As a single, educated Chinese woman approaching 30, Nancy Ji felt tremendous stress from her parents to get married. So at 28, she hastily tied the knot with a boyfriend. 'My parents put a lot of pressure on me. They nagged me about being single every day, and it was very annoying. My boyfriend appeared at the right time, and he had the right economic profile,' Ji says. So they got hitched. But it didn't take long for the marriage to fall apart, and three years later Ji filed for divorce. Part of the problem, she realized, was how she went about finding a partner. When she was younger, Ji's requirements for a spouse were focused on practical matters, like income, family background, height, and education. Romance wasn't part of the equation. 'My parents told me to get married first, and that love can be nurtured later,' says Ji. Marriage based on economic status is normal in China. A lot of Chinese women -- and their parents -- even consider a house and car as prerequisites for potential boyfriends. ![]() But these financially driven relationships do not always end happily. Shows that the number of divorces in China jumped 8 percent last year, and, for the first time in 10 years, the increase of the divorce rate has outpaced the growth of the marriage rate. In Beijing and Shanghai, almost of couples now divorce, a figure approaching those in Western countries. Meanwhile, people are getting married later in life. As a result, more members of China's 'post-80 generation,' referring to those born in the 1980s, are opting for love and attraction -- rather than practical considerations -- in finding a partner. In China, this idea represents a break from tradition. Joy Chen, a Los Angeles-based author of the best-selling book Do Not Marry Before Age 30, says Chinese culture emphasizes honor, duty, and responsibility in relationships -- not love. These days, though, priorities have shifted. 'Suddenly, in the last 10 or 15 years, there's been an explosion in China of talking about love,' Chen says, 'Everyone wants true love, but people don't know how to get it.' For Wu Di, this cultural shift presented a business opportunity. A family and relationship counselor in Shanghai and the author of I Know How You Were Leftover, Wu launched a three-month 'dating camp' two years ago and charged 4000 RMB (about $650) per student. Together with her partner Bob Liu, a salsa instructor, she offered dance courses, workshops and salons to teach singles how to date and fall in love. Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monuments (LAHCMs) in Downtown Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California are designated by the City's Cultural Heritage Commission. 'Building community and connections with Asians from all around'With Asian Groupting you'll find:Group + MeetingGroup + OutingGroup + ConnectingWho Asian Groupting is for:All Asians, you. Meet singles in Los Angeles, California with OkCupid, the best free dating site on Earth. Download their top-rated apps for iOS and Android. Meet single Asian women & men in Los Angeles, California online & connect in the chat rooms! DHU is a 100% free dating site to find Asian singles. Welcome to fusion101 - Christian dating for free! 101 is the world's most popular free dating site for Christian singles! The only absolutely totally free. Hundreds of people signed up for the camp, Wu says, mostly Shanghai white-collar workers in their thirties who had never dated in their life. In her weekly workshops that have attracted thousands, Wu lectures about how to negotiate with a partner, how to confront parental demand to get married, and even on subjects like sex and birth control. Salsa dancing is a big part of the training, Wu says, because dancing loosens up shy individuals and the music puts them in the mood right away. 'Chinese people don't know how to date. It's been like that for thousands of years,' Wu says. 'Young people have higher expectations for marriage now. They want attraction, and their parents don't know what that is.' Wu isn't the only one with that idea. Last year, Alex Edmunds, a 26-year-old Princeton graduate living in Beijing, founded Coucou8, an online dating site that hosts affordable small group events like dinner, cooking classes, hiking, and afternoon tea for singles over the age of 26. Edmunds says that at Chinese dating events, conversations focus on income, wealth and whether or not a person has a Beijing hukou, a permit that qualifies a resident for social services like education and health care. This contrasts with the Western style of dating, which Edmunds defines as an organic interaction based on mutual interests where singles get to know each other before focusing on practical matters. 'Young people have higher expectations for marriage now. They want attraction, and their parents don't know what that is.' At the inaugural Coucou8 event, Edmunds found that the Chinese men were low-key and passive, often staring at their phones rather than getting to know the women in the room. So he decided to break the ice by bringing in a host and introducing American-style drinking games. Membership has grown by 10 attendees per month since April. 'China has a very hardworking culture, so there isn't much momentum for people to go to social events and meet people outside of their work environment,' Edmunds says, 'So what we have to do is bring in a different culture around initial dates and meetings that encourage people to meet based on their personalities and interests.' *** Both Wu and Edmunds are targeting China's 'leftover women,' a new term describing educated, urban women over 27 who are disadvantaged not just by society's perception they're 'too old' for marriage, but also because their successful careers and economic security intimidate prospective suitors. The government adopted the term in 2007 and promoted it in the state-run media. Leta Hong Fincher, a PhD candidate in sociology at Tsinghua University and author of a forthcoming book about leftover women and Chinese gender inequality, says that the Chinese government wants 'leftover women' to create 'quality' babies by scaring the women into marriage. This goal dovetails with a China State Council plan to upgrade 'population quality' in 2007, the same year the term 'leftover women' came into wide usage. Ever since, the government has invested a lot of effort in marrying off these women. 