No, Prince Didn't Invent Air Jordans, and Other Myths Debunked

Prince circa 1985. Photo by the LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

It's now been a little over a week since a jealous God rescinded Prince Rogers Nelson, universally beloved musical polymath and lyricist, patron saint of ectomorphic sexuality, human synecdoche of the color purple, noted keytarist (he held a US patent on the instrument) and the last human being to be given a pass for replacing words with numbers. These are but a few of the endless accomplishments that flooded obituaries over the course of the last week.

Indeed Prince was so influential and prolific, and so mercurial as a personality, that he fuses neatly with his myth, making it impossible to tell the truth from the fiction. Which makes the recent tabloid coverage of the days leading up to his death—that he was reportedly addicted to Percocet, that he allegedly had AIDS—doubly upsetting. Whatever the truth turns out to be, it's worth remembering that Prince's very inscrutability was always his strength, and the facts always manage to upstage what we think we know for sure. We're talking about a man who became a devout Jehovah's Witness after penning lyrics so filthy they were directly responsible for the creation of the Parents Music Resource Center, the group that distributed Parents Advisory stickers.

How can you summarize the life of a man who changed his name to a symbol, dated Audrey from Twin Peaks, and tried to convince Vanity to change her name to "Vagina"? What legend could possibly contend with the paradox that was Prince?

What follows is a short list of prevalent but fallacious rumors, malfeasances, and misapprehensions that needn't clutter the Purple One's legacy, much as that legacy seems designed to keep us wondering, as Prince himself asked, "Is this reality or just another façade?"

Prince Designed the Air Jordan Sneaker

Sort of makes sense, right? Prince clearly knew his footwear (and his hosiery, and his tassels, and his cravats), but the idea—widely promulgated online—that Prince invested in Nike in 1971 (when he was 12), got Michael Jordan to sign with the shoe company in 1983, then designed his eponymous shoes is just as crazy as it sounds. Whatever sneakers Prince was using, we all know that cat could ball.

Eric Clapton Called Prince the World's Greatest Guitarist

This is a public service announcement: You needn't revaluate your sense of Eric Clapton's humility based on this scurious internet item, which claims that, when asked how it felt to be the world's greatest guitarist, Slowhand replied, "I don't know. Ask Prince." He said no such thing and in fact the whole thing's a throwback to a quote Jimi Hendrix was supposed to have said about Rory Gallagher, which isn't real either. It's turtles all the way down, this one. You know what Clapton did say? He said, "Her name is Aphrodite and she rides a crimson shell." Big deal.

Prince Hated the Internet

It's true enough that Prince said, "The internet is over" in 2010, but he probably meant the internet he had helped to create by being one of the very first recording artists to take advantage of the fledgling technology in 1994, when he embarked on a "virtual tour" via 1994's Interactive CD-ROM. He made a boxed set (1997's Crystal Ball) available through a website, started a digital subscription to compete with Napster, and went on to win a Webby Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006. Prince was heavily identified with the internet circa 1995 when jokes about the nascent Information Superhighway were as ubiquitous as rapping breakfast cereal characters, hence his appearance in a Simpsons episode where he is seemingly part of a Radioactive Man newsgroup. Which reminds me...

Photo courtesy of Fox

Prince Was on The Simpsons in the 90s

And he was. For about two seconds, in a non-speaking role. But this turns out to have been but a glimpse of things that might have been, as Prince turned down a chance to guest-star in a Conan O'Brien–penned fifth-season episode that would have served as a sequel to "Stark-Raving Dad," with Leon Kompowsky convinced he is the Purple One in the yellow flesh after being cured, The Ruling Class-style-style, of his delusion that he is Michael Jackson.

Prince and Michael Jackson Were Rivals

It may not be long before we start to hear spooky Jacko/Prince coincidences à la JFK/Lincoln. Both died at home under mysterious, possibly pharmaceutically-induced circumstances; both were flamboyantly-coiffed leading artists of the 1980s; Michael was called the King of Pop, while Prince was called... Prince. So it might be natural to assume, as has been claimed, that there was some wrinkle in the two's relationship, perhaps dating back to Prince turning down Jackson's offer to collaborate in "Bad." (Prince biographer Touré relates a charming anecdote about Prince rerecording the song to send back to Michael as a "kind of superstar way of saying, 'Fuck you.'") But lest this turn into a classic Beatles/Stones dichotomy with rival street gangs wearing frilly scarves or single sparkly gloves, let's be clear: The two respected each other's output and were, according to Prince's keyboardist Cassandra O'Neal, as amiable as you'd want two massively-talented thin-waisted superstars to be.

Prince Recalled Every Copy of an "Evil" Album After a Bad Trip

I think this one is reductionist—not to mention that it seems to be a variation on the time that an LSD-addled Brian Wilson, yes, shelved the track "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow" during the Smile sessions because he was convinced it had pyrotechnic powers. Drugs or no drugs, Prince probably had perfectly good reasons for disowning The Black Album (finally released by Warner Brothers in 1994). Although it makes for a fascinating listen now, it's clear that it was no kind of follow-up to Sign o' the Times and reveals an artist somewhat uncomfortable with his success and image, as well as the alarming Prince-bashing "Bob George," in which an in-character Prince lashes out at his critics.

Prince Needed Hip Replacements After Years of Dancing in Heels

Another mean deduction, along the lines of Bon Jovi's stomach pump or Marilyn Manson's rib. Obviously, the dust has yet to settle on Prince's health issues in the last decade of his life, so we won't know if there's anything to the rumors that Prince's faith caused him to refuse the blood transfusions he needed to survive—but at least we can stop blaming the shoes.

Prince Once Ran a Personal Ad Looking for "the Most Beautiful Girl in the World"

Actually, unlikely as it seems, I can't find any evidence that this one is false, so if you want to believe that Prince ran an ad with a blurry picture asking you to spend holidays at Paisley Park, be my guest.

Prince Doesn't Believe in Time

Assuming he wasn't thinking of Morris Day, this stems from what is probably the best Prince interview of all time, in the pages of Notorious, where he answered a question about his Adonis-like youth by saying, "I don't believe in time. I don't count. When you count, it ages you." Look, Prince said a lot of crazy things in interviews. He also sang a lot of crazy things, and those are the words we should abide by. In other words, it's not the time that matters—it's the sign o' the times.

Prince Was a Solo Artist

And he was, of course. But something that can't be said enough is what a collaborator Prince was and how much of his work was shaped by his ability to recognize and surround himself with talent. Now only did he share songwriting credits with members of the Revolution and the New Power Generation and mentor Shelia E. and the Bangles, he wrote songs for Chaka Khan, Paula Abdul, and Sinead O'Connor. Nor did he forget his origins in the Minneapolis funk and soul scene, as catalogued in Numero Group's superb Purple Snow boxed set, continuing to work with the members of Minneapolis stalwarts Flyte Tyme and recruiting his childhood roommate André Cymone (who took in Prince as a teenage runaway). Like Bowie before him, he remained active in producing and promoting music up to the time of his death, all of which should be an inspiration to all of us still trying to get through this thing called life. And life is the word that means forever, and that's a mighty long time.

