Employees of the Month

ROWAN JACOBSEN

Rowan Jacobsen's food writing has won a couple of James Beard Awards and a smattering of other honors. He writes for Outside, Mother Jones, Harper's Magazine, Orion, Yankee, and let us not forget the Calais Lakes and Ponds Working Group. His book topics tend to oscillate between gourmet food and the coming environmental apocalypse. Before he came clean under his own name, he ghostwrote books on Christian powerwalking, Hindu fairy tales, natural alternatives to Viagra, and hemp. The highlight of his career was when he was paid well to ghostwrite a blank exercise workbook. He lives in Vermont on a lake whose road is even worse than its cell coverage.

See THE FIRST RULE OF TEA CLUB

JUAN MADRID

Juan Madrid was born and raised in Catskill, New York, and received a BFA in professional photographic illustration from the Rochester Institute of Technology. He has had work exhibited at shows in the US and abroad and in various publications, including Mossless, ISO, and Ain't Bad. His first monograph, Waiting on the Dream, was published in 2014 by VUU. He is a co-founder of the Free Lunch Cartel, a publishing outlet for photographic and other artistic endeavors. He currently works as the digital lab manager at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, in Woodstock, NY, and this is his first time being featured in VICE.

See CATSKILL

MATTHEW LEIFHEIT

Two years ago, Matthew was a bright-eyed photographer self-publishing a beautiful photo magazine called MATTE. In December 2013, he was hired to be the photo editor of VICE, and since then he's taken portraits of gay roughnecks in the Bakken oil fields and President Obama at a prison in Oklahoma, among many other people and things. Matthew edited two outstanding VICE photo issues and has chosen basically all the pictures in the magazine for the past year and a half. This fall he's off to grad school at Yale, where he will slay those dandy no-hopers with his red-haired righteousness. He'll continue to contribute as VICE's new photo editor at large.

See Matthew's past work for VICE here.

CAELAINN HOGAN

Caelainn Hogan is a writer from Ireland based temporarily in the megacity of Lagos, Nigeria. She has reported from Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, South Sudan, Uganda, and Kashmir, to name a few. Her writing has appeared in Harper's Magazine, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Irish Times, and the Dublin Review. She recently ate pierogi for the first time in the East Village with Casper, a sex worker whose experience with HIV-preventative medication frames her first story for us. Over months, many people gave their time to provide her with insight into the diverse experiences of New York's sex trade and the "stink-eye" discrimination those working in it face.

See A HARD PILL TO SWALLOW

BRITT JULIOUS

Britt Julious is a writer based in Chicago. She is the local music columnist for the Chicago Tribune and contributes to Broadly, Noisey, and the Guardian. She is also the host of The Back Talk, a podcast featuring true stories from women of color. She is possibly the first black, sequin-adorned millennial hippie ever. In this issue, she profiles the rapper and producer Le1f, whose debut album, Riot Boi, will be released this fall. Britt first saw Le1f perform in a tiny bar in Chicago where he destroyed the headliners. The second time was at an ice cream social less than two blocks away from her apartment. And she hasn't looked away since.

See BOI WONDER

DANIEL ARNOLD

Daniel Arnold, of the Milwaukee Arnolds, is easily mistaken for a street photographer because there are streets on the way to everything. It's closer to say that the Brooklyn-based 35-year-old is just an everything photographer. He copes with overactive curiosity, empathy, and cellphone addiction by staying handcuffed to a camera and writing an inscrutable atlas of his own emotions using other people's faces, half-answering the classic, never-asked question: What was it like to be Daniel Arnold in the early 2000s? Daniel says he is self-absorbed but in a way that people seem to like. In this issue, he follows the incredible Wolfpack brothers on a life-changing trip to LA.

See IT WAS GOOD TO GET OUT OF THE HOUSE

Illustrations by Geffen Refaeli