers showed a window display of bridal mannequins arranged similarly to Goya’s famous portrait of Charles IV and his family. Her Oranges collaboration with Frank O’Hara, in which she made paintings in response to 12 of his poems, incorporating text from each, reflects how seamlessly painting mixed with poetry within the New York School.

Perhaps they were ignored because many postwar American artists struggled to define themselves against the Europeans, who commanded more legitimacy and respect from the MoMA, gallery owners, and influential collectors like Peggy Guggenheim. But as Pollock and Willem de Kooning’s careers began to take off in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the competition intensified. An aggressive artistic character was admired. These gestures on the canvas were crowned for their maleness and, in turn, used to eliminate competition in a small market.

Painted by men or women, the work is still breathtaking in its ambition. Consider Hedda Sterne, who is included in the catalogue’s thoughtful index. She did not quite define herself as an abstract expressionist, and yet she was the only woman in the movement’s famous 1951 Life photo shoot

by Nina Leen. In it, she stands on a chair, above the men—she claims she arrived to the shoot late, and the photographer just told her where to go. She stands out, as she said later, “like a feather on top.”

Her painting New York, NY, 1955, which she made with enamel and a spray gun, came out of storage last spring for the opening of the new Whitney Museum. It blended right in alongside a Pollock, a de Kooning, and a Rothko.

It was about time.

THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE Starz

To watch The Girlfriend Experience is to witness a young woman slowly destroying her life—or is it?

The STARZ drama, executive-produced by Steven Soderbergh and very loosely adapted from his film of the same name, follows Christine Reade (Riley Keough), a 20-something secondyear law student who lands an internship at Kirkland & Allen, a Chicago law firm. As the show progresses, she’s drawn into the world of high-priced prostitution by a friend and fellow law student, Avery. Christine—who bangs under the nom de guerre Chelsea—has sex and intimate conversation (the girlfriend experience) with rich businessmen in sleek, antiseptic hotel rooms, making thousands of dollars a pop. It hardly seems like a spoiler to say these two lives intersect with disastrous consequences. But while the fallout clearly ruins the lives of many around Christine, its effect on her is more ambiguous— and it’s also one of the most interesting aspects of the show.

There’s a deep continuity between the soulcrushingly muted vibe of Christine’s office and law school and the fancy hotel rooms where Chelsea takes over, and throughout it all, she’s unsettlingly opaque, displaying little or no emotion. In a telling moment early on, before she has started sex work, Christine is at a job fair with Avery, memorizing technical terms from intellectual-property cases on index cards. Avery asks her what the phrases mean. “Doesn’t matter,” Christine replies. “They just want to hear their own words repeated back to them.” Of course, when she uses this technique at an

interview with Kirkland & Allen, they see right through it—and hire her anyway. She’s already a hooker; she’s just not a very good one. Toiling at a major law firm is about spinning bullshit and making money, just like selling sex to millionaires, but at least the latter is sometimes interesting and pleasurable. It’s hard to resist: As her life at the law firm blows up, Christine fucks corporate America, literally. She doesn’t seem to be leaving much behind at Kirkland— she’s just trading up from intern to smallbusiness owner. SOFIA GROOPMAN

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FIELD NOTES / REVIEWS

RATFUCKED David Daley

CASTRO’S CUBA Lee Lockwood

Liveright

Taschen

How could Democrats win 1.4 million more votes than Republicans in 2012 and still lose the House by 33 seats? Welcome to modern politics in America. In his first book, Ratfucked (a term for political sabotage), David Daley, the editor in chief of Salon, shows how a few Republican operatives and darkmoney donors were able to ensure legislative victories that could last through the decade, regardless of the popular vote. It began in 2010, when Republicans flooded local races with cash and took control of a handful of state legislatures, giving them the ability to draw local and congressional district lines that will last until 2022. Using software that compares everything from voters’ political preferences to recent online purchases, they gerrymandered districts across the country, allowing them to guarantee Republican wins. But there’s more at stake here than just party control, Daley argues. Gerrymandering creates districts so politically uniform that candidates only face a real threat in primaries, which are thought to attract more ideological voters than general elections. Daley believes this forces candidates from either party to become increasingly extreme in order to keep their seats, furthering political polarization. With the new battle to draw political lines approaching, Daley leaves readers wondering what the GOP is up to now. SARAH MIMMS

