Employees of the Month

LESLIE JAMISON Leslie Jamison is a very wise and eloquent young author who grew up about 125 miles from the Mexican border. She currently lives in Iowa City, far from any border, where she manages cookie production at a tiny bakery and works as a “professional medical pretender.” She also told us that she “specializes in pretending to be asthmatic and/or depressed” and frequently travels to and sustains injuries in Central America. In this issue you will find Leslie’s account of her trip to a literary gathering in Mexico, where she mingled with poets and other writers who have been inspired by the brutally violent drug cartels that have ravaged the country. The paperback edition of her first novel, The Gin Closet, comes out this May and will be published in Mexico early next year. See LA FRONTERA

ANDREA SONNENBERG Andrea Sonnenberg, aka Teen Witch, is a 21-year-old self-taught photographer from California. Ryan McGinley first hepped us to her, and fellow Vice photographer Sandy Kim is her best friend. She’s obsessed with super-esoteric things like skateboarding and partying and tattoos. Sometimes she gets topless for no reason, and she recently got the letters SVU tattooed on her because she loves Law & Order so much. Her photos make San Francisco look like a big, pretty party full of wild-haired weird girls, and everything looks like the funnest time. And when she’s not running around with her crazy friends, she spends her time working at an ice-cream shop. We foresee great things coming from this one. See PHOTOS BY ANDREA SONNENBERG

SLAVA MOGUTIN Slava is a Siberian-born artist, writer, and photographer who was granted political asylum in the US at age 21 after being exiled from Russia for things like “malicious hooliganism” and “extreme insolence.” Since then he’s authored multiple books, like Lost Boys and NYC Go-Go, exhibited internationally, and been featured in publications like the New York Times, i-D, and Modern Painters, just to name a few. For this issue of Vice he photographed dudes blowing shotties into each other’s mouths. This was a complete exercise in discipline as he had recently quit smoking. He made it through without one single cigarette. Way to go, Slava. See BROS BLOWIN’ SHOTTIES
Photo by Bruce LaBruce

JONATHAN SMITH Jonathan is a Mississippi-born North Carolinian whose afterschool job in high school was folding maternity panties at a Wilmington sweatshop and who spent his first year in New York selling catheters and diapers to old people over the internet. We figured with a pedigree like that, we’d have carte blanche to make him do whatever kind of creepy gross-out work we could cook up. Instead of seeing how much milk he can chug in five minutes, we’ve opted for a more psychological form of hazing and put him in charge of the Viceland blog, where he’s responsible for keeping some 100,000 of you maroons happy on a daily basis. This month he took a short break from deleting the endless stream of spam and death threats in the comments to write a column on spontaneous human combustion. See THE LEARNIN’ CORNER