Recent work by J. W. McCormack appears in Conjunctions, BOMB, and the New Republic. Read his other writing on VICE here.

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How the UK's Prudish Laws from the 1950s Make Sex Work Dangerous Today

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Summer, a 28-year-old London sex worker, is pissed off. She wants to know why, despite outcry from her colleagues, the UK may be lurching towards legislation that would criminalize buying sex. Or why a high-profile report into implementing the law was carried out by a team that didn't include one current sex worker, off the back of an ongoing inquiry into sex work law that felt skewed from its outset.

"It's a joke," she says to VICE. "Those on the side of the Nordic model talk about giving 'a voice to the voiceless,' but won't listen to those of us who are shouting at the top of our lungs, who these laws will directly affect." Summer moved to London from England's south-west and turned to sex work as a way to provide for her two children. She says she's been having "sleepless nights" thinking about the threat of a new form of criminalization.

"Criminalizing my clients would make a massive difference to my personal safety. Right now I'm able to ask for detailed screening information. I can check clients are who they say they are, request deposits, and make sure my security buddy knows where I am and who I'm with. Under criminalization, insisting on strict screening every time wouldn't be an option."

Already, Summer's working conditions leave plenty to be desired. She can't, for example, work together with a friend as this would be classed as a brothel and is illegal. Her colleagues who work outdoors can be charged with soliciting. These are major stumbling blocks when it comes to creating a safe, fair working environment. So how did we end up with such awful laws? And are we about to stumble into making another more?

It's worth noting, you'd think, that most current legislation was created without consulting the workers themselves. The main laws governing prostitution in the UK are still the 1956 Sexual Offenses Act, which makes brothel-keeping an offense, and the 1959 Street Offenses Act, which criminalizes solicitation.

The Street Offenses Act was created on the back of a 1957 document called the Wolfenden Report, best-known for its calls to decriminalize homosexuality. Setting a precedent we still see today, the report didn't include testimony from a single working prostitute. In fact, the committee behind the report found the words "homosexual" and "prostitute" so distasteful they substituted them—"for the sake of the ladies on the committee"—for "Huntleys and Palmers," a 1950s biscuit manufacturer.

The result was the 1959 Street Offenses Act, put to immediate use in a crackdown on street prostitution. This triggered an increase in off-street sex work such as massage parlors and escort services, says Dr. Julia Laite, a lecturer in British history at Birkbeck, University of London, and an expert in the history of UK prostitution law. More worryingly, she says, it also led to an increase in violence against sex workers.

"In the 1960s, there was a rise in violence and a rise in the police being unable to find perpetrators of violence as women moved into more clandestine work," Laite says. "There was also a rise in the prevalence of sometimes-exploitative third parties ." Laite says it had all happened before. "It may have been only a coincidence that three years after the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 instigated a crusade against so-called brothel keepers, Jack the Ripper became known as the first serial murderer of prostitutes," she has previously written, "but it is a symbolic coincidence."

Since sex workers began to demand a voice in law-making, there have been victories—the 1984 defeat of a dangerous bill; 2014's quashing of another—but the pattern of legislating over their heads continued.

"The 2003 Sexual Offenses Bill consultation largely ignored what sex workers had to say," says Niki Adams of the English Collective of Prostitutes. "It increased sentences for working together in premises and introduced an offense to stop the consensual movement of people across international borders, disguised as an anti-trafficking measure. Immigrant sex workers were targeted for raids and arrested as a result."

And here we are in 2016, discussion raging once more. Sex workers sidelined, once more. When the current UK inquiry gathered oral evidence there were three main witnesses: just one current sex worker, Laura Lee; a former prostitute and survivor of abuse within the industry, Mia de Faoite; and UK Feminista's Kat Banyard who admitted not having actually worked with prostitutes but "with women with involvement in prostitution."

WATCH: England's Lord of Fraud – Wolf of the West End

"We've had 150 years of this bullshit," Laite says. "And there's a depressing pattern to it all. Ironically, while calls to criminalize are predicated on the idea that prostitution is harmful, what I'm seeing is that the more criminalized it gets, the more harmful it becomes.

"What really bothers me is that these people present the idea of criminalizing buyers as a brand-new, feminist, revolutionary idea. Really, the idea is very old. It wasn't originally considered feminist; it was far more connected to the moral reform movement."

Then again, if this wasn't really about moral reform, the aim would be improved working conditions and safety, not abolition. Those already working under similar laws tell us repeatedly that criminalizing sex buyers means that they too are criminalized and endangered. In Northern Ireland, since the Sex Buyers law was passed last year, three sex workers—but only one buyer—have been arrested.

We've been here before. In 1898, an amendment to the Vagrancy Act made "living off the earnings of a prostitute" an offense. But, lo and behold, in 1900, only 165 pimps were sentenced while 7,415 women were convicted under the solicitation laws.

By legal definition, under the Street Offences Act, Summer can still be classed a "common prostitute." "I feel powerless," she says. "Nobody is advocating for me and my colleagues throughout this. We are being silenced."

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The LGBT Campaigners Trying to Push Homophobia Out of Northern Ireland

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

In 1970, an anal sex-fearing fundamentalist preacher set the cogs in motion that would hold back Northern Ireland's progress on LGBT rights for decades to come. Dr. Ian Paisley, of the infamous "Save Ulster from Sodomy" campaign, moved from the church to politics, establishing the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in 1970—now Northern Ireland's biggest political party.

Fast forward to 2016, before the Assembly election on May 5, and "it's accurate to say that the Democratic Unionist Party have been the main obstacle to moving the marriage equality debate forward in Northern Ireland," gay rights activist Stephen Donnan tells VICE.

This month Donnan launched the #VoteProudly2016 campaign, aiming to "empower LGBT+ people and our allies to find the information they need on which candidates in their constituencies support marriage equality," Stephen says. Basically, Vote Proudly is setting out to use tactical voting to squeeze out the DUP and a veto loophole that the party's used for years to boost moralistic conservatism—but more on those specifics in a bit.

Northern Ireland is the only part of the United Kingdom where same-sex marriage is against the law, and Love Proudly, the organization behind #VoteProudly, is just one part of a broader marriage equality movement that's been mobilizing for some time. The motion on same-sex marriage had been brought before the Northern Ireland Assembly five times, repeatedly defeated by chamber vote alone. That was until November of last year.

Just six months after the Republic of Ireland's May vote on marriage equality by referendum, Northern Ireland's Assembly voted through same-sex marriage in majority for the first time. But because the DUP controversially deployed what's known as a "petition of concern," they were able to veto the democratically approved proposal.

Now for that loophole. The petition of concern is one part of more complicated political scaffolding that has helped Northern Ireland emerge from its conflict. It was included as part of the peace deal in 1998, known as the Good Friday Agreement. The aim was to lay out a way for the new power-sharing Assembly to do government that would allow for the fair representation of both British unionists and Irish nationalists.

