On an upcoming episode of MEL: On Air, we’re focusing on the theme of Lost Loves Found. To that end, we’ll be talking to a professor who’s convinced she’s discovered the perfect formula for reconnecting with your high school sweetheart; a man who became so obese that...
Spend enough time on Yelp, and you’ll lose your faith in the wisdom of the crowd. Someone will give a Sichuan restaurant one star for including Sichuan peppercorns in their food, and then go on to rave about the turkey melt at Subway. But sometimes, in the...
“All you can eat” is more than just a business model for buffets — it’s a dream, a utopia, the promise of the infinite plenty of the cornucopia, rolled up into four magic words. At a buffet, the bowls aren’t just big; they’re bottomless. The refills aren’t just free;...
Seven years ago, Michael Airhart and his now-wife were living in South Korea, earning less than $40,000 a year each as teachers. Their dream was to save $100,000 so they could build and manage their own boutique hotel, so they enacted a savings strategy known as the...
When Kristen Barber’s father, a stunt pilot born in 1925, needed to look good, he’d turn to products marketed at his wife to get the job done, including hair dye and moisturizer. But by 2003, when Barber’s youngest brother was a tween, the landscape of products available...
Dr. Jerome Pittman, founder of the Gentle Circumcision clinic in Culver City, CA, estimates that he gets through about 15 procedures a day. Newborns in the morning, older kids in the afternoon, adults on Fridays (so they have time to heal before work on Monday). School-age patients...
Last week, Americans learned that some Chinese men like to beat the heat by flaunting their unimpressive midriffs. The news was met with guffaws and laughter, as the visible male midriff is virtually nonexistent here in the body-shaming States. Unless, that is, you happen to have played...
The march of progress has not been kind to comedy. The banana peel gag? Ruined when we developed a modern waste-management system. Seltzer in the face? Hard to accomplish with a can of La Croix. Crossed letters, missed phone calls, mixed-up messages left on answering machines? Driven...
On two separate occasions in August 1943, legendary military commander George S. Patton walked into a field hospital in Italy and slapped a “shell-shocked” private. Today, we’d diagnose the soldiers as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, but to Patton they were mere cowards. The incidents dogged Patton...
Like the cliché ending of a sports movie, the clock ticked down, one second at a time, until it read zero — a close 27–20 game between the Houston Texans and Kansas City Chiefs now complete. The winning team, the Chiefs, ran onto the field in jubilation. I, however,...
In traditional Chinese culture, life doesn’t necessarily end after you die. You simply move onto an afterlife that’s best experienced with the same creature comforts and cash it takes to make your way through the mortal plane. (The Chinese also believe that money can be used to...
In a low gray building on the side of a dusty road in Sun Valley, CA, human bodies are being sliced up, bloodied, and otherwise mutilated in unspeakable ways. It’s high season for horror, and Dapper Cadaver, a “death-related prop house and prop fabrication shop” is churning...