Employees of the Month

Mishka is obsessed with the digitalization of the world and spends most of his days pouring over satellite images, Google Street View, online forums, and data sets. He just had a baby girl and wanted to name her Jpeg, but his girlfriend said no because that’s what moms are for. He’s been short-listed for this year’s Deutsche Börse Photography Prize for No Man’s Land, a series of Street View images of European sex workers. In this issue, we’re proud to feature his terrifying satellite composite images of massive beef farms and oil fields in the US. The photo essay doubles as the catalogue to Mishka’s solo show at the Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool, England, which will run March 1 to May 5.

See BEEF AND OIL

ESRA RØISE

Esra is a Norwegian freelance illustrator who lives and works in Oslo. Ever since she graduated from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts she’s been drawing at her kitchen table for the likes of Vogue, Nylon, Nike, and Levi’s. Esra uses a combination of watercolor, ink, and pencil in her works and loves spending ridiculous amounts of time trying to re-create moments that last only a split second—like those photos people sometime snap of you midword or blinking funny, where you look like a mutant. For this issue, she illustrated Clancy Martin’s harrowing, all-too-real guide for alcoholics who want to hide their boozing from loved ones, and in the process made us really thirsty.

See THE SECRET DRINKER’S HANDBOOK

PATRICK McGUIRE

Patrick is VICE Canada’s new managing editor, but dude’s been with us for quite a bit now. He bided his time by doing the boring shit like online-advertising operations until he told us Anonymous wanted to have a baby with him and started writing about the internet and other things for VICE.com that made us very scared. Recently, Patrick has been investigating an online ring of pedophiles who prey on young girls via webcam chat sites, and who may have pushed a 15-year-old named Amanda Todd to suicide. Lately, he says, he’s been trying to wash his soul clean by taking scalding showers. We’re sure you’ll want to hop in with him after reading his story in this issue, which delves deep into the grimy world of the next frontier of sexual extortion.

See COWARDS ARE BLACKMAILING YOUNG WOMEN TO DEATH ON THE INTERNET

J. MALCOLM GARCIA

Malcolm was a social worker in San Francisco until one day, shortly after 9/11, he decided to travel to Afghanistan to become a journalist by covering the war. He’s gone back every year since, publishing the stories he’s found in Mother Jones, McSweeney’s, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Best American Travel Writing, the Best American Nonrequired Reading, and in his book, The Khaarijee: A Chronicle of Friendship and War in Kabul, published by Beacon Press in 2009. For this issue, he reported on the International Committee of the Red Cross Orthopedic Center in Kabul, where the maimed victims of Afghanistan’s innumerable wars learn how to live without arms and legs.

See BROKEN HEARTS, LOST MINDS, AND MISSING LIMBS

FARZANA WAHIDY

Farzana was born in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 1984, and moved to Kabul at the age of six. She was in grade school while the Afghan civil war was raging, and secretly attended an underground high school when the Taliban came into power and banned the education of women. After the Taliban’s defeat, Farzana continued her education and won a scholarship to study photojournalism at Loyalist College in Belleville, Ontario. Since then, she’s returned to her homeland to shoot photos of war and its aftermath for Agence France-Presse, Getty, the Guardian, and the Associated Press. For this issue, she captured the heartbreaking images of Afghan amputees that accompany J. Malcolm Garcia’s article.

See BROKEN HEARTS, LOST MINDS, AND MISSING LIMBS