Get All Up in Our Hot Box

When photographer Giles Clarke saw the “gang cages” that members of San Salvador’s warring street criminals were imprisoned in—sometimes for months at a time—it was as if he encountered something out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. The photographs he took of more than 30 men stuffed into cages that are 12 feet wide and 15 feet tall are insane and express the underlying theme of VICE’s latest edition, which we’ve titled the Hot Box Issue.

In keeping with the spirit of Giles’s discovery of absurd detention, artist and writer Molly Crabapple traveled to Guantanamo Bay to check out the US Naval Detention Center that has become a worldwide blot on America’s credibility as a moral power for her story named after a T-shirt she found at the base’s gift store: “It Don’t GITMO Better Than This.”

Jean Friedman-Rudovsky and Noah Friedman-Rudovsky traveled to Mennonite colonies in Bolivia to report on the continuing and frightening rape epidemics happening in their insular community. They found that even though the perpetrators of the so-called ghost rapes have been apprehended, the rapes continue.

We also traveled to Colombia in search of rare strains of marijuana with the self-proclaimed King of Cannabis, Dutch seed magnate Arjan Roskam, offering a more traditional take on the meaning of hot box.

As you can imagine, there’s much more in out latest effort to sink your teeth into too. Terry Richardson photographs mega superstar cat Lil Bub who then got her fortune told. Richard Kern shot a dark and titillating fashion editorial inspired by David Cronenberg's Videodrome.

As the month rolls along, expect more goodies from the print issue to appear on VICE.com—including an excerpt from  Adam Leith Gollner's new book The New Book of Immortality, new fiction by Barry Gifford, and a report on the courageous women of Egypt battling rape and sexual assault during the country's recent revolutions.

If you want an IRL copy of this magazine to hold and snuggle with we'd suggest heading to one of these fine locations pronto. Actually, don't bother. They probably are already gone.

Find all the published and future articles for the Hot Box Issue here.