SMACKWAVE Spike Fuck Self-Released

In 1965, six years after he covered the Cuban revolution, the photojournalist Lee Lockwood returned to document the country’s new socialist system. He travelled with the young Fidel Castro around the country in jeeps, boats, and Soviet helicopters, photographing the charismatic leader giving speeches in tropical downpours, playing dominoes, and smoking cigars. Castro’s Cuba—first published in 1967, and now reissued with more than 200 photographs from Lockwood’s archives—is a diary of these fourteen weeks, accompanied by a transcript of a wide-ranging week long conversation he had with the then 39-yearold ruler. Some of Lockwood’s photos are surprisingly intimate: a shirtless Fidel, in army pants and Chucks, flexing his muscles and doing pull-ups; in another shot, he lounges in a track suit, lazily pointing an AK-47 at something (or someone). Though he edited the interview before it was published, Castro welcomed Lockwood’s pointed challenge to his utopian aims. He countered by accusing the US of hypocrisy over racial discrimination, money-clogged politics, and the suppression of Communist media. “An enemy of Socialism cannot write in our newspapers,” he said to Lockwood.

“We don’t deny it, and we don’t go around proclaiming a hypothetical freedom of the press where it actually doesn’t exist, the way you people do.” NATALIE SHUTLER

OUR TINY, USELESS HEARTS Toni Jordan Text Publishing

There’s a morbid kind of romance to addiction has always captivated people. If it’s too gruesome to look at in life, then certainly, we’re fascinated by it in art. Since Billie Holiday quavered “You Go To My Head,” singers have written about love, drugs, and the space where they intersect. Gil Scott Heron lamented it on Pieces of a Man, while Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day” came close to a celebration.

Spike Fuck’s heartbreaking post-punk EP Smackwave does something else again. Stories of dependency, rehabilitation, intimacy, and Spike’s own transgender identity are delivered with a surprising pop sensibility. Over Smackwave’s four tracks, Spike Fuck undulates between tragedy and minutia. ‘Tomorrow We Get Healthy’ could’ve appeared on Unknown Pleasures. ‘Junkie Logic,’ leaves us in the wake of heroin: “I got one, I got two, I got three friends that died from constant drug use.” Spike tells some pretty dark stories, but this record doesn’t suggest we’re all fucked. In fact, it does exactly the opposite.

“When I get home to Melbourne, I’ll make it safe and clean.”

Smackwave’s remarkable feat is to all at once communicate the sometimes unbearable complexity of things and the exceptional nature of being alive—a decent effort for a record going round for free. ISSY BEECH

People living out in the suburbs lead much weirder sex lives than their inner city counterparts. Or at least they do in this novel. When single— kinda bitter about it—Janice leaves her Melbourne apartment for the weekend to visit her married sister Caroline in distant suburbia, she’s bracing for boredom. Instead, she discovers that Caroline’s husband has run away with their kid’s teacher, and Caroline herself is having an affair with her nipple-pierced neighbour. His wife has no idea.

Somehow, Janice’s ex ends up sprawled naked on her bed, covering himself with a throw pillow. It’s a lot to deal with at once.

Maybe relationship breakdowns shouldn’t be funny, but Jordan’s fourth novel is lighthearted and sardonic enough that you don’t feel too guilty revelling in the demise of several people’s great Australian dreams. Our Tiny, Useless Hearts isn’t American Beauty, but it’s not The Castle either—rather, something in between.

Sometimes what’s swept under the astroturf isn’t sinister, it’s just a mess. Maybe it’s for that best that we’ll never be able to afford that white picket fence. KATHERINE GILLESPIE

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FIELD NOTES / VOICES

Why We Wear It: The Denim Cutoff Short ALICE NEWELLHANSON —

i-D photo via Everett Collection; Thump photo collage by Kitron Neuschatz

FASHION

When Levi Strauss first began making denim pants in late-19th-century San Francisco, they were known not as “jeans” but as “waist overalls.” Hardy, rip-resistant fabric had been used for centuries to make overalls for American labourers, but Strauss took this material into the modern era. With a patented new technique, he created a truly utilitarian trouser. And pants start at the waist, so: “waist overalls.”

A better branding decision: Strauss changed his own first name to “Levi,” after moving west to reinvent himself as a drygoods tycoon and abandoning his parents’ original choice, “Loeb.” We almost lived in a world in which people posted Instragram photos of their butts in vintage Loeb 501s and serenaded “Apple Bottom Waist Overalls.”