To make sure that one political group wouldn't rule discriminatorily against the other, all votes made by the Assembly would depend on cross-community support. A petition of concern could be used to veto a vote that didn't have the mutual approval of both communities—a sort of emergency brake for legislation. The problem has been the vague conditions for the petition's use, leading to what critics have called misuse.

"Instead of enhancing and protecting human rights the veto has become a tool of LGBTQ oppression," says Danny Toner, editor of The Gay Say, a local LGBT news blog that's taken a prominent role in the Vote Proudly movement. "Marriage and human rights do not fall under the underlying rationale for the veto's existence." Dr Alex Schwartz, a lecturer from the School of Law at Belfast's Queen's University, wrote an article last May outlining practical reforms that he believes would improve the veto. He seems to agree with Danny.

"I think the DUP's use of the veto to block marriage equality is definitely an abuse of the procedure," he says." As I understand it, the rationale for having the veto in the context of a place like Northern Ireland is to protect the two main communities' particular group interests qua unionists and nationalists. There is nothing inherently unionist or nationalist about the question of marriage equality."

The use of the veto as a last line of opposition indicates a change in the Assembly chamber that more closely reflects the attitudes of the actual electorate, particularly younger voters. An Ipsos/MORI survey in July 2015 showed that 68 percent of adults in Northern Ireland and just under half of DUP's electorate supported same-sex marriage. The data indicated that massive 89 percent of young adults, aged between 16 and 24, were in favor. The shift in perspective picks up speed as Northern Ireland's peacetime generation come of voting age, forcing new accountability from parties whose electoral monopoly previously relied on the tribal ethno-nationalistic politics of the old conflict.

In a BBC televised election debate for first-time voters last week, the young audience demanded clarity around policies relating to employment, education as well as abortion and marriage rights. Questions about the future left the panel visibly unsettled, leading veteran journalist Eamonn Mallie to tweet that "young ... are clearly leaving the politicians behind."

Some of the campaigners out leafletting for marriage equality. Photo courtesy of Love Proudly

Other parties, including the Greens and nationalists Sinn Fein, have voiced total support to marriage equality (though they haven't been immune to abusing the petition themselves). As the second largest party in the Assembly, Sinn Fein launched their election manifesto on Thursday, April 28, pledging commitment to bringing forward marriage equality legislation again.

And the DUP? Here's what they had to say in a statement to VICE. "The DUP does not believe marriage should be redefined for same sex couples. Civil partnership is available in Northern Ireland for homosexual couples and brings with it all the same rights as marriage does for heterosexual couples. The petition of concern is a mechanism which was democratically voted for in 1998. It has been used by all parties on various issues."

So much for that, then. We're yet to see whether Northern Ireland's current constitutional set-up can deliver the kind of society that the peacetime generation want, and whether a tactical LGBT voting bloc will be able to enact the change they want on May 5. Until then, preacher Paisley's legacy lives on.

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Comics: 'No Pleasing Jeeves,' a Comic by Jai Granofsky

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First-Person Shooter: A 'Budtender' Gives Us a Potent Look Inside a Colorado Weed Dispensary

In this week's edition of First-Person Shooter, we gave two cameras to Emily, a Denver-based "budtender" who runs the counter at Magnolia Road, a dispensary that operates both a medical and recreational marijuana storefront, as well as a grow house. A huge weed enthusiast, she smokes about an eighth of dank nug a day (even on the job) and helps upwards of 300 customers pick out a variety of strains, edibles, and other pot products.

On top of shooting the inside of Magnolia Road, Emily snapped #weedporn-worthy pics of the company's massive warehouse filled with budding buds. She also talked to VICE about the inner-workings of a commercial pot dispensary that she says makes anywhere between $5,000 and $10,000 a day.

VICE: What was your day like Friday? Where did it start? What'd you get up to?
Emily the Budtender: I started my day by getting high before work—the critical wake and bake. Open to close shifts are normal in the industry, so a typical day usually goes from 8:45 AM to 7:45 PM. It was a normal Friday in the stores after that. Our recreational and medical locations are right next door to each other, so I'm usually the budtender jumping between both shops. The medical side has been up and running for three years and the recreational side just under a year.

Later in the day, I popped over to the grow warehouse to take photos of a different side of the dispensary operation. Very few people get a true, inside look at the grow facility, as it's off limits to customers. This is where all the growing, transplanting, cloning, and trimming of the weed happens.

I see all these different jars full of weed in the shop, what's the difference between them?
Those are the strains we currently have on our shelves. The jars with the black labels represent the indica-dominant strains and white labels represent the sativa-dominant strains. I also took photos of the plastic containers, which is the back stock, or inventory we keep in the safe.

What type of people do you serve at the medical shop versus the recreational one?
On the medical side, we serve people 18 years old and up if you have a medicinal marijuana card and matching ID. Recreationally, we serve a totally different crowd. We can accept visitors above the age of 21 from both in and out of state. have a purchase limit of one ounce, while out-of-town visitors are allowed to buy a maximum of seven grams per transaction. We see a way different audience on this side, including a huge amount of out-of-state visitors checking out a dispensary for the very first time.

Can you tell me about the difference between your cheapest and most expensive products?
We try to remain super competitive by pricing our specials nearly identically in both our medical and recreational shops. Typically, a quarter ounce of flower (seven grams) will run around $45 out the door on each side. The most expensive will come from our top-shelf weed on the recreational side, running at $15 a gram, or nearly $300 for the ounce. These top shelf strains have our maximum THC levels, at 20 percent or above.

What's the weirdest thing that has happened at the shop?
We have a regular customer that comes in rocking his pet cat perched on his shoulder, parrot-style.

How did your night end? How did you feel the next morning?
At the end of the night, I went out with a coworker. We hit the bar scene down in Denver, but not without a substantial pregame beforehand. I ended my night by taking a fat dab right before bed, which is the best kinda nightcap. Weed is truly the best hangover cure, so I felt great the next day.

Follow Julian on Instagram and visit his website for more of his photo work.

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Eating Wild Weeds with 'Wildman' Steve Brill, Forager and Punk Naturalist

I felt a little alarmed as I watched a guy wearing a pith helmet and a pickaxe pop a yellow dandelion into his mouth. I'm pretty sure my mom told me they were poisonous when I was a kid. A few minutes after swallowing, he showed no sign of vomiting plant matter or dying, so when he picked another from the ground and asked me to try it, I couldn't help but accept. It didn't taste bad—the texture reminded me of a brussel sprout with a surprisingly mild flavor.

On a cold Saturday morning in Connecticut, a group of ten bundled-up people gathered to listen to "Wildman" Steve Brill talk about weeds. For the last 35 years, the self-taught forager, tour guide, and author has been bringing people into fields, parks, and even onto roadsides all over New England to show them food they can easily find in the wild to eat or cook. Though he doesn't have a college degree in botany, environmental studies, or ecology, the outsider naturalist bills himself as "America's go-to guy for foraging." He was once arrested in Central Park for eating a dandelion in front of undercover park rangers, a story he loves to retell and one that, he said, made him famous. "Before that, I was an unknown. I think it must have been a slow news day because every TV station picked the story up."

