Factory Girls

It was five o’clock on a Sunday in May, two hours before showtime, but already thousands of K-pop fans had flooded the concrete playa outside the Honda Center, a large arena in Anaheim, California. Tonight’s performers were among the biggest pop groups in South Korea—shinee, f(x), Super Junior, EXO, TVXQ!, and Girls’ Generation. In the United States, Korean pop music exists almost exclusively on YouTube, in videos like “Gangnam Style,” by Park Jae-sang, the rapper known as PSY, which recently went viral. The Honda Center show was a rare chance for K-pop fans to see the “idols,” as the performers are called, in the flesh.

K-pop is an East-West mash-up. The performers are mostly Korean, and their mesmerizing synchronized dance moves, accompanied by a complex telegraphy of winks and hand gestures, have an Asian flavor, but the music sounds Western: hip-hop verses, Euro-pop choruses, rapping, and dubstep breaks. K-pop has become a fixture of pop charts not only in Korea but throughout Asia, including Japan—the world’s second-biggest music market, after the U.S.—and Taiwan, Singapore, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia. South Korea, a country of less than fifty million, somehow figured out how to make pop hits for more than a billion and a half other Asians, contributing two billion dollars a year to Korea’s economy, according to the BBC. K-pop concerts in Hong Kong and on mainland China are already lucrative, and no country is better positioned to sell recorded music in China, a potentially enormous market, should its endemic piracy be stamped out. Yet, despite K-pop’s prominence in Asia, until recently few in the United States had heard of it. SMTown World Tour III, named for S.M. Entertainment, the Korean music company that is sponsoring the global tour, is hoping to change things, through a unique system of “cultural technology.”

Outside the arena, clusters of fans were enacting dance covers: copies of their favorite idol groups’ moves. (PSY’s horse-riding dance, from “Gangnam Style,” may be the Macarena of the moment.) People carried light sticks and bunches of balloons, whose colors signified allegiance to one or another idol group. The crowd was older than I’d expected, and the ambience felt more like a video-game convention than like a pop concert. About three out of four people were Asian-American, but there were also Caucasians of all ages, and a number of black women.

Standing beside me was Jon Toth, a twenty-nine-year-old white guy, a computer scientist who had driven twelve hours straight from New Mexico. Toth is a fan of Girls’ Generation, a nine-member girl group in the process of recording its American début album, with Interscope Records. At the time he stumbled across the Girls, on YouTube, Toth was an alt-rock guy; he loved Weezer. “I was definitely not the kind of guy you’d expect to get into a nine-girl Asian group,” he told me. But before long Toth was studying Korean, in order to understand the lyrics and also Korean TV shows. Then he started cooking Korean food. Eventually, he travelled all the way to Seoul, where, for the first time, he was able to see the Girls—Tiffany, Sooyoung, Jessica, Taeyeon, Sunny, Hyoyeon, Yuri, Yoona, and Seohyun—perform live. It was a life-changing experience.

“You think you love them, but then you see Tiffany point directly at you and wink, and everything else that exists in the world just disappears,” Toth wrote on Soshified, a Girls’ fan site. “You think you love them, but then you see Sooyoung look you dead in the eye and say in English, ‘Thank you for coming.’ ” Toth concluded, “I might not know how much I love these girls.”

I had arranged to meet Toth because somewhere between my tenth viewing of the Girls’ video “Mr. Taxi” and my twentieth click on “Gee” it occurred to me that I might not know how much I loved these girls, either. “Listen, boy,” Tiffany coos at the outset of “Gee.” “It’s my first love story.” And then she tilts her head to the side and flashes her eye smile—the precise crinkle in the outer corner that texts her love straight 2U. Why was watching “Mr. Taxi” such pure audiovisual pleasure? Why did my body feel lighter in the chair? It wasn’t the music—bright, candy-cane-sweet sounds, like aural Day-Glo—and, while the dancing was wonderfully precise, the choreography had a schematic quality.

“They look like cheerleaders,” my twenty-one-year-old niece hissed over my shoulder one day as I was watching “Gee” again. “Uncle Pervy!”

No, it was nothing like that. For pervy, try the J-pop group AKB48, a Japanese girl ensemble, with scores of members, who, affecting a schoolgirls-in-lingerie look in their video “Heavy Rotation,” pillow-fight, kiss, and share heart-shaped cookies mouth to mouth. Girls’ Generation is a group of preppy-looking young women in skinny trousers. When they wear hot pants, it’s to display the gams, not the glutes.