Denim cutoffs are the third generation of American denim-wear, the further diminution of the jean and ultimately the overall.

The irony is that the deliberately chopped and frayed shorts worn by everyone from Daisy Duke to 90s metalheads to presentday actresses at Coachella are still sewn from fabric supposedly formulated in 18thcentury France to be tear-proof.

But denim cutoffs are inherently irreverent. If jeans are John Wayne and country music, denim cutoffs are Patti Smith and punk. They’re deliberately distressed.

They’re disruptive.

The most iconic wearer of denim shorts, Daisy Duke, played by Catherine Bach in the late-1970s to mid-1980s television series The Dukes of Hazzard, knowingly harnessed the power of her

exceptionally toned legs with her cutoff hotpants. She used them to distract truck drivers and avoid tickets for reckless driving. Before production, network censors deemed the shorts too revealing, and they forced Bach to wear flesh-colored tights at all times, to avoid scandalizing American primetime viewers.

While, to some, Daisy Duke shorts connote peachy Southern sexuality, cutoffs were also swept up in the rise of punk. In almost every photo taken of Patti Smith in 1977, she wears the same pair of hacked-off indigo jeans, roughly cuffed and paired with a tweed men’s waistcoat. She played CBGB in them. The same year, legendary rock photographer Bob Gruen captured Debbie Harry skulking around Coney Island in ripped denim hotpants, attracting stares from local beachgoers. Shredding the iconic pants of American industry was a defiantly punk statement, and if that inspired unease, so much the better. Witness the aggressively short denim cutoffs championed a decade

later by metal legend Lemmy Kilmister, bassist for Motörhead. “It was like a thong, dude,” former tour mate Scott Ian has said.

In November 1988, Anna Wintour put the first pair of jeans on the cover of American Vogue, effectively admitting denim into the canon of high fashion—or at least conceding the viability of a high-low mix. From this point on, the denim cutoff entered a new, more polished era. No longer symbols of the counterculture, cutoffs were subsumed into the glossy materialism of the late 80s and early 90s. In 1992, Herb Ritts shot Cindy Crawford for the November issue of Vogue cavorting on the beach in Malibu with then husband Richard Gere, her supermodel physique highlighted by a pair of frayed Levi shorts. And on the catwalks too, designers have returned to cutoffs again and again to inject something both provocative and all-American into their collections. Stella McCartney sent buttock-revealing cutoffs down the runway during one of her final collections for Chloé. More recently, Alexander Wang showed distressed versions when he wanted to channel the punky energy of New York’s St. Marks Place, and Hedi Slimane used high-waisted cutoffs to communicate his vision of 70s California groupie glamour during his tenure at Saint Laurent.

Today, denim cutoffs have all but lost their shock factor—both on the runways and in real life—but that’s a small price to pay for gaining a universally beloved (and socially acceptable) summer wardrobe staple. | VICE’S FASHION CHANNEL

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FIELD NOTES / VOICES

SARAH JEONG — INTERNET

In December 2015, I interviewed an antirevenge-porn activist who went to war against Hunter Moore, the “king of revenge porn.” Moore had hosted nude photos of her daughter, K, on his site. He hacked the photos from K’s email account, and their release caused her pain and humiliation.

“I will carry the trauma of this experience with me for the rest of my life,” K said in court, during Moore’s sentencing. For his part, Moore—who once called himself a “professional life-ruiner”—was sentenced to two and a half years in prison.

When I wrote about the case, I decided not to use K’s name, only her first initial.

Her mother is well known and the media has written about her a lot, so because of that attention, K’s name has also appeared many times in the press.

At this point, K is very publicly associated with Moore’s case. If you’re curious to see her full name, her age, her headshot, her IMDb page, just get on Google. She aspires to be an actress, and the search results tied to Moore are not the ones she wants for the rest of her life. I won’t contribute to the problem. It’s why I redacted her name in my original article, and why I’m

continuing that practice here. K deserves to be forgotten.

In the early 1990s, internet luminary John Gilmore famously said, “The net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

In an age where social networks reign and have a say over what can or cannot be said online, this rule is no longer an absolute, but it rings true in many instances. Remove one torrent of the latest Game of Thrones episode, and another ten will spring up in its place. The internet does not like to forget.

