Salute All Cars, Kids. It’s a Rule in China.

All the students at Luolang Elementary School, a yellow-and-orange concrete structure off a winding mountain road in southern China, know the key rules: Do not run in the halls. Take your seat before the bell rings. Raise your hand to ask a question.

Import Insanity: Shopping for Comfort Food Gone Wild

I bought 15 cans of Dr. Pepper today. I also bought 25 cans of A&W Root Beer, and a few bags of Cool Ranch Doritos. I’m not having a party or anything, I’m just a fat white girl in China. I left my home country with people, places, and comfort food that I love, and now I live in a new country full of strange people who like vegetables and soup. (And soup with vegetables.) So when I find something close to what I grew up with, I swell up with memories, sigh longingly and tell everyone, “I just have to buy it!”

Manolo Blahnik stamps out the platform shoe

(Telegraph)
By Hilary Alexander
‘Sex & The City’ shoe designer prefers the ‘Zero Sole’
Shoe designer Manolo Blahnik beside his leopard print platform design from 1972 ( left) and his ‘zero’ heels form his latest collection for s/s 20109 (right).
There can be chine else in the world as thrilled as Manolo Blahnik, the man who put the sexy [...]

Yoko Ono’s life of love, war and Lennon

Yoko Ono was thinking ahead. That was the only way she could think. Like an art-shark — not one of this elaborate theoriser’s metaphors, but it could be — she has to move forward at all times. To think about the past would mean thinking about her upper-class, conservative upbringing and eventual disowning by a family with rarefied banking and imperial connections; about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, whose destruction happened when she was a 12-year-old in Japan; the firebombing of Tokyo by the Americans, which she actually lived through.

Living la vida Lohan

You look like a good girl, but we all know you are bad,” goads the photographer Ellen von Unwerth, as she snaps Lindsay Lohan vamping it up on the floor of her room at Hôtel Plaza Athenée in Paris. Lohan revels in this reference to her notoriety, and pouts harder, throwing back her waist-length, newly blonde hair (the result, she reveals, of two 12-hour days in the salon).

Lovebox and Bestival music festivals take 10:10 carbon pledge

Two