"There are tons of herbs, berries, greens, mushrooms nuts, seeds, and roots growing all around us," Wildman Brill told me at one point during the tour. "People don't know what they are, so I teach them how to identify, collect, and cook them.

He thinks foraging is important to help people connect with nature, understand the food they eat, and make sustainable, environmentally-friendly decisions. "This is no different than going to a supermarket and noticing a carrot or a tomato—foraging just isn't part of our culture. So I teach people what wild plants they can use, how to protect themselves from eating the wrong plants, how foraging fits into life, and anything else I've been able to pick up about plants," Wildman Brill said. "Also," he added, "how it lowers your grocery bills."

He's not a survivalist or a doomsdayer. Instead, he's a realist with a passion for understanding the natural world, a knowledge he thinks more people could benefit from. When I asked why more people don't know that you can eat widely available plants such as dandelions, he popped another one into his mouth and answered, "because there isn't any plastic packaging and there aren't any commercials on TV; there is no dandelion marketing campaign."

After swallowing the weed, Wildman Brill added that he thinks the best organic food is found growing wild. "The stuff you buy in the health food store has been genetically modified by conventional breeding to make the plants more durable. They are nicer looking, but they don't have the flavor that the corresponding wild foods have," he said as he handed another dandelion to a tour-goer, adding, "This bud's for you."

He pointed out daylily stalks and asked us each to take a bite and told us how we can prepare them at home. He pulled out a container of daylily stalks that he roasted at home and lets us try them. Wildman Brill mentioned that you can also eat the plant's tubers, which taste a little like turnips. He suggested roasting them with herbs and oil and serving them like a baked potato. "It's not something anyone would turnip their nose at," he concludes with one of the many bad jokes he's known for. Among the other edible things we found on our tour were Garlic Mustard, Dandelions, Violets, Cattails, Wild Carrot, Sweet Oak, Bitter Dock, Wild Lettuce, Spice Bush, and Field Garlic.

During the rest of the three-hour tour, neophyte foragers collected bags full of greens, tubers, and flowers for eating or planting later at home. When people sign up for tours, they are told to bring plastic or paper bags for collecting food and pens to mark the bags. Every few feet, Wildman Brill stopped and pointed out another plant, adding puns and jokes whenever he could. The tour-goers ate it up, both literally and figuratively.

Wildman Brill has talents beyond just foraging. He's also an artist. When I went to interview him a few weeks later, he showed me the mushroom sculptures and plant drawings he uses to illustrate his finds. The art, hand-drawn illustrations worthy of vintage botany books, can be seen in his books and through an app he created that offers an on-the-go foraging guide with information on how to identify and properly eat over 250 common plants available around the country in different regions, climates, and seasons.

"I got into this because I was hungry and I was into health, cooking, and nutrition. When I discovered there were wild plants you could eat, I started teaching those to myself," he said.

His first discovery came when he was riding his bike through a park in his native Queens in the 70s. He saw a group of orthodox Greek women collecting plants. He stopped to ask them what they were doing but didn't understand a word they were saying. "It was all Greek to me but they sent me home with a bag of the grape leaves they were picking. I stuffed them and cooked them and they were delicious. After that, I had to know more about these foods growing in the wild.

"I started getting books. The bad thing was that the books weren't very good, which made it hard to learn and to use what I learned. It was good because I saw big opportunities to write about the plants once I knew them," he told me. He learned via reading and a whole lot of trial-and-error, though he's never been sick from something he ate in the woods. "I'm very careful. I've sometimes waited several decades before I've eaten a plant I've seen in the woods."

His favorite foraged food is the Wild Common Violet, after which his daughter and foraging partner is named. His favorite violet recipe is his Violet Saag Paneer, an Indian curry that replaces spinach with violets and paneer with a tofu-based equivalent. "I think I'm just scratching the surface of the culinary possibilities of wild foods." He gets about half of his food from foraging, the rest is bought at the store.

"My thing is gourmet wild foods, no reason for me to go without my brown rice, lentils, and spices," he clarified.

He avoids all processed foods and a typical day's diet for him might include only two meals. On the day we met, he'd had brown rice with Japanese Knotwood for lunch, and salad with a mixture of foraged and store-bought greens with a side of fruit salad for dinner. He doesn't garden either. "The whole world is my garden. There is always something in season and new to find," he said.

When asked if there are others out there who do what he does, he answered, in typical Wildman style, "Yes, all the animals in the woods."

For more on 'Wildman' Steve Brill, visit his website and check out event calendar.

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TV Game Shows Are Dying and I'll Miss Their Shiny Pointlessness

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Big, brash game shows may be on their way out. After 13 series and an obligatory celeb spinoff, British tabloids recently reported that The Million Pound Drop has been axed by Channel 4 in March. A spokeswoman for Endemol told VICE that it hasn't definitely been culled, but did confirm that there are no plans for Davina McCall and her gigantic bundles of cash to return to our screens for now, after its last airing in March 2015.

With rumors towards the end of last year that Deal Or No Deal might also be coming to an end after ten years, the death of the overly theatrical, big money gameshow could be here. Looking at ratings alone, once niche quiz show Only Connect—miles away from the razzle-dazzle of The Million Pound Drop—evolved into a sleeper hit on BBC One last year and didn't need a "shiny-floor" format or official hashtag to do it.

Frankly, I'm gutted. I've long been a fan of the see-you-after-the-break tension and big, visual elements of shows like The Drop and Deal; with the latter it's those mysterious red boxes with their faux superstition, while on the former it's big stacks of pinkies teetering on trap doors as perma-tanned couples try to hold down their vomit. Post-grad student and one-time game show contestant Alex Fraser admits being attracted to the drama of it all. He was once on BBC Two's Eggheads and describes it as "very dry."

"It's just a shot of the contestants' faces, a shot of the Eggheads' faces, a shot of Jeremy Vine, on a loop," Alex says. "The viewer doesn't get as much opportunity to know the contestant, or to get involved." Conversely, The Drop was one of the first shows to integrate playing along at home with an online site before quiz show apps became the norm, snagging a BAFTA for digital creativity back in 2011.

Rather than just write a heartfelt farewell letter to The Million Pound Drop, I decided to speak David Flynn, its creator, to find out what he makes of its possible demise. A quiz mogul and former UK creative chief for Endemol, who also masterminded Pointless, he reckons there's a winning formula to The Drop that will lead to its return.

"Everywhere it's gone it's done very well, because there's something very pure within the format that people like," he says. "They love that sense of people risking it all to try and win big, seeing people lose it all at different stages or take those risks and get through to that final question and win the cash." He's also keen to stress that the format is still licensed in some 54 "territories" worldwide, so even if British broadcasters aren't game, TV audiences in other countries from Afghanistan to Vietnam may still be.

Andre Sousa, a quiz show developer and assistant producer at ITV Studios, is also optimistic about the future of these sorts of shows. "Alongside talent shows, heavily formatted quiz shows have got a lot more potential to travel around the world, as they're easy and cheap to make," he says, as someone who's worked on entertainment formats in both the UK and his native Portugal. But with The Drop currently on ice in the UK, will we ever see another show on the scale of, say, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?

