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...
Aaron Yoder, 31, is the head track-and-field and cross-country coach at Bethany College in Kansas. He’s also one of the world’s greatest backward runners, which is exactly what it sounds like (jogging, sprinting or racing backward instead of forward). I do my workout very early in the...
It wasn’t that long ago that women were considered the legal property of men. Ownership of a woman was transferred from her father to husband upon marriage, and signified by her swapping out her father’s last name for her husband’s. Treating women as literal chattel seems unthinkable...
Feel like you haven’t gotten a good handshake in years? It’s not you. Kids today can’t grip for shit. A study out of Winston-Salem State University found that men in their early 20s in 1985 could crush, on average, 121 pounds with their right hand, and 105...