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Mr. Banks Goes to Washington (w/ Michelle Obama)

First Lady Michelle Obama recruits Thomas to join the interagency effort to end veteran homelessness, and bring one newly-homed vet to the White House. THE White House.

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More Balls Deep

Sewers of Bogota

It’s all fun and games until the death squad shows up. VICE takes a trip to Bogota, Colombia’s most inhabited sewers.
The Sakawa Boys

While Nigeria’s 401 scammers may have written the book on West African internet fraud, their shtick looks like Compuserve compared to what’s going on in Ghana. Unsatisfied with the meager winnings from emailing thousands of random Westerners in hopes of convincing one poor sap they’re the treasurer of the Ivory Coast, Ghana’s scammers decided to stack the odds in their favor the old-fashioned way—witchcraft. Taking a page from cyberpunk, traditional West African Juju priests adapted their services to the needs of the information age and started leading down-on-their-luck internet scammers through strange and costly rituals designed to increase their powers of persuasion and make their emails irresistible to greedy Americans. And so “Sakawa” was born.

Now not only is Sakawa Ghana’s most popular youth activity and one of its biggest underground economies, it’s a full-blown national phenomenon. Sakawa has its own tunes, clothing brands, Sakawasploitation flicks, and even a metastatic backlash from Christian preachers and the press. When we were in Accra over the summer it was impossible to walk more than 10 feet without seeing the word Sakawa in blood-red Misfits letters on a poster or tabloid, often accompanied by bone-chilling horrors of the photoshopped variety.

The government is freaked out because Sakawa is threatening Ghana’s business reputation, the Christians are freaked out because they’re losing money to the Juju priests, the press is freaked out because being freaked out is what sells papers, and the public is freaked out because their government, preacher, and media are all telling them they should be. All the while the Sakawa boys are living the high life and racking up debts to the spirit world, just waiting for the axe to fall.
Leathermen

The Eagle NYC is the last great outpost of New York’s gay leather scene. Once the hardest, burliest, most cruisinest members of the gay community here and everywhere, Leathermen’s ranks were hit especially hard by AIDS in the 80s and 90s. Where the side streets of the West Village and Chelsea once swarmed with glistening, hairy chests and bulging jeans, like some never-ending Tom of Finland mural, these days the scene is but a faded denim shadow of its former self.

Since finding a solid clutch of Leathermen in New York nowadays is harder than getting a leprechaun to make eye contact with you at the Central Park Ramble, we went into the Eagle, basically the Leatherman’s Alamo, to meet the surviving members of this once-mighty subculture and learn the tricks of their rough trade. Please be mindful of the hanky code while watching this video, and, of course, no khakis, sneakers, or fragrances.
Speaking In Tongues

In this preview of BALLS DEEP, we follow Thomas Morton into a Pentecostal tent revival, where the congregation prays in tongues, in the name of Jesus. The Pentecostal tent revival is as exciting as Christian church gets. It is still church, however. Thomas goes to a revival in Arkansas to see how the holy spirit stacks up against secular temptations like drugs, movies, and sleeping in on Sunday.