"As with everything, it's cyclical," he explains. "While it's hard to come up with something that really takes off, I would expect it to happen sooner rather than later. As humans, the tendency is to go bigger and better, so I won't be surprised if there's a show in the future with much bigger prizes than £1,000,000—especially if you manage to start charging players at home to engage with the show."

Likewise, barrister-turned-quiz champion Shaun Wallace, from ratings favorite The Chase, doesn't think audiences are tiring of the genre either, citing the longevity of shows such as his own. "I think that a key part of The Chase's success are the theatrics and the rapport that Bradley Walsh in particular has built up with the viewers," he says. "Our viewers love testing themselves, but if the show was merely a quiz I don't think it would be as successful as it is." That said, like Sousa, he understands the need to innovate.

"It's a shame that The Drop has seemingly been cancelled, as it was a fun show," he says. "While it was fast-paced, having a time slot of 8 PM on a Friday can make it difficult to build a loyal fanbase. I also think that as with all successful game shows, such as Millionaire, they have to be changed up to keep the audience's attention. Thirteen series is a long time."

Even if glossy, garish game shows might not be in as much trouble as it first appeared, it will be interesting to see how things develop. If austerity worsens, I'd find it hard to justify formats that demand that we pay for privilege of playing along, and celebrating huge sums may move from light entertainment to tacky bad taste. Will the next big hit seize some of the cerebral nature that's made Only Connect so big, or will questions still revolve around 90s sitcoms and the royals? Can The Drop just bounce back? I know what I'd prefer. But in the words of former Millionaire host Chris Tarrant—now promoting an off-brand lotto in the ad breaks—the questions are only easy if you know the answer.

Follow Hannah on Twitter

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A Lawyer Explains the Terrible Oklahoma Law Making Oral Sex with an Unconscious Person Legal

Photo via Flickr user Joe Gratz

On June 1, 2014, a 17-year-old boy and a 16-year-old girl were drinking in a Tulsa, Oklahoma, park. The girl drank such large quantities of vodka that her blood alcohol content rose above .34––over four times the legal limit for drivers. As she slipped in and out of consciousness, the boy carried her to his car, and at some point, the girl performed oral sex. Later, she woke up at her grandmother's house and was eventually taken to a hospital, at which point she regained consciousness.

At first, prosecutors charged the boy with first-degree rape and forcible oral sodomy, but there wasn't enough evidence to convict him. And as the Guardian reported this week, the state appeals court in March issued a stunning declaration when upholding the non-conviction: Forcing oral sex on someone who is unconscious doesn't count as rape.

The legal loophole is actually pretty easy to explain: In Oklahoma, there are five very specific definitions of forcible oral sodomy, and none of them mention alcohol or drugs. Therefore, the judges wrote in their decision that they would not, "in order to justify prosecution of a person for an offense, enlarge a statute beyond the fair meaning of its language."

John F. Wilkinson, an attorney at the legal group AEquitas, which helps prosecutors build sexual assault cases, says that when he heard about the decision, he "literally gasped." But he tells me that the law isn't necessarily a reflection of the prairie state's archaic viewpoints on sexual assault. Instead, he suggests this may have just been an accident. Wilkinson points to the state's statutes, which say that a person can't consent to vaginal or anal sex if they get drunk to the point of "unsoundness of mind." The problem is that language simply doesn't appear in the definition of "forcible oral sodomy," which is classified as its own distinct crime.

"Every state's weird," Wilkinson says. "Some states don't explicitly cover voluntarily intoxication and only surreptitious intoxication––someone slipping you something. It might have been people were expecting the court to find that this obviously would be covered, but it literally is not explicitly stated in the statute."

Wilkinson suspects this is probably the result of the "patchwork" way America has constructed laws governing sexual assault. As views on rape evolve, the definition becomes broader, and fixes are applied state by state. For instance, marital rape is still quasi-legal in a handful of states, and laws are slowly being created to address LGBT rape.

The attorney believes Oklahoma is the only state with this bizarre exception for nonconsensual oral sex and drunkenness, but says it could easily be closed. Indeed, State Representative Scott Biggs posted on Facebook Thursday that the loophole could be closed as soon as next week.

"There are a lot of consequences that come from getting voluntarily intoxicated," Wilkinson says. "You get drunk, you fall down, you get a hangover. But getting raped is not a consequence of being drunk."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

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California's 'Fuck Trump' Protest Wasn't a Movement—It Was a Party

On Thursday evening, thousands of Donald Trump supporters snaked around the fringes of the Pacific Amphitheatre in Costa Mesa, California, anxious to witness firsthand the spectacle of a Donald J. Trump production, live from the campaign trail. Dozens of young, brown protesters were there too, turning out to chant and scream "Fuck Donald Trump!" in the faces of people who bought tickets. It was the first Trump rally to hit Orange County this election cycle, and even before the doors opened, it seemed likely to make national headlines before the last bottle was hurled.

With more than an hour to go before the rally was scheduled to begin, the crowd had already started to get antsy. About halfway down the line, eight mounted officers with the Orange County Sheriff's Department suddenly turned in unison, and began slowly making their way toward the entrance. The Trump fans burst into applause, shouting random encouragements at the departing cops. "Go get 'em!" one man yelled after them; somewhere else, a lady shouted, "Send them back!"

An officer in front, riding a caramel-colored Irish Draught, called back the plan: "We're gonna split 'em!" The rest of the crowd started whipping out cell phones, pointing at the horses, and the officers who had, by now, come to a standstill between the two factions—the ones desperate for Trump's new America, and the ones fighting what they see as the racist groundswell driving his presidential campaign.

All photos by Julie Leopo

By 7 PM, around 8,500 Trump fans had finally crammed inside Pacific Amphitheater, pledging allegiance to a giant American flag hanging onstage, behind the podium bearing Trump's name. A group of local policemen had come in to watch over the crowd from the lawn, vigilantly scanning the sea of red "Make America Great Again" caps American flag bandannas, and newly purchased cotton t-shirts portraying Trump as Rosie the Riveter. One kid, a young white male, has taped Trump's face to a cardboard cutout of Captain America, and makes his way around the entire arena, posing for photos. Meanwhile, at least four choppers circled above.

Then, an eerie, robotic voice came over the PA system with the usual instructions on how to deal with protesters inside the venue. "If a protestor starts demonstrating in the area around you, please do not touch or harm the protestor," the voice warned. "In order notify the law enforcement officers of the location of the protestor, please hold a rally sign over your head and start chanting 'TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP!' Ask the people around you to do likewise until the officer removes the protestor. Thank you for helping us make America great again." The warning was, inexplicably, followed by Elton John's "Tiny Dancer."

Trump was late, so his warm-up acts—a local Orange County mayor and a Republican state representative from Idaho—fluffed the crowd with platitudes about "disillusioned" voters and something about something America. The audience applauded occasionally, but mostly looked bored; they hadn't come for the politics—they wanted a show.

