It’s no secret that even the most well-maintained airplane cabins are still crawling all sorts of icky germs. Most travelers are inured to this fact and try not to think about it, but there’s always that one person wiping down their armrests with Wet Ones. This list is for them.
When I quit my job in New York to go backpacking in South America, I agonized over what to pack. I couldn’t, for instance, not bring my Ferragamo flats, even if it meant ruining their soles on dirt paths and crumbling cobblestones. I certainly couldn’t leave behind my beloved red lipstick—I wanted it for nights out…
What am I doing here? The question had lodged itself in my brain when I arrived in Southeast Asia two months ago, and it’d been reverberating in my skull ever since. I should have stayed in D.C., I thought, working on improving my GPA and hunting for a job post-graduation. Instead, I’d accepted a study-abroad spot in…
Pity poor Urban Outfitters: If the company wants any hope of expanding its flagship brand internationally, they've got to be sensitive to populations besides affluent white American teenagers. Which is apparently so, so hard.
A massive new UN survey has found that in some parts of Asia, more than half of the men admit to forcing a woman to have sex. Throughout the countries involved in the research, one in four men admitted to rape. Congratulations, UN Rape Survey. You found a thing to make even 9/11 seem worse.
I wouldn't call myself a flag-waving jingoist, but there are times I'm pretty happy to be American — while watching that YouTube clip of Whitney Houston singing the Star Spangled Banner in windpants before the Super Bowl or eating a hot dog while keeping score at a baseball game or stalking the White House's Flickr…
There's a full-length mirror and a scale on every single floor of the all-girls high school where Julia Lurie works. She's an American teaching English in South Korea, the country with the highest per capita rate of plastic surgery in the world. One in five women in Seoul have undergone some kind of procedure. Most…
Japan's current Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, a stern conservative and nationalist who stepped down from his post in 2007 only to re-emerge this year, might be taking back a 1993 apology that the nation issued to World War II "comfort women," thousands of female citizens who were forced into brothels across Asia to…
Today, China's national legislature passed a new law that, once enacted, will require citizens to visit their elderly parents "often," or go to court. This law is so, so ripe for 1980's style stand up jokes about mothers in law, or a very special episode of Married... With Chidren where someone gets bumped on the head…
In China, plastic surgery shows you've made it. And more and more people are making it.
[Taipei, Taiwan, January 8: A dog bends over to a poster that calls on the judiciary to better enforce a law banning animal abuse. Image via AP.]
[Taipei, Taiwan, December 31: A singer performs during a New Year's Eve ceremony, which also served as a 100th anniversary celebration for the Republic of China. How does she squeeze through doorways in that thing? Image via AP.]
A "higher standard of beauty" — read: "the leggy, skinny, busty Western ideal that has become increasingly universal" — is leading to a dangerous plastic surgery boom in China.
[Yangon, Burma, November 5: A woman sits by a campaign poster hung for the upcoming election in Myanmar, which many say is a "sham" because of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi's ongoing house arrest. Image via Getty.]
The name translates to "sensible and intelligent." The motto is "Modest and Fabulous." The first issue features the headline "women on top." And a model appears to be doing a sexyface. Muslim ladies, meet your new fashion mag.
[Candaba, February 5. Image via Getty.]
Women in Hong Kong are being pressured to "whiten up" by advertisements that feature Caucasian models and promote skin lightening products.