“They take the love the fans feel for them, and they return it to the fans,” Toth told me. “When you see them onstage, it’s like they’ve come to see you.”

I must have looked skeptical.

“Just wait,” he said. “You’ll see.”

by John Seabrook, New Yorker |  Read more:

Photo: Matthew Niederhauser.

Why Your Car Isn’t Electric

It will come as no surprise to hear that only a tiny fraction — less than 1 percent — of cars driving along American roads are fully electric. What might be more surprising is the fact that this wasn’t always the case. In 1900, 34 percent of cars in New York, Boston and Chicago were powered by electric motors. Nearly half had steam engines. What happened? Why do we end up embracing one technology while another, better one struggles or fails?

The easiest assumption is that some powerful entity suppresses one technology and favors another, and so the wheel of progress slowly turns. But historians of science and business will tell you that this isn’t the whole story. Instead, the culture we live in and the technologies we use are constantly shaping and being shaped by one another, and it’s this messy and unpredictable process that determines winners and losers.

There are plenty of reasons Americans should have adopted electric cars long ago. Early E.V.’s were easier to learn to drive than their gas cousins, and they were far cleaner and better smelling. Their battery range and speed were limited, but a vast majority of the trips we take in our cars are short ones. Most of the driving we do has been well within the range of electric-car batteries for decades, says David Kirsch, associate professor of management at the University of Maryland and the author of “The Electric Vehicle and the Burden of History.” We drive gas-powered cars today for a complex set of reasons, Kirsch says, but not because the internal-combustion engine is inherently better than the electric motor and battery.

At the turn of the 20th century, the Electric Vehicle Company was the largest carmaker in the United States. It was also the biggest owner of cars in the country. That’s because the E.V.C. opted to rent or lease its vehicles instead of selling them. You could pick up an E.V.C. car for a short trip or take it for a week or a month, but you couldn’t own it. The business model was based on the E.V.C.’s assumption that its customers didn’t have the know-how or facilities to maintain their own cars. This may have been true, but when a series of shady business dealings drove the New York-based company into bankruptcy, it took electric cars down with it. Investors, soured by their experience with the E.V.C., swore they’d never put money into the industry again, and in the lull in electric-car development that followed, gasoline-car companies improved their technology and made their vehicles cheaper. Over the next 20 years, Americans formed a new idea of what a carwas. And from that point on, right up to today, it was hard to get them to try anything else.

“Part of what makes infrastructure is its invisibility,” Kirsch told me. “When we have to create infrastructure for ourselves — installing charging stations at our houses, for instance — we make the invisible visible. It becomes an overwhelming task, like having to remake the world. Most people just want a car.”

Society shapes the development and use of technology (this is a function of social determinism; for example, cars didn’t really become ubiquitous until they became easy to operate and cheap to buy), but technology also shapes society (technological determinism; think of the way cars then essentially created the suburbs). Over time, the two interact with and change each other, an idea known as technological momentum, which was introduced in 1969 by Thomas P. Hughes, a historian of technology. According to Hughes’s theory, the technologies we end up using aren’t determined by any objective measure of quality. In fact, the tools we choose are often deeply flawed. They just happened to meet our particular social needs at a particular time and then became embedded in our culture.

by Maggie Koerth-Baker, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Getty Images

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Julius Bissier
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The Weird, Black, Spidery Things of Mars

[ed. Reminds me of the Fire Swamp in The Princess Bride (and the ROUSes).]

See those weird, black, spidery things dotting the dunes in this colorized photo taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2010? Yeah. Nobody knows what the hell those things are.

What we do know about them just underlines how incredibly unfamiliar Mars really is to us. First spotted by humans in 1998, these splotches pop up every Martian spring, and disappear in winter. Usually, they appear in the same places as the previous year, and they tend to congregate on the sunny sides of sand dunes — all but shunning flat ground. There's nothing on Earth that looks like this that we can compare them to. It's a for real-real mystery, writes Robert Krulwich at NPR. But there are theories:

Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey, from Hungary, from the European Space Agency have all proposed explanations; the leading one is so weird, it's transformed my idea of what it's like to be on Mars. For 20 years, I've thought the planet to be magnificently desolate, a dead zone, painted rouge. But imagine this: Every spring, the sun beats down on a southern region of Mars, morning light melts the surface, warms up the ground below, and a thin, underground layer of frozen CO2 turns suddenly into a roaring gas, expands, and carrying rock and ice, rushes up through breaks in the rock, exploding into the Martian air. Geysers shoot up in odd places. It feels random, like being surprise attacked by an monstrous, underground fountain.