In the European Union, this has led to the “right to be forgotten”—a legal right that people can exercise against search engines, forcing them to remove outdated or inaccurate information. It sprang from a case in Spain in which an old, irrelevant news story about an attorney’s financial embarrassments lingered in his Google search results, years after his circumstances had changed.

A court ultimately forced Google to delist the news story from its search results. In 2015, Google reported receiving more than 400,000 right-to-be-forgotten requests. The company granted about 40 percent of them.

The worst-case scenario, of course, is that someone like Moore can potentially use the

“right to be forgotten” to erase his misdeeds from history. And in the UK, it has been abused to censor embarrassing stories about public figures. The public has a right to know and to remember when people commit serious wrongs. But the internet doesn’t just remember scandal, corruption, and crime—it also remembers addresses, phone numbers, financial information, embarrassing photographs, and juvenile drama. Most of us have photos from freshman year of college we’d rather never see again, but they persist on Facebook in perpetuity. That’s nothing compared to the Google search problems faced by people like K, who, in her quest to have her nude photos removed from the internet, may have linked her name with the term “revenge porn” forever.

The world wide web is a magnificent library of knowledge, linked together by machine-readable text that can be crawled by search engines. Through sites like Google, you can penetrate an unimaginably dense world of words; websites, blogs, and articles that would otherwise remain obscure can easily be found.

In most cases, this is a good thing. We have never had this much knowledge and information available to us at once. It also means that an argument, which in the real world would have dissipated in a flash, can last forever. A single blog post can dog someone’s reputation for years.

To be fair, sometimes this is justified— for example, no matter how much money University of California, Davis, spends to remove online mentions of the incident, we shouldn’t forget that campus police peppersprayed student protesters in the face in 2011.

Still, there are many private people who simply don’t have a lot of search-engine hits for their name, and even a fly-by negative mention will float to the top, just because there isn’t much else. I’m not interested in being part of someone’s search-engine hell, and I imagine most decent people aren’t either.

Let’s set aside the legal “right to be forgotten” and think instead about the baseline of decency we want for ourselves—the kindness of forgetting. By practicing a sort of reverse search-engine optimization—refusing to supply the machine-readable text that makes search engines tick—we can participate in a better, nicer, more ethical internet.

Internet photo collage by Adam Mignanelli

The Kindness of Forgetting

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Ask an Expert: What’s in Your Baggie?

DAVID GARBER — NIGHTLIFE

Music festivals are breeding grounds for bad decisions, but today, hoards of partiers use DIY drug-testing kits in an attempt to mitigate potentially poor choices.

The testing process is simple: Take a piece of your substance, drop a chemical solution on it, and wait to see what colour shows up. Depending on what appears, you may have a better idea if your stuff is legit or potentially dangerous. Some swear these kits are a quick way to see what you’re taking, but critics say there’s not enough research to support them.

We talked to veteran British psychiatrist, psychopharmacologist, and former government official David Nutt to see what he thinks of these mobile laboratories.

has toxic substances like [the dangerous MDMA knockoff] Red Mitsubishi in it, they might be useful. It takes a lot more analysis to actually work out how much is in it, rather than what’s in it.

THUMP: How do testing kits work?

Dr. David Nutt: Drugs are chemicals that can be detected by their chemical interactions with other chemicals. The right chemical can, in theory, react with a drug to produce a signal— usually a change of colour—to show what else is present.

What can be done to better test drugs?

The kits are promoting safe drug use, which I’m all in favour of, but whether they actually provide safety, I don’t know. There’s not enough evidence to recommend them. If you’re going to take drugs, try to get them from a source that’s reliable and you can go back to. If you’re going to use something for the first time, take a tiny amount.

What can they be useful for?

If you’re curious if your ecstasy

What’s your opinion of these kits?

I think they give you a false sense of security. I think that roadside testing for users half an hour before they are going to pop it is a complete waste of time and may do more harm than good.

I’m an enthusiast for testing as it’s done in the Netherlands and Wales, where you can go to a professional lab and find out exactly what you’re getting.

| VICE’S ELECTRONIC MUSIC CHANNEL

Art Trends: The New Nude Last May, notorious appropriation artist Richard Prince caused a stir during the Frieze Art Fair in New York when he revealed New Portraits, EMERSON a series of photos of photos. He “stole” ROSENTHAL the images from the accounts of some — Instagram-famous young women— ART models, musicians, and performers.

The purloined content was connected

by Prince’s interest and the space it occupied; each carefully curated candid sat squarely between a sext and a selfie, revealing Prince’s penchant for publishing things that are potentially pornographic.