'All media are controlled and censored by the government, so when the government wants to send a very strong propaganda message, that message is extremely effective,' Fincher says, 'The majority of women are still internalizing this ideology. They are genuinely very afraid that if they don't marry by the time they turn 30, they won't find a husband.' According to Joy Chen, however, Chinese culture has played a role in pressing women into marriage long before the arrival of the Communist Party. Thousands of years of culture and tradition have labeled women who are neither a wife nor a mother as social outcasts. For the post-80 generation -- one that was caught in the transition between traditional and modern China -- the term 'leftover women' is especially suitable. But the real source of adversity towards single women has a simpler explanation: parents. In contemporary China, Wu says that a generation gap has emerged between people born in the 1950s who lived through the chaos and poverty of the Mao Zedong era, and their (usually only) children who grew up under vastly different circumstances. According to Chen Haiyan, a popular dating coach on Chinese social media, this conflict results in anxiety for the parents, especially mothers, and depression for the daughters. 'The majority of women are still internalizing this ideology. They are genuinely very afraid that if they don't marry by the time they turn 30, they won't find a husband.' 'Every time a woman calls home, her mom will cry and yell and ask why she hasn't married yet,' she says, 'Their grandmothers will then say that they don't want to die before seeing you get married.' Stressed, scared and stigmatized, many women will give in and rush into a loveless marriage before age 30 and then rush out of it within one or two years, Wu Di says, thus driving up the divorce rate in China. Nevertheless, as the idea that it's ok to be single past a certain age continues to gain acceptance in China, women will have options that didn't exist in the past. Challenges remain to get to this level, but both Wu and Joy Chen are optimistic: they believe the term 'leftover women' will disappear in the next decade as more women remain single after age 27. For Nancy Ji, divorced and lost at 31, life has never been better at 37: She has recently started seeing someone she met at Coucou8 events, and her perspective on what she wants has changed. 'Now I hope I can find someone who I can connect with based on interest and personalities,' Ji says. “Trump’s appetite seems to know no bounds when it comes to McDonald’s, with a dinner order consisting of two Big Macs, two Fillet-O-Fish, and a chocolate malted.” This 2,400-calorie meal is among the details in a forthcoming book by Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and aid David Bossie, as described in a preview. A dinner of that size would offer caloric energy for a full day. The 3,400 milligrams of sodium more than doubles the American Heart Association’s recommendation of 1,500 milligrams per day. The meal provides almost no fiber—and also offers more white bread than anyone would do well to eat in a week. This is all ominous for the president’s cardiovascular system. Now that Michael Flynn has pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I., and agreed to dish on his former boss, some Trump-watchers are suggesting that impeachment may be around the corner. “It’s time to start talking about impeachment,” announced a Saturday on CNN.com. The Flynn deal, former Deputy Assistant Attorney General Harry Litman in Friday’s New York Times, “portends the likelihood of impeachable charges being brought against the president of the United States.” That may be true. But bringing impeachment charges against Trump, and actually forcing him from office, are two vastly different things. And while the former may be more likely today than it was half a year ago, the latter is actually less likely. Since Robert Mueller became special counsel in May, the chances of the House of Representatives passing articles of impeachment—and the Senate ratifying them—have probably gone down. When Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and all-purpose aide, made a rare public appearance on Sunday in Washington, D.C., it didn’t take long for the investigations engulfing the White House to come up. Two days earlier, Trump’s former national-security adviser, Michael Flynn, had to making false statements to federal investigators about his conversations with former Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the presidential transition, including one in which he urged Russia to delay or vote against a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The plea-deal documents indicated that “a very senior member of the Presidential Transition Team” had instructed Flynn to contact officials from several countries, including Russia, in an attempt to defeat the resolution. Journalists subsequently that this senior transition official was Jared Kushner. On January 18, 2016, Daniel Shaver, a traveling pest-control worker, was in between shifts at his motel, a La Quinta Inn and Suites in Mesa, Arizona. In the elevator, he met a man and woman who’d just finished their own workdays, the two in court. Did they want to join the 26-year-old Texan for Bacardi shots in his room? They’d already begun drinking when one of the guests asked about an unmarked case in the corner. Was it musical instrument? No, a pellet gun. He used it at work. His job was to go hunt down birds that had flown into businesses including Wal-Mart. Soon he was standing by his room’s window showing off his pellet gun to the man. Down below, two motel guests in the La Quinta Inn and Suites hot tub looked up and saw a man with a gun near a fifth-floor window. Someone called 911. In the opening scene of Godless, Marshal John Cook (Sam Waterston) rides into the town of Creede, Colorado, as a dust storm swirls around him. The marshal lowers his bandana and squints into the distance, surveying the scene impassively as the landscape slowly comes into focus. He takes in the carnage of a firefight, a wrecked train, and countless bodies who seem to have all been shot in the head. Then one of his men directs him to the sight of something so awful that it makes the steely old-timer stagger a little, and fall to his knees in the dirt: the sight of a small boy, maybe 5 years old, who’s been lynched from a post. What can the Western, that hoary, craggy old relic, a staple of TCM movie marathons and Disneyland saloon experiences, say about life in contemporary America? Godless, written and directed by Scott Frank ( Get Shorty, Minority Report) for Netflix, and executive produced by Steven Soderbergh, is a gorgeous, slyly subversive affirmation of the genre’s power, even if it isn’t quite the “feminist Western” it was marketed as. The seven-episode series has all the tropes of classic models: outlaws, train heists, brooding heroes, disillusioned lawmen, boundless scenery. But it also has the weight of a world in which something is out of balance. The tension between freedom and order, between outlaw individualism and functioning communities, has come to a breaking point. T HIRTY YEARS AGO, nearly half of Louisiana voted for a Klansman, and the media struggled to explain why. It was 1990 and David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, astonished political observers when he came within striking distance of defeating incumbent Democratic U.S. Bennett Johnston, earning 43 percent of the vote. If Johnston’s Republican rival hadn’t dropped out of the race and endorsed him at the last minute, the outcome might have been different. To hear more feature stories, or Was it economic anxiety? The Washington Post reported that the state had “a large working class that has suffered through a long recession.” Was it a blow against the state’s hated political establishment? An editorial from United Press International explained, “Louisianans showed the nation by voting for Duke that they were mad as hell and not going to take it any more.” Was it anti-Washington rage? A Loyola University pollster argued, “There were the voters who liked Duke, those who hated J. Bennett Johnston, and those who just wanted to send a message to Washington.”. The last photograph of my son Jonathan was taken at the end of a new-student barbecue on the campus green at the University of Denver. It was one of those bittersweet transitional moments. We were feeling the combination of apprehension and optimism that every parent feels when dropping off a kid at college for the first time, which was amplified by the fact that we were coming off a rocky 16 months with our son. We had moved him into his dormitory room only that morning. I remember how sharp he looked in the outfit he had selected, and his eagerness to start class and make new friends. We were happy, relieved, and, knowing what we thought he had overcome, proud. At lunch, I asked Jonathan whether he thought he was ready for the coming school year. “Dad, I can handle it as long as I continue my recovery,” he said. “Everything flows from that.”. A bar of gold. A disk of iron. A chain of beads. A card of plastic. A slip of cotton-linen paper. These things are worthless. One cannot eat them, or drink them, or use them as a blanket. But they are valuable, too. Their value comes from the simplest thing. People believe they are money, and so they are. If every currency is a, then bitcoin, a digital cryptocurrency that changes hands over the internet, feels more like a consensual hallucination on psychedelic drugs. The concept of bitcoin was born in a detailed white paper published in late 2008 by a pseudonymous “Satoshi Nakamoto.” By 2013, one bitcoin was. As of this writing, it’s worth more than $10,000. Its value has doubled in the last two months alone. For any currency’s value to increase by 100 percent in eight weeks is, to use a technical term, bonkers. If the Japanese yen or American dollar did the same, their economies would plunge into an infernal deflationary spiral. Millennial politics is simple, really. Young people support big government, unless it costs any more money. They're for smaller government, unless budget cuts scratch a program they've heard of. They'd like Washington to fix everything, just so long as it doesn't run anything. That's all from a new Reason Foundation poll surveying 2,000 young adults. Millennials' political views are, at best, in a stage of constant metamorphosis and, at worst,,' as Dylan Matthews puts it. It's not just the Reason Foundation. In March, Pew came out with a similar survey of Millennial attitudes that offered another: • Millennials hate the political parties more than everyone else, but they have the highest opinion of Congress. • Young people are the most likely to be single parents and the least likely to approve of single parenthood. • Young people voted overwhelmingly for Obama when he promised universal health care, but they oppose his universal health care law as much as the rest of the country. Even though they still pledge high support for universal health care. (Like other groups, but more so: They seem allergic to the term Obamacare.). President Donald Trump’s behavior on Twitter routinely drives entire news cycles. This weekend, he showed that a single word within a single presidential tweet can be explosive. Trump raised alarm bells in to the news that his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. The tweet published to Trump’s account clearly implied that he already knew that Flynn had deceived the Feds when he fired him back in February: “I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!” That unleashed a frenzy of speculation about whether Trump had just admitted to, since it seems he must have known that Flynn had committed a felony when he was pressuring then-FBI director James Comey to ease up on the Flynn case.
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