"If you were there," says Phil Christensen of Arizona State University, "you'd be standing on a slab of carbon dioxide ice. All around you, roaring jets of carbon dioxide gas are throwing sand and dust a couple hundred feet into the air." The ground below would be rumbling. You'd feel it in your spaceboots.

Read the rest of Robert Krulwich's post — and check out some spectacular photos of the things — at NPR

by  Maggie Koerth-Baker, Boing Boing |  Read more:

The Forgotten Mapmaker

Apple's maps are bad. Even Tim Cook knows this and apologized for them. Google's maps are good, thanks to years of work, massive computing resources, and thousands of people handcorrecting map data.

But there are more than two horses in the race to create an index of the physical world. There's a third company that's invested billions of dollars, employs thousands of mapmakers, and even drives around its own version of Google's mythic "Street View" cars.

That company is Nokia, the still-giant but oft-maligned Finnish mobile phone maker, which acquired the geographic information systems company Navteq back in 2007 for $8 billion. That's only a bit less than the Nokia's current market value of a bit less than $10 billion, which is down 93 percent since 2007. This might be bad news for the company's shareholders, but if a certain tech giant with a massive interest in mobile content (Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo) were looking to catch up or stay even with Google, the company's Location & Commerce unit might look like a nice acquisition they could get on the cheap (especially given that the segment lost 1.5 billion euros last year). Microsoft and Yahoo are already thick as thieves with Nokia's mapping crew, but Apple is the company that needs the most help.

Business considerations aside, I'm fascinated by the process of mapping. What seems like a rather conventional exercise turns out to be the very cutting edge of mixed reality, of translating the human world and logic into databases that computers can use. And the best part is, unlike web crawlers, which were totally automated, indexing the physical world still requires people heading out on the roads and staring at imagery on computers back at the home office.

As I described last month, Google has spent literally tens of thousands of person-hours creating its maps. I argued that no other company could beat Google at this game, which turned out to be my most controversial assertion. People pointed out that while Google's driven 5 million miles in Street View cars, UPS drives 3.3 billion miles a year. Whoever had access to these other datasets might be in the mapping (cough) driver's seat.

Well, it turns out that Nokia is the company that receives the GPS data from both FedEx and UPS, the company's senior VP of Location Content, Cliff Fox, told me.

"We get over 12 billion probe data points per month coming into the organization," Fox said from his office in Chicago. "We get probe data not only from commercial vehicles like FedEx and UPS trucks, but we also get it from consumers through navigation applications."

by Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic |  Read more:

The F Word

"Ok," I said to my daughter as she bent over her afternoon bowl of Cinnamon Life. "What's going on with you and J.?" J. is the ringleader of a group of third-graders at her camp—a position Lucy herself occupied the previous summer. Now she's the one on the outs, and every day at snack time, she tells me all about it, while I offer up the unhelpful advice I've been doling out all summer long. Find other girls to sit with. Ignore them. Be yourself. Be patient. It does get better.

"She's bossy," Lucy complained.

"Mmm-hmm," I said as I returned the milk to the refrigerator, thinking that my daughter can be a little on the bossy side herself.

"She's turning everyone against me," Lucy muttered, a tear rolling down her cheek. "She's mean, she's bad at math, she's terrible at kickball. And...she's fat."

"Excuse me," I said, struggling for calm, knowing I was nowhere in calm's ZIP code. "What did you just say?"

From the way her eyes widened, I knew that she knew she'd done what her sister, four-year-old Phoebe, called a Big Bad. "She is fat," Lucy mumbled into her bowl.

"We are going upstairs," I said, my voice cold, my throat tight. "We are going to discuss this." And up we went, my blithe, honey-blonde daughter, leggy as a colt in cotton shorts and a gray T-shirt with Snoopy on the front, and her size-16-on-a-good-day mom.