In 1969, Betty Tompkins took a similar approach to Prince’s with her own series of paintings. Her source material—tightly cropped hardcore pornography— caused her work to be banned all over the world. But the fact that Tompkins’s Fuck Paintings reemerged and were revered in 2013 speaks to a movement toward thinking more openly about sex and art.

Even Jeff Koons’s 1990 Made in Heaven, a series of snapshots with his then wife Ilona Staller, a porn actress best known by the name Cicciolina (Italian slang for “cuddly fat one”), promised to shake up the rising star’s career by unabashedly depicting graphic sex. The pictures aren’t close to being his most popular, but they set the bar for sex performed as art in a way that only a handful of artists, including Cosey Fanni Tutti, with her two-year foray into porn stardom (a performance-art project called Prostitution), had before.

In the age of the internet, however, art and porn intersect more than ever. “I’m past being frustrated with being naked on the internet,” artist, photographer, and cam girl Lindsay Dye told Motherboard, after she decided to print and sell the physical copies of screenshots from her live shows that online harassers had started blackmailing her with in 2015. “Once I accepted it, my live shows and art were activated again. I want the circularity of the project [Buy Me Offline] to work in my favour, by taking back what is mine and selling what the recorders can’t: my physical artwork.” It’s a project in line with the My body is on the internet, deal with it declaration that Prince’s Instagram subjects each appear to suggest, both in theory and in praxis. It’s a declaration made daily, with aplomb, in the internet-based works of Zoë Ligon, Leah Schrager, Ann Hirsch, and countless others. OK then, what can we make? Prince asks with his series.

It seems high time we put to bed the divisive “art or porn?” debate. Today’s sex-based content deserves deeper consideration than simply asking who’s being fucked—not least because the market will buy or take the shirt off your back either way. Porn, like art, is what you make it. | VICE’S ARTS AND CULTURE CHANNEL

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FIELD NOTES / VOICES

The Talk: Money, Power, Sex How Honest Are We When Discussing Finances with a Partner?

ANA CECILIA ALVAREZ — SEX

Money’s everywhere, but talk of it remains taboo—particularly when the conversation involves sex and relationships. A 2012 study showed that fighting over funds is a leading cause of divorce among couples in the US. Another determined that nearly three-quarters of Americans are stressed about money.

So what do we say to our partners when we talk about money? Why is it sometimes uncomfortable (or unattractive) to communicate about cash and socioeconomic status and what it means to us? How do power dynamics shift as currency flows?

Recent thoughtful reporting in mainstream publications—including cover stories in New York Magazine and the New York Times Magazine—around sex work has, in my mind, encouraged an important discussion about the direct and indirect influences that finances have on romantic relationships. These articles highlight how practically all of our interpersonal relationships—with lovers, parents, coworkers, and roommates—are at some point transactional. Our Venmo feeds, of payments and IOUs, show that whether discussed explicitly or never mentioned, money influences the ways we relate to and desire one another.

This month in The Talk, video editor Chuka Chukuma and writers Jenny Zhang, Larissa Pham, Jesse Barron, and I discussed coupling in a world where cash rules.

Ana: We rarely try to reflect our class—the broke get broker, so they can pass as rich, and the rich give themselves away by fetishising poverty. The sum effect is something like a flattening of class, which makes it easier to ignore or forget. My partner and I come from very disparate class backgrounds and, reversely, earn very different salaries. Yet if you looked at us, you’d never be able to tell.

Jesse: This reminds me of a scene from Thomas Chatterton Williams’s Losing My Cool. Williams grew up in an uppermiddle-class neighbourhood and goes to Georgetown. There’s a scene where he is with a wealthy friend he calls Playboy in a grocery store. Playboy tells him to get a baguette. And he thinks, What the fuck is a baguette? He’s walking around the store, and he’s so humiliated he doesn’t want to ask anyone what it is. Finally he figures out

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that “baguette” must be French for “a small bag,” so he gets a grocery bag and meets his friend. He says he will never forget the look of condescension and pity and comprehension of how deep the error is. Class is more than money; it’s a whole set of learned behaviours.

Ana: Totally. Class is about what you can get away with, where you’ll be included. It’s just as much about effect as it is about money. Has class played a role in how you guys evaluate potential friends or partners?