Finally, the Rolling Stones came blasting through the speaker system, and on cue, the lights above the stage brightened. The crowd was suddenly on its feet, wildly chanting Trump's name as the candidate made his way out from behind the curtain. Slowly, he crept across the stage to the podium, pausing on occasion to give a thumbs-up, or point randomly at supporters, who had, by now, lost their minds. Nearby, a little boy holding a campaign sign quickly lost his voice yelling at the stage.

Trump's speech, if you can call it that, was predictable—an ever-so-slight variation on the stump speech he's been giving for months. It is, nevertheless, a performance, one that at some point seemed explicitly aimed at inciting protesters in a city and county with a huge Hispanic population. Off the bat, he pointed out a "LATINOS FOR TRUMP" sign in the audience, reading the sign aloud and adding: "It's true, too." Later, he noted that his guests at the rally included members of a group whose goal is to "remember victims killed by illegal aliens."

After about thirty minutes of soundbytes, though, I was bored as hell. Plus, a faint smell of burning rubber had started to waft into the arena. I wondered if the real action might actually be going down outside this teeming bowl of right-wingers, willing to risk a lungful of tear gas if it meant escaping the ramblings of that bloated, orange head.

Having made my escape, I started toward the blue and red flashing lights and smoke hovering in front of the entrance to the fairgrounds. Hundreds of demonstrators have gathered around the venue, and several large Mexican flags wave over the crowd. People were beating drums, leading the crowd in a call-and-response of "WHO'S STREETS? OUR STREETS!"

One group of mostly young and Latino protesters had taken the northeast corner of the intersection, and already left their mark in black spray-paint on the glowing orange OC Fair & Event Center sign: "Fuck TRUMP" on one side, and the more succinct "FDT"—as in "Fuck Donald Trump"—on the other. Across the street, about a half-dozen protesters had perched themselves on top of a gas station marquee, and were calmly watching the crowd like iguanas on a hot rock.

Under the fluorescent light of the police choppers above, I watched one skinny kid scale a streetlight; someone below tossed him a can of paint, and he managed to scrawl an upside-down "Fuck Trump" before the crowd advised him to climb back down before the cops saw him. The commitment, couple with the heavy aroma of paint chemicals and weed hanging in the air, somehow made the whole thing seem legit. These kids were going to stay put until the weed ran out, or their asses got beat.

The protests went on like that for a while, undeterred by crackling orders from police megaphones. Eventually, though, the sheriff's department arrived on horseback, slowly closing in on the unruly mob, pushing them toward one end of the street. It was an effective tactical move, and the beginning of the end for the protesters, who failed to come up with any way to retaliate against the heavily armed police presence, besides shouting at the horses.

But rather than disperse, or try to find a new way to get their message across, the protesters just started partying. Somewhere, a car blasted the YG & Nipsey Hussle hip-hop song "FDT," and people in the crowd started dancing. Eventually, that got old, and they turned their aggression on a Costa Mesa Police Department squad car—but not before someone came up with the brilliant idea of orchestrating a street performance to El Caballo Dorado, which was sort of like the Mexican equivalent of line dancing.

In the end, the protests didn't result in much, except a couple of arrests and some extra cleanup work for the city of Costa Mesa. But they did hint at the kind of hatred and divisiveness Trump might stir up if he wins his party's nomination, and is forced to take his presidential campaign to an audience beyond the angry, white people who vote in Republican primaries. But while the kickoff of his California campaign last night was undoubtedly a circus, it's hard not to think that maybe that's the way Trump wanted it all along.

Follow Eric Cocoletzi on Twitter, and also on Instagram.

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Werner Herzog's New Film Tackles Something Even Scarier Than Nature—the Internet

Still via 'Lo and Behold'

In Les Blank's documentary Burden of Dreams, Werner Herzog—then in the process of filming his epic period piece Fitzcarraldo deep in the Peruvian jungle—rants against the "obscenity" of his lushly overgrown surroundings. "Nature here is vile and base," he says. "The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't think they sing. They just screech in pain. It's an unfinished country. It's still prehistorical."

That was 1982, while Herzog was still relatively early in a career that has since taken him to other geographical extremes, from post-Gulf War Kuwait to isolated research stations in the Antarctic. If the Bavarian-born filmmaker makes a habit of complaining theatrically about the habitats he enters, his grumpiness is offset by his desire to plunge ahead into uncertain terrain. He's long since secured his place in film history as a globe-trotting adventurer, unflappable in the face of danger, and suited to clamoring over every kind of terrain in search of things to film.

The trailer for 'Lo and Behold,' Werner Herzog's new film

The hook of Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World, which premiered earlier this year in Sundance, is that it sends Herzog into uncharted territory—the virtual no-man's land of the internet. This is a massive topic for a single movie, and the degree of difficulty is compounded by the fact that Herzog, for all his cred, doesn't seem to be the ideal man for the job. At age 75, the director is clearly of a different generation. He famously made his first phone call when he was 17 years old, and in an interview with TechCrunch, he admitted that he doesn't carry a cell.

And yet for all his skepticism, he doesn't overplay the part of the anxious Luddite. Instead, Herzog's curiosity—always his greatest resource as a documentarian—shines through. Determined to condense the history and implications of the internet into just under 100 minutes, Herzog covers a lot of ground. He dutifully visits the primal scene of host-to-host communication on the UCLA campus, and also some more contemporary computer labs, where he seems amazed by the possibilities of technology developing exponentially by the day. In one interlude, Herzog meets with programmers developing robot soccer players, which strikes him as amusing; he's less entertained by the idea that computers could one day direct their own films.

Still via 'Lo and Behold'

With its multiple characters and subplots, Lo and Behold is all over the place, but Herzog's thesis seems to be that the vast expanse of the internet is a reflection of those who use it—for good and ill. One woman, who saw photos of a dead family member disseminated across the web in the aftermath of a car accident, sees something demonic in the rapid spread of information. "I think the internet is the Anti-Christ" she says flatly. Always interested in dialectics, (it's the German in him), Herzog divides his subjects into two loose groups: those who've devoted their lives to mapping and populating social networks, and those who've aggressively disconnected. In both cases, the film's thesis seems to be that our lives have gotten so thoroughly re-wired that occupying the middle ground is an impossibility.

A passage set in an Appalachian community, whose residents have moved there to escape life online, presents the subjects as if they were somehow living out of time—a remote tribe plunked down in the middle of the continental United States. An interview with infamous entrepreneur Elon Musk envisions a different kind of escape plan, to the safe harbor possibly offered by Mars (not surprisingly, Herzog is willing to sign up for that mission, too).

As the film goes on, it gets into big, abstract discussions about the implications of artificial intelligence. "Does the internet dream of itself?" Herzog asks two programmers, who seem bemused by the poeticism of the question. This line of thinking takes Herzog to sinister places as well: at times, Lo and Behold seems to be stoking fears that our tools are evolving beyond our capacity to control them, which offers an intriguing twist on his usual theme of the indifference of nature. But he also leaves plenty of space for viewers to cultivate their own reactions, as in the scene where he uses footage of Honda's ASIMO robot pouring itself a drink.