I'd spent the nine years since her birth getting ready for this day, the day we'd have to have the conversation about this dreaded, stinging word. I had a well-honed, consoling speech at the ready. I knew exactly what to say to the girl on the receiving end of the taunts and the teasing, but in all of my imaginings, it never once occurred to me that my daughter would be the one who used the F word. Fat.

by Jennifer Weiner, Allure |  Read more:

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Tap The Healing Power of Poop

It’s flushed down dark pipes into malodorous sewers. It is the very definition of “waste.” But it turns out that human feces may also have amazing healing properties, due to the trillions of colon microorganisms that it contains. Stool from a healthy person, recent findings show, can cure nine out of ten chronic cases of potentially deadly colitis caused by the intestinal bacterium Clostridium difficile. Moreover, healthy stool might treat a range of other disorders, from Crohn’s disease to constipation.

The procedure of transferring stool to a patient—technically called fecal microbiota transplantation—was first performed in the United States in 1958 to treat an intractable case of C. difficile colitis, a gastrointestinal condition caused when the balance of microbes in the gut—called the microbiome—is destabilized or destroyed. The goal was to banish C. difficile by overpowering it with healthy microbes so that balance could be restored. The experiment worked, and last year a review of 317 patients treated by 27 different research groups found an astounding 92 percent cure rate from this unusual therapy.

Now a group of physicians have designed the fecal treatment’s first double-blind trial, in which neither patient nor researcher knows whether a placebo or a healthy microbiome is being delivered to the ailing gut. Before that can happen, though, the FDA needs to approve the use of healthy donor stool as an “investigational new drug.” Then the National Institutes of Health must provide funding.

Colleen Kelly, a gastroenterologist in Providence, Rhode Island, who is helping design the trial, says the first patient she treated with a fecal transplant was a premed student in 2008 who was completely debilitated by six painful months of C. difficile colitis. “I tried every standard regimen of treatment. Nothing worked,” Kelly says. After the patient received a transplant of her live-in boyfriend’s stool, she was cured. “When I saw her at follow-up, she looked fantastic,” Kelly says, “smiling and completely symptom free. She told me she’d felt better the same day as the transplant. I’ve done 72 of these now, and I hear that again and again.”

Growing interest in the unconventional therapy is due in part to the fact that C. difficile colitis cases have tripled in the past decade and now afflict more than half a million people a year. “C. difficile colitis is a terrible problem, and fecal transplant results are astounding,” says Lawrence J. Brandt, emeritus chief of gastroenterology at Montefiore Medical Center in New York. He is a proponent of fecal transplant therapy as a primary treatment for C. difficile, rather than as a last resort.

by Jill Neimark, Discover |  Read more:

Image: Shutterstock

Grizzly Bear Members Are Indie-Rock Royalty, But What Does That Buy Them in 2012?

The 6,000-capacity Radio City Music Hall fills with a cheery and stylish crowd of fans, and the band is welcomed, briefly, home. “This is surreal,” Droste announces as they take the stage. “Makes me think back to our first show, at Zebulon, in 2004.” Back then, he was too nervous to stand in front of an audience; the band sat for almost a full year. Now they’re on their feet on a grand stage, a system of eighteen cloth-wrapped lamps floating behind them like synchronized-swimming jellyfish, digging into the squall of guitars that closes a new single, “Yet Again,” or ending the evening with a gorgeously intimate version of the song “All We Ask.” Shields, meanwhile, is about to debut at No. 7 on the Billboard album chart. This is a long way from Zebulon, and certainly not a place an indie act from the cafés and warehouse spaces of Williamsburg could reasonably expect to wind up.

Still, the question of how “big” Grizzly Bear are—where they fall on the long scale between celebrity megastars and those unwashed touring-in-vans-for-the-love-of-it indie rockers whose days consist of, as Droste remembers it, “cars breaking down, sleeping on floors, being allergic to the cat in someone’s house, making literally no money, playing in a diner, having ten people show up, being like Why are we doing this?, eating beef jerky from the gas station for protein”—is a funny and unsettled one, and its answer might depend on your perspective.  (...)