Jesse: Absolutely, consciously or not, because America is so segregated by class. Money determines what your peers and family accept. I know very few people whose partner comes from a vastly different social or economic background.

There is a deep resistance to marrying “down.” It’s something so ingrained and absurd and Victorian.

Larissa: Yes! In college, as a response to that, I dated a lot of white guys who are less financially privileged than I am. That’s been really strange.

It crosses a race and a class line. I’d argue with one of my boyfriends, a white guy—from an immigrant family, but he is white—who grew up really poor in Queens, about which of us suffered more. I always told him that despite being well off, I’ve had jobs since I was sixteen.

Photo collage by Zoe Ligon

Jenny: I’m always attracted to someone who seems to exist outside of the work, work, work of capitalism—someone who doesn’t dream of upward mobility or doesn’t buy into that fantasy.

But that is often at odds with my desire for extravagance, for wild gestures, and for someone who can afford to be lavish without being blithely wasteful.

There’s also a very significant difference between someone who is wealthy but tightfisted and someone who has to be thrifty. I come from a family that has gone through long periods of poverty, where my parents were extremely thrifty when it came to their own lives but still as generous as they could be with me and their children and family and friends. The most attractive partners and lovers possess this rare quality—they know the worth of each gift because they don’t have the privilege of not being calculating with money, but spend money on their loved ones as if they did not need to be calculating.

constantly sick with worry over finances—can be kind of sexy. Maybe it’s a part of my sexuality that remains truly decolonised and is titillated by the gross fantasy of a bohemian love affair—two people who only have each other. That can make the sexual attraction more intense and more meaningful, but over a sustained period of time, the allure of two broke people who seek riches in each other is just that—a fantasy that curdles.

The excitement of squalor and struggle becomes just the squalor of struggling.

Chuka: As a guy, I feel the pressure of constantly trying to look “in control.” In most cases, men are taught that’s what drives attraction from our counterparts, this illusion of having it all together.

When that’s jeopardized, those societal pressures weigh heavily on the male psyche. Forget the trauma that comes from not being able to provide for yourself, let alone wooing your partner.

There’s the argument that money isn’t necessarily tied to your interest in a prospective or current partner, but I would say, for people like myself, who really do struggle with money, we don’t say shit like that. Financial strain permeates every facet of life when it’s real. What do you do when you can’t even afford subway fare to take your boo to whatever dumb, free outing you’ve planned? Let’s be real here: What do you do when you want to fuck, and you can’t cop condoms because them shits are expensive? I’m just saying, when it’s real, shit runs deep. And not far from that point is where you start to doubt yourself.

Jesse: I hear that. I’ve gone through periods, after being fired or being unemployed, where I didn’t feel sexual, or—and this is bad—tried to compensate by being more dominant sexually. For men, I think it’s not financial stress as such; it’s the feeling of powerlessness or humiliation that our culture attaches to financial stress. Those aren’t masculine feelings. They interrupt your sense of fluency in the world. Men are supposed to slide the card into the check without looking at it.

However, associating money with sexual potency feels a little Mad Men to me. It’s too transparent, too clearly the concoction of the economic system. I always want to be having sex—when I’m in debt, when I have money, when I’m even. I find it sexy when my wife, Sarah, gets a big check.

Ana: I wonder how that sense of having to be “calculated,” of having to stress about money, fucks with fucking. There’s ease with wealth, and I think, uptightness with scarcity. Or the opposite could be just as true too.

Ana: That is hot. How have you guys communicated about how much money you’re making?

Jenny: In a way, a certain level of financial stress—one that is mostly tolerable and involves being careful and thrifty rather than being

Jesse: What emoji did you use? Venmo feels like the steps in front of high school, where we all whisper, “Oh I heard Jenny and Ana went out

Larissa: My ex and I would always go on Venmo when we were pooling drug money or something.

last night and had beers.” It’s funny to see the exchange of money as a social spectator sport.

Larissa: It just said, “Thanks, Papi.” We basically exchanged the same thirty bucks back and forth.

He’d do something nice, like cook dinner, and I’d Venmo him for the groceries. We would Venmo each other because we weren’t close enough to let the money be water under the bridge. Venmo became this record of our transactional lives. One week, he was totally broke and asked me if I could buy him groceries. So, like a good girlfriend, I took the train to Greenpoint and bought him food. The next day, I sent him a Venmo request.