For some, this benign demonstration will seem a frightening image out of sci-fi literature—the implacable AI out to replace us. And yet the strange, awkward delicacy of the automaton's movements recall the weirdo outsiders of Herzog's other movies. This benign white humanoid could be kin to the demented penguin in Encounters at the End of the World, which leaves the flock and rushes hell-bent toward the horizon. Are we looking here at a cool usurper, or a mirror image of our own frailties?

In Lo and Behold's best scene, a scientist calmly explains that the most sophisticated AI in the world is still operating below the level of a cockroach, which exercises choice about where to go and what to do. It's as if Herzog, whose fear and loathing of nature has always been underwritten by a healthy respect, is reminding us—and maybe himself—that Mother Nature still has the upper hand, at least for now. Whether or not the unfinished country of the internet will render everything else prehistorical remains to be seen.

Lo and Behold plays at Toronto's Hot Docs festival on April 28–29 and is planned to play in theaters later this year.

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The VICE Guide to Right Now: Cops Are Investigating Whether Prince's Death Was an Overdose

Photo via Flickr user Scott Penner

Read: Prince Was a Genius No Matter How You Define It

Police have launched an official investigation into how prescription medication may have played a role in Prince's untimely death earlier this month, as the Associated Press reports.

A law enforcement official briefed on the investigation told the AP investigators are looking into whether a doctor was prescribing the musician drugs in the weeks before he was found dead at Paisley Park in Minneapolis. They're also said to be looking into whether a doctor was on the plane that made an emergency landing in Moline, Illinois, six days before his death.

TMZ previously reported that Prince's plane had to make that emergency landing after the star allegedly overdosed on Percocet. The official confirmed to the AP this week that Prince was, in fact, administered a "save shot" of Narcan, which is often used in cases of opioid overdoses, on the tarmac in Moline.

The pop giant's autopsy results are expected to be released within the next three to four weeks. Until then, investigators are probing what kinds of drugs may have been in Prince's home, recording studio, and plane, leaning on the search warrant issued after his death.

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Mass Shootings Killed More People in the US Last Week Than in All of Europe in 2016

A stretch of road in rural Ohio was shut down after two shootings killed eight family members last Friday. (Chris Russell/The Columbus Dispatch via AP)

VICE is tracking mass shootings in America in 2016, and comparing the numbers with their European counterparts. Read our rationale for the project and the metrics we're using here.

Since last Friday morning, America has endured 13 mass shootings that left 15 people dead and 44 more injured. The attacks bring the US mass shooting toll in 2016 up to 91 incidents with 99 dead and 332 injured.

Europe, meanwhile, suffered just one mass shooting —the first on the continent since an attack on April 2 in Marseilles, France. The new shooting came last Friday night in Naples, Italy, where an alleged hit by the notorious Camorra crime syndicate on a neighborhood crime family killed two and injured three. The brazen incident, which drew a fair amount of regional press coverage, brings the continent's death toll in such attacks so far this year to 14 incidents with 13 dead and 55 injured.

But for all the attention garnered by the bold violence in Naples, it was dwarfed by ongoing coverage of last Friday's mass shooting in Piketon, Ohio. The killer or killers carried out a two-stage execution-style assault on a stretch of rural road, targeting three of the same family's nearby properties and another one miles away. The massacre left eight dead. The mass shooting stage of the spree, which accounted for seven of those deaths, was the single deadliest such attack in America so far this year.

Piketon's media dominance makes sense, given what Jaclyn Schildkraut, an expert on the way the news processes mass shootings at the State University of New York (SUNY) Oswego, recently told us. Attacks that target what the media tends to consider typical victims—like young black or Latino men in cities—seem revoltingly routine to us by now. But attacks that deviate from the norm, hitting or endangering atypical victims, often in displays and scales of violence that don't fit with the sloppy drive-by and street dispute narratives of most mass shootings, garner intense scrutiny in the national press.

Most of this past week's attacks, a series of drive-bys and escalated confrontations, fit roughly within the category of shootings America chooses to ignore. A couple of incidents did stand out: Friday's attack in Naples was noteworthy thanks to its potential ties to crime families and imagery of well-armed, masked assailants storming a public square. And an attack on Monday at 3:30 PM in the crowded Music City Central bus terminal in Nashville, Tennessee, drew its fair share of attention as well. Although seemingly targeted violence allegedly perpetrated by one young black man against a minority victim—something the mass media might usually barely cover—the public location of the shooting, in broad daylight, endangering all manner of people (although fortunately injuring just four people) made it uniquely attractive for media coverage and terrifying to viewers.

But neither of these incidents held a candle to the unique and horrific spectacle in Piketon. An execution-style shooting that claimed many members of the same family with one shot to the head, some as they slept, sparing only two infants and a three-year-old child, at least one right next to their murdered parent—the assault seems singularly precise and cold-hearted. The decimation of a family in a small town also deviates from the norm, as does a shooting with only deaths and no injured survivors. And grim flourishes, like the money reportedly strewn at one of the victim's feet, and the potential connection to a marijuana grow operation—and the fact that the as-of-yet-unknown attacker(s) in the case remain at large despite a massive investigation—all add up to a distinctive spectacle of human suffering that reporters and readers alike can't look away from.

Piketon, paradoxically, both is and is not the quintessential image of a mass shooting. Although not a public rampage, this is the kind of tragedy many Americans think of when we think of that term—an aberrant, unexpected terror wiping out many people in a gruesome manner. But the catching, brutal facets of the crime that make it so outstanding to us also make it a poor representative of the bulk of mass shootings, which kill one or two at most and injure a handful, usually in communities that routinely struggle to contain violence. Urban shootings might seem low-grade and banal to some Americans, but by the standards of many places in Europe, they're all exceptionally bloody—and the fact that such attacks could even become banal, shifting our definitions of tragedy toward something like the Piketon massacre, should be cause for national reflection.

Our fixation on Piketon over the past week makes sense, going by media theory and human nature. It was a catastrophe almost made for fearful rubbernecking—not just in America but in the wider world as well. But the price of that fixation, the marginalization of somehow less newsworthy American mass shootings and the wider ignorance of a grinding epidemic of a unique style of violence, one that has wrought a heavy toll on the nation this year alone—that is borderline criminal.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

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Young New Yorkers' Finances Are Extremely Fucked

Some cool young stock image New Yorkers hanging out and talking about the decline of real wages, probably. Photo via Nycretoucher/Getty

If you're a young New Yorker and feel surrounded by people who are overeducated and either underemployed or underpaid or both, if it seems like your friends are struggling more than the generation before them, if it seems like you are all just kind of drifting aimlessly, well, you're right to feel that way, because that's exactly what's going on, according to a new report about millennial New Yorkers' economic prospects that came out this week.

Issued by the office of New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer, the 38-page report pretty much confirms what everyone who is young and living in the city already knew: For 18- to 29-year-olds, real wages are down and living expenses are up, but fresh batches of transplants keep coming here anyway.