For much of the late-twentieth century, you might have assumed that musicians with a top-twenty sales week and a Radio City show—say, the U2 tour in 1984, after The Unforgettable Fire—made at least as much as their dentists. Those days are long and irretrievably gone, but some of the mental habits linger. “People probably have an inflated idea of what we make,” says Droste. “Bands appear so much bigger than they really are now, because no one’s buying records. But they’ll go to giant shows.” Grizzly Bear tours for the bulk of its income, like most bands; licensing a song might provide each member with “a nice little ‘Yay, I don’t have to pay rent for two months.’ ” They don’t all have health insurance. Droste’s covered via his husband, Chad, an interior designer; they live in the same 450-square-foot Williamsburg apartment he occupied before Yellow House. When the band tours, it can afford a bus, an extra keyboard player, and sound and lighting engineers. (That U2 tour had a wardrobe manager.) After covering expenses like recording, publicity, and all the other machinery of a successful act (“Agents, lawyers, tour managers, the merch girl, the venues take a merch cut; Ticketmaster takes their cut; the manager gets a percentage; publishers get a percentage”), Grizzly Bear’s members bring home … well, they’d rather not get into it. “I just think it’s inappropriate,” says Droste. “Obviously we’re surviving. Some of us have health insurance, some of us don’t, we basically all live in the same places, no one’s renting private jets. Come to your own conclusions.”

Rock bands are generally obligated to express profound gratitude for any kind of success, and Grizzly Bear’s seems thoroughly genuine. They will also acknowledge that it’s “a weird life,” that it’s not always easy, that it requires a mix of sacrifice and raw compulsion and rigorous overhead-cutting, and that they sometimes wonder what they’d do if the band fell apart. Chris Bear is just now, for the first time, ceasing to handle management of their tours, though he still can explain the band’s accounting in detail, sounding almost guilty about any expenses that rise above a monastic level: The occasional hotel-room rental, he says, is so they can take showers, and the sound and lighting engineers are inarguable necessities. (“You can’t roll into Radio City and be like, ‘Yeah, just plug in my acoustic guitar and turn it up.’ ”) He and Droste go out of their way to stay in the top tier of an airline rewards program for the upgrades on long tour flights. (“I’m six-four,” says Droste, “and I don’t want to pay for business class.”) Sit down with the four of them, and you get the overall sense that the band’s high profile has taken them from ordinary early-twenties NYU grads—working as a temp, a caterer, a coffee-shop employee, and “the guy who edits out the coughs” in audio documentaries—to the early-thirties proprietors of a risky small business: very busy, stuck somewhere between “scraping by” and “comfortable enough,” and unsure how they’d ever manage to do things like support families or pay for any children’s educations, especially given the slim chances that this business will exist twenty or even ten years from now. “If your livelihood is in songwriting, you never know when that’s just gonna stop,” says Rossen. Now that they’ve reached success, they seem to wonder about stability. “There’s people that know they make X dollars a year, and that’s not going to change,” says Bear. “Or if anything, they’ll get a raise. That seems like a pretty reasonable setup, compared to maybe having one really good year, and then who knows what the future is.”

by Nitsuh Abebe, Vulture |  Read more:

(Con) Fusion Centers

One of the nation’s biggest domestic counterterrorism programs has failed to provide virtually any useful intelligence, according to Congressional investigators.

Their scathing report, to be released Wednesday, looked at problems in regional intelligence-gathering offices known as “fusion centers” that are financed by the Department of Homeland Security and created jointly with state and local law enforcement agencies.

The report found that the centers “forwarded intelligence of uneven quality — oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens’ civil liberties and Privacy Act protections, occasionally taken from already published public sources, and more often than not unrelated to terrorism.”

The investigators reviewed 610 reports produced by the centers over 13 months in 2009 and 2010. Of these, the report said, 188 were never published for use within the Homeland Security Department or other intelligence agencies. Hundreds of draft reports sat for months, awaiting review by homeland security officials, making much of their information obsolete. And some of the reports appeared to be based on previously published information or facts that had long since been reported through the Federal Bureau of Investigation.  (...)

The investigators also discovered that federal officials cannot account for as much as $1.4 billion in taxpayer money earmarked for fusion centers and that some of the centers listed on paper by the Homeland Security Department do not even exist.  (...)

The report on the dysfunctional nature of the fusion centers makes clear that in the decade since the department was created, Homeland Security has not carved out a clear counterterror mission that does not overlap with those of other agencies.