I debated whether I should do that, but it seemed like an important boundary to keep. I also knew he was broke because he was spending money on drugs, student loans, and rent. And I thought, When can I judge you for how you’re spending?

Jenny: I usually try to have as much financial transparency as possible with partners, sometimes to a detriment because I’m constantly evaluating who can afford to buy more dinners or pay for a larger portion of a trip by where each of us is with our finances. I’ve usually been the person who made more money in relationships, which feels cool and powerful but also sometimes I can’t help but succumb to expectations of patriarchy, which turn whatever feelings of power and independence I might have into something shameful or embarrassing. It sometimes means an initial romantic gesture of “Hey, let me take us out to dinner tonight” becomes something to refer to later in an argument where I feel some need of mine is not being fulfilled, and I want to blame it on the stress of being the “ambitious” one and I feel the need to be the one who makes more money because I’m working harder (which can be a total capitalist fantasy), and so the one who always treats, who always pays, who always gifts.

Chuka: I’m all about finding that area where you can be honest with each other about financial responsibilities and income, but not overwhelmed by whatever position your partner is in. As someone working in the arts, I tend to be the partner who’s way more broke than the other.

The sweet spot is where you can be honest with your significant other and create an environment in which honesty brings a freedom that allows you to actually help support each other. From my experience, this becomes easier to navigate with age, but it will forever remain easier said than done. I’m in a new relationship now with the girl of my dreams, and at times I worry I’m not going to be able to give her all the things I think she deserves, but at this point in my life, I know it’s really all about honesty. When you’re honest, understanding isn’t too far behind.

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FIELD NOTES / VOICES

NOISEY UK — MUSIC

We Brits are proud of our music scene. It’s one of the best in the world. We know this because we live here, and you, the world, know this because you’ve heard the Beatles, FKA twigs, Radiohead, and Dizzee Rascal. Sure, America has its rap stars, EDM DJs, and Bruce Springsteen, but we have the world’s most forward-thinking artists, plus Oasis. So, in time for your cold, cold winter, here are Noisey UK’s favourite new releases. They encapsulate the current bedrock of Britain’s music scene, and they might help raise your temperature a few degrees. |

VICE’S MUSIC CHANNEL

NOISEY RECOMMENDS

Landcruisin’ A. K. Paul

CHUBBY 808INK & JD. Reid

PMVD GAIKA feat. Mista Silva

Lines Lil Silva

This song alternates between sounding like a dirt-bike race in a summer’s meadow and like Beck romping through the set of Blade Runner.

Then it speeds off into the sunset, presumably to make us wait another five years for the duo to realign the world’s chakras with another track.

In “CHUBBY,” 808INK’s twisted and anthemic rap bangs. If these guys aren’t some of Britain’s biggest stars soon, then the music industry has pretty much rendered itself as useful as snorting a bag of concrete dust.

Death is morbid, but it’s buried into GAIKA’s industrial explorations through dancehall, sonic minimalism, R&B, and, ultimately, the new forefront of London’s sound on both this track and his recent mixtape, Security.

The nightclub is closing. The sunrise waits. But you don’t want to go home, do you? Grab a bottle of water, a thinly rolled joint, and listen to this as you trek to the nearest elevated viewpoint, ready to reassess your life as you look over the city or town or village that you live in.

Sober et aliae feat. DΔWN

Open Hand Kojey Radical

Hoax Novelist

Beneath the Concrete LUH

Not drinking has never sounded so heartbreakingly harmonious.

You know when someone tries to say that music isn’t political or meaningful anymore?

Force an earbud into that person’s ear and don’t let him or her leave until you’ve played this generation’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”

Novelist may be 19 years old, but he’s southeast London’s grime don. This song comes after “David Cameron Riddim” and “Street Politician,” completing a triple threat of tracks that solidify his position as the political voice of his hood.

This song sounds like the members of LUH are dancing around the fl ames of a devilish fi re in which they’re roasting some medieval children they’ve found in a museum.

Which, obviously, is an impressive achievement in illustrative sound.

Malaria Mitigation Last month, I visited Tanzania to report on malaria. The name comes from the Italian mal’aria, which means “bad air.” It was coined at a time when we still gave diseases poetic KALEIGH monikers and believed the parasitic infection ROGERS was spread through the air, instead of infectious — mosquito bites. It’s a reminder that malaria is THE FUTURE one of our most ancient foes, one that has proved difficult to smite. But over the past decade, a previously unmatched global push to defeat the disease has seen remarkable success. For the first time, we can see a future where we’re free of an infection that kills about half a million people each year.