When the recession hit in 2008 and 2009, it hit everywhere, but it was especially hard on New York: Unemployment among 18- to 29-year-olds spiked to 18 percent in 2009, and though that number has fallen along with general unemployment statistics across the country, it was still above 9 percent in 2015.

If you, like me, lived in New York during that time, you'll recall that things fucking sucked back then. A few months before I graduated college in 2009, I got laid off from Starbucks, and my post-graduation job hunt consisted mainly of trying to sort out which Craigslist jobs were outright scams and which were actually legit, if crappy, employment opportunities. I wrote copy for a never-actually-launched real estate website, I tried out unsuccessfully for a spot in a wine bar's kitchen, I sold comedy tickets on the street for a day before quitting—when I got a job at a call center and kept it for several months before the entire staff got canned for budget reasons, it felt like a triumph.

The recession never looked or felt as bad as the Great Depression—there were no visible breadlines, no shantytowns springing up on the edges of the least fashionable boroughs. But college grads, especially those of us who ended up with less-than-useful degrees, found the city closing itself to us. Good jobs were rare, and often we were competing against older, more experienced workers who had been downsized. The number of long-term unemployed (meaning those without a job for six months or more) in NYC went from 55,000 in 2007 to 192,000 in 2012. Millennials of color had it worse than their white counterparts; in 2011, 6.5 percent of young white people were unemployed compared to 13.4 percent and 17.1 percent of their Hispanic and black counterparts, respectively.

Those grim stats have fallen somewhat, and there are more jobs today than there used to be. The problem is that, for the most part, the jobs aren't any good. Poorly paid industries like retail and hospitality, according to the report, are employing more young people than they did in 2000, while fewer young people are working in media or finance. The comptroller's report doesn't mention the "gig economy," or the phenomenon of an increasing number of people earning a living either wholly or partially through things like Uber or TaskRabbit, but a disproportionate number of young people nationwide are taking those "jobs," so it seems likely that plenty of New Yorkers have gone this route too. All this is true despite the fact that four fifths of millennials between 23 and 29 have at least a bachelor's degree. Predictably, median real annual income (income adjusted for inflation) for an employed 29-year-old dropped from $56,000 in 2000 to $50,300 in 2014.

That's a lot of numbers even for you college grads, so let me put it in more understandable terms: If you are young and living in the city, you are fucked.

You are fucked because even as those wages have dropped and the good jobs have become scarcer, the city has become more expensive. Renters under 30 paid a median rent of $1,012 in 2000, and that went up to $1,400 in 2014. You are fucked because student debt is rising across the country—by nearly 10 percent a year from 2005 to 2014 for borrowers under 30. And you will continue to be fucked, because—well, I'll let the report explain:

College graduates from the Class of 2008 and after have experienced only a severe recession and a tepid recovery during their working lives. With intensified competition for entry-level work opportunities, their counterparts who did not attend or finish college have faced even greater obstacles to finding suitable employment, and for those who didn't finish high school, the employment opportunities have turned even bleaker. Moreover, recent economic research has found that for young people who enter recessionary labor markets, the market effects can slow down their career advancement and earnings for years or even decades afterward.

What's more fucked is that despite this terrible climate for young workers, New York City has that same old shiny appeal for the young who think that they are different, that they are the ones who will beat the odds and live the glamorous lives they deserve. In 2014, there were over 1 million more 18- to 29-year-olds living in this town than in 2000, according to the report. Every year since 2010, about 88,000 have come here from other parts of the US, and 85,000 have gone back to real America, or at least LA.

The people who come here aren't wrong that there are lots of opportunities here for creative people—for all its faults, New York still has Broadway, the bulk of the publishing industry, a good slice of TV and film production, and a gaggle of media companies, both old and new. But the people who leave also have their reasons, and good ones too. New York seems more crowded and more expensive every year, and therefore less hospitable to the young and broke. It's become impossible to deny that it's increasingly difficult to scratch out a living while hoping you get that book contract/record deal/star role you've been banking on. It's still true that if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere, but if you can make it anywhere, why in God's name would you want to be in New York?

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How David Fincher Became a Master of Dark Thrillers

Watch the full fourth episode of 'The VICE Guide to Film' online now

Filmmaker David Fincher is known for his distinctive style that blends controlled craftsmanship with bold showmanship. He's worked on groundbreaking films including, Seven, Fight Club, and The Social Network, as well as the ever-popular Netflix series House of Cards.

On this episode of VICELAND's The VICE Guide to Film, actors Ben Affleck, Robin Wright, and Jesse Eisenberg examine David Fincher's films and talk about what it's like to work with the prolific director.

Watch the full free episode above and make sure to check out new episodes of the series airing every Friday at 9:30 PM for profiles on Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, and Gus Van Sant.

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Mapping the Lost Nightclubs of New York City

The former Club Exit. Currently a New York Sports Clubs. Photo via Google Maps.

Disappointment isn't exclusive to New York, but the high cost of living does make the feeling especially prevalent here. The nightlife squares it. You work hard all week and then head out into the evening to decorate bars, clubs, warehouses, and liquor stores with your money, all in the hope that you'll maybe have a good time. In New York City, fun is a high-risk, low-reward endeavor.

Disappointment kills some clubs off, allows them to fulfill their free-market destinies as apartments, high-end gyms, coffee shops, or just empty spaces. But when clubs die––in fairness, for all kinds of reasons––their Yelp reviews tend to outlive them. With the ongoing gentrification of NYC seen as an unwitting or targeted assault on nightlife, depending on your viewpoint, I wanted to collate an unspoken history of going out in this city, of the clubland portals that are no more. So I scoured the internet for reviews of the clubs and bars that have gone the way of all things, and looked up their addresses to pair these reveler reviews with Google Street View screengrabs of what the buildings have become.

In some of the testimonies I found, I recognized experiences of my own, experiences that should be universal to anyone who's ever found themselves expensively disorientated late at night in this city. I was 17 when I entered my first club, inhaling the sweat and sin at East Flatbush's Café Alta, where the girls gyrated in their halter-tops and the boys thrust their crotches into the humid air. I partied a year later at Club Gravity in Crown Heights without incident, but my homeboy told me later that I was there on a good night: He heard stories of guys purposely being thrown off balconies. What type of degenerate throws someone off a balcony in a nightclub?

Alas, neither club is listed below because nobody reviewed them on Yelp. Memories from Club Gravity and Café Alta will die with my generation, when we breathe our last breaths, like tears in the rain. But the clubs below are immortalized through Yelp. Read on for tales of people suffering extreme disappointment due to absurd cover charges, choke holds, too much nudity, not enough nudity, gun fights, and Satan.

AMNESIA

AVALON

CLUB EXIT

CLUB LQ

COLUMBUS 72

ELEMENT

FINALE

GREENHOUSE

HOME

JAGUARS 3

LE BARON

NELL'S

REBEL

TENJUNE

THE ELECTRIC WAREHOUSE

Follow Brian Josephs on Twitter.

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