Top officials of the Homeland Security Department have known about the problems for years, but hid an internal department report on the program’s flaws from Congress while continuing to tell lawmakers and the public that the fusion centers were highly valuable and that they formed the centerpiece of Homeland Security’s counter-terrorism efforts. A 2010 internal assessment by the department discovered, for instance, that four of its claimed 72 fusion centers did not exist, even as department officials kept using the 72 figure publicly with Congress.

Homeland Security officials disputed the findings of the Senate investigators. Matthew Chandler, a department spokesman, said the Senate report “is out of date, inaccurate and misleading.” He said the investigators “refused to review relevant data, including important intelligence information pertinent to their findings.”

When it was created, the Department of Homeland Security was supposed to function as a central clearinghouse for terrorism-related intelligence, to solve what was supposed to be one of the big problems identified in the government’s failure to prevent 9/11 — a lack of intelligence sharing between the F.B.I., the Central Intelligence Agency and other agencies.

But almost immediately, the George W. Bush administration created other organizations to do much the same thing. Today, the central clearinghouse is the National Counterterrorism Center, part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Department officials soon began angling to find something else to do. They hit on the idea of taking charge of intelligence sharing between the federal government and state and local law enforcement agencies, and by 2006, fusion centers were being set up across the country.

by James Risen, NY Times |  Read more:

mechanism #12, acrylic on canvas, 2012 - by doug glovaski
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Buy, Buy Love: In Search of Modern Mail-Order Brides

"Respect for the girls disarms them—they're not used to it. Be funny and humorous. And power tip No. 3? Don't lock in too early on any one girl."

It's a sweat-through-your-statement-shirt Saturday afternoon in Medellín, Colombia—the former murder capital of the world. Dave, a stocky ex-nightclub manager from Liverpool, England, is preaching to a crowded bus of single men. They've traveled from Europe, Australia, and the United States to meet single women, maybe even marry them. Dave is the dating coach at AmoLatina, a subsidiary of Anastasia International, an international online dating portal that includes AnastasiaDate.com, AmoLatina.com, AsianBeauties.com, and AfricaBeauties.com. Once a romance-tour client himself, Dave's all lovable swagger and rogue British charm. It's easy to see why the men around me have bought into him and his power tips.

We're en route to a dating party organized by AmoLatina. Our minibus peels off a busy highway and into the parking lot next to an unassuming club called Dulce Jesús Mio. We head inside and take in the Latin-village decor that's oddly punctuated with wall-to-wall Christmas lights and large, grinning porcelain pigs. It looks like the kind of place that celebrates New Year's every night. (And every night at midnight, it does.)

The music starts. Reggaeton—a fusion of Latin hip-hop, dancehall, and salsa—echoes through Medellín no matter where you go. Its pulse is the hypnotic "dem bow" beat: a mesmerizing pattern that never ceases.

Women begin arriving in groups of three and four, spilling out of bright yellow taxis. We see glimpses of halter tops and jeans, outfits keenly hugging voluptuous figures. The youngest, smiles lined with braces, are in their early twenties. The oldest look to be in their mid-forties and strut toward the club with less giggle, more purpose. Photographers have been hired to capture the women as they enter the club, blinding flashes lighting up their faces in front of an AmoLatina sponsor board, which reads: bringing the world together.

The phenomenal growth of online dating over the past two decades shows no signs of slowing. It has skyrocketed from a curiosity in the late 1990s to a $2 billion powerhouse in 2011. Anastasia International, most famous for arranging meetings with Russian women, was founded in 1993 and has more than 240 employees, working in offices from Maine to Moscow to Medillín. They run regional websites in Eastern Europe, South America, Africa, and Asia. The company boasts that nearly one in five of its customers ends up either married or in a "lasting relationship" after attending one of its Eastern European romance tours. It also claims that the number of men joining has more than quadrupled since 2005—and that sign-ups by Russian, Ukrainian, and Latin American women have tripled.

Here's how it works on AmoLatina: Select one of 27 countries (the parent company works with 113 nations in total) from a drop-down menu, then identify the traits you would like in your ideal partner: age, height, weight, hair color, eye color, and even English-speaking skills (which range from "fluent" to "beginner"). If a profile piques your curiosity, you pay for an online introduction. Fees range, based on whether you want to send translated messages to the women, have roses delivered to their doorstep, or go on a guided tour in their hometown to meet them. Of course, you can always forgo formalities and book a tour without doing any preliminary browsing. Most customers travel to meet as many women as possible in one particular city.