In the past 15 years, malaria deaths globally have dropped 60 percent. In Africa, where the majority of infections occur, malaria deaths fell by 66 percent. Last year, there were zero reported cases of malaria in Europe for the first time, and each year countries join the list of nations reporting no infections.

This was no easy task. It was born out of a commitment made during a UN meeting at the start of the millennium. Bolstered by NGOs, governments around the world set goals and crafted a plan to knock out malaria. One of the most significant strategies was one of the simplest: Get everybody in malaria-endemic regions sleeping under insecticide-treated bed nets.

In 2000, fewer than 2 percent of households in Africa had insecticide-treated nets. Now, more than half do. We’ve also improved our ability to diagnose and treat malaria; tested strategies like seasonal malaria chemoprevention, giving children anti-malaria medicine; and controlled the mosquito population through indoor insecticide spraying.

We’re closer than ever to eradicating malaria, but not there yet. We have a plan that builds off of everything we’ve learned so far. That includes funding research to find new treatments, such as a vaccine—a dream that may be in reach. There are more than 30 vaccine candidates in trials now, but we’ll also need to invest in practical ideas, like helping countries set up systems to monitor malaria, especially if it’s close to being eliminated locally.

The World Health Organization estimates annual malaria funding will need to more than triple over the next 15 years, from $2.7 billion today to $8.7 billion by 2030. If we don’t double down, we risk losing all the progress that’s been made. With the Zika virus ravaging at our doorstep, we’ve been reminded of what it’s like when a mosquito is not just a pest, but a legitimate health risk. For one of the oldest mosquito-carried diseases, we finally have a shot at ending that fear. | VICE’S TECHNOLOGY CHANNEL

Motherboard photo via iStock.com/Antagain

Summer Sounds and Important Imports

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NATHAN BAJAR Last January, Nathan Bajar visited the Philippines to begin a photographic project documenting the country his family left behind when they emigrated to the United States a few years before his birth. The work in progress illuminates the uncanny experience of returning to a homeland that was never quite home.

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FIELD NOTES / BEHIND THE COVER

ELLIOT ROSS Though based in New York City, Elliot Ross travels a lot and focuses most of his work on the interpersonal, cultural, and economic hardships of human beings in geographic isolation.

His photos have been published by National Geographic, the Guardian, Refinery29, and the Atlantic.

Tell us the backstory of the cover image.

Moria, a transit camp and registration point for asylum seekers arriving on the Greek island of Lesbos, sits on a steep hill. At its centre is a fortified complex of administration and medical buildings, ringed by high fences topped with razor wire. After EU authorities discovered one of the Paris attackers registered there, they designated Moria a hot spot and closed it to journalists. While on Lesbos, I was able to sneak in, and I saw these clothes hanging out to dry on the fence. This simple thing struck me–it was a poignant reminder of normal life, even in this alien landscape of fences and borders.

While photographing the camps, did you meet any refugees whose stories stuck out to you?

On one of my first days in Greece, at a camp called Eleonas in Athens, I watched a kid playing with a soccer ball across the commons. His name was Fishel, and he explained that when he was sixteen, he set off alone from Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo. It took him a year to travel the seven thousand miles to Athens, all for one dream, to play soccer for Real Madrid. Most likely he’ll be deemed an economic migrant and deported to Kinshasa.

What projects are you working on now?

I’m currently spending time camping in California’s Slab City, in the Sonoran Desert, making portraits of those who choose to live off the grid.

Elliot Ross jots down notes about his photos in a daily process journal.

Polaroids dry inside Ross’s mobile portrait studio.

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FIELD NOTES / ARTIFACT

In April 2015, I was a production assistant at VICE on HBO, and my executive producer tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Givens, do you want to go to Baltimore?” I said, “Hell yeah!” So I got my gear together, and within 30 minutes, we were on the road. I spent the next 48 hours documenting the protests that followed Freddie Gray’s death. The trip was one of the most memorable experiences of my life.

As an African American man, it wasn’t the fi rst time I’d had a close encounter with police, but it was certainly the fi rst time I smelled tear gas or had to don body armour. On the second night of the protests, I split from my crew to get footage of the National Guard spraying the crowd with rubber bullets. I found this one on the ground and kept it as a good-luck charm. —DAVID GIVENS, EQUIPMENT MANAGER

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