The participants on this trip paid $1,595 for a package that includes accommodations at a four-star hotel (the Hotel Dann Carlton Belfort Medellín), in-house translators, and access to hordes of women at two "socials." The central office of the romance tour is housed in a spacious hotel hospitality suite, with open windows overlooking downtown. This is where clients set up dates with women they've spotted on the website or at a social.

The guys on my trip range from 26 to sixty-something. Aggie, a hulking, cheery real-estate executive from Los Angeles, appears to be about 30. He's already befriended Mark, a six-foot-five undertaker from Boston. They make for a boisterous duo. Steve, from Omaha, is a grandfather and a widower. Joe, a middle-aged divorcé from Boston, works at one of the world's biggest tech companies and resembles Jon Lovitz—right down to the billowy polo he's wearing. Joe is brash and self-deprecating but softens when he talks about meeting a potential partner. Many of the men on tour in Medellín have experienced heartbreak, betrayal, and loneliness. Some pine for a wife and children. A minority are "players" who expect a tangible return on their investment. So says Dave, who confesses to taking a group of men to a strip club—which doubled as a brothel—in Bogotá a week earlier.

Today, Dave's job is part cultural concierge, part cheerleader. The latter proves vital. For many men, booking this tour isn't without emotional consequences. The process forces an admission of defeat: that they still haven't figured women out. Dave is a counterweight to these insecurities, a quippy, encouraging ally.

Who are the women, then? Quite a few come from the poorer parts of Medellín—like Comuna 13 and La Iguana—and many are single mothers. "The girls want to get out of the country," says Howard, a 57-year-old agricultural entrepreneur I met on the plane and who, coincidentally, married a Colombian woman a decade ago (though not on a matchmaking tour). Having traveled regularly from San Diego to Colombia to court his wife, Howard had the opportunity to see the tours evolve over the years. "They have looks, they're beautiful," he says. "But if they hit 25, 26 . . . the boat has left the dock. They're too old for Colombian guys." For these gals, the appeal is simple: free drinks, free food, and the chance to meet a foreigner serious enough about love to pay for it. Throughout my trip, several young women would complain about Colombia's notoriously unfaithful men.

by Adam Baidawi, Details |  Read more:
Photos: Adam Baidawi

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Secrets of the Phallus

If you’ve ever had a good, long look at the human phallus, whether yours or someone else’s, you’ve probably scratched your head over such a peculiarly shaped device. Let’s face it—it’s not the most intuitively shaped appendage in all of evolution. But according to evolutionary psychologist Gordon Gallupof the State University of New York at Albany, the human penis is actually an impressive “tool” in the truest sense of the word, one manufactured by nature over hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution. You may be surprised to discover just how highly specialized a tool it is. Furthermore, you’d be amazed at what its appearance can tell us about the nature of our sexuality.

The curious thing about the evolution of the human penis is that, for something that differs so obviously in shape and size from that of our closest living relatives, only in the past few years have researchers begun to study it in any detail. The reason for this neglect isn’t clear, though the most probable reason is because of its intrinsic snicker factor or, related to this, the likelihood of its stirring up uncomfortable puritanical sentiments. It takes a special type of psychological scientist to tell the little old lady sitting next to him on a flight to Denver that he studies how people use their penises when she asks what he does for a living. But I think labeling it as a “crude” or “disgusting” area of study reveals more about the critic than it does the researcher. And if you think there’s only one way to use your penis, that it’s merely an instrument of internal fertilization that doesn’t require further thought, or that size doesn’t matter, well, that just goes to show how much you can learn from Gallup’s research findings.

Gallup’s approach to studying the design of the human penis is a perfect example of of “reverse-engineering” as it’s used in the field of evolutionary psychology. This is a logico-deductive investigative technique for uncovering the adaptive purpose or function of existing (or “extant”) physical traits, psychological processes, or cognitive biases. That is to say, if you start with what you see today—in this case, the oddly shaped penis, with its bulbous glans (the “head” in common parlance), its long, rigid shaft, and the coronal ridge that forms a sort of umbrella-lip between these two parts—and work your way backward regarding how it came to look like that, the reverse-engineer is able to posit a set of function-based hypotheses derived from evolutionary theory. In the present case, we’re talking about penises, but the logic of reverse-engineering can be applied to just about anything organic, from the shape of our incisors, to the opposability of our thumbs, to the arch of our eyebrows. For the evolutionary psychologist, the pressing questions are, essentially, “why is it like that?” and “what is that for?” The answer isn’t always that it’s a biological adaptation—that it solved some evolutionary problem and therefore gave our ancestors a competitive edge in terms of their reproductive success. Sometimes a trait is just a “by-product” of other adaptations. Blood isn’t red, for example, because red worked better than green or yellow or blue, but only because it contains the red hemoglobin protein, which happens to be an excellent transporter of oxygen and carbon dioxide. But in the case of the human penis, it appears there’s a genuine adaptive reason that it looks the way it does.

by Jesse Bering, Scientific American |  Read more:

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This Is the Way Facebook Ends

Let’s not forget everything Facebook has done for us. In leveraging our social curiosity and innate egomania, Mark Zuckerberg unleashed a social revolution, compelling us to share even the most mundane aspects of our lives. No longer anonymous trolls scouring the wild west of the web, we now had an online presence defined by our actual names, a virtual representation of ourselves with a perpetual audience. Suddenly, we were empowered, intoxicated even, by our constant connectedness.

And for the past eight years, Facebook has been the central neural network of the Internet’s link-sharing brain. But as the site has grown, so have our needs. Now that the company’s public, it’s crunch time, and the skeptics and haters are lining up to talk about how it might all end. One thing’s for certain: whether it’s a bang or a whimper, Facebook is not forever. How could it collapse? Let me count the ways.

Since Facebook’s inception, Mark Zuckerberg has had an uncanny knack for maintaining the site’s exceptional growth, despite royally pissing off the majority of its users with shady privacy practices, monetization strategies like the Beacon fiasco, and of course, its latest incarnation, Timeline. And yet, despite all the user resentment, we’re apparently using the site more than ever before. It’s this kind of fortitude in the face of user frustration that has led some to compare Zuckerberg’s forceful genius to that of Steve Jobs.

But while Jobs always had his doubters, vocal critics, and fair share of questionable philosophies, he commanded the kind of respect that’s made Mac fanboys some of the most annoying self-described geeks around the world. His death was felt internationally, as the world mourned the passing of its greatest tech rockstar.

Zuck doesn’t have the same kind of cult following. He’s been ridiculed all over the Internet and in a million-dollar Hollywood movie. Many simply don’t trust him. Beyond the anodyne hacking talk and his “keep shipping” motto, oracle readers have had to rely on chat transcripts from years of legal cases to learn about his thinking and intentions (for instance, that he once thought of his users as “dumb fucks.")

As net neutrality guru Tim Wu noted, Facebook has a lot of bad karma. “No one really loves the company,” he tweeted the other day. “We just feel stuck with it.” Really, we’re waiting for a good enough reason. At some point, Zuckerberg will push too hard — a new setting you can’t turn off, a “frictionless” feature that shares too much, a product that simply pisses you off too hard — and users will ragequit for good. The company’s controversial IPO and the simultaneous pressure to build up ad revenue will only accelerate this process.

At some point, Zuckerberg will push too hard, and users will ragequit for good

Of course, people have been calling for this for quite some time (almost with every new abrasive change to the site), but no true revolution has materialized. Thanks to the network effect, sheer inertia, and the lack of a compelling alternative, Facebook remains top dog. Our often-surprising threshold for pain doesn’t help, but it is finite. We are always potentially one bad update away from the tipping point. We’ve seen the internet rally together before and Facebook’s track record makes it easy to hate.

Before Facebook there was Friendster. Plus MySpace, Yahoo, and even Compuserve, among countless others. The idea for Facebook, however brilliantly executed, wasn’t necessarily built on some revolutionary, genius idea. It was one of many social networking sites to emerge around campuses in 2004, and it happened to be the thing that everyone started using. Like many success stories of the past, the thing that Facebook nailed was timing.

Facebook arrived at the advent of Web 2.0. Broadband reached the masses and the Internet was going mainstream. Photos that once took agonizing minutes to load on our noisy dial-up connections could now be shared near instantaneously with our dirt cheap digital cameras. The arrival of new HTML standards meant that the new web wasn’t just prettier, it was highly functional. Finally, the world was ready for a social network. Suddenly, Facebook became the coolest party in town.

by Alec_Liu, Motherboard |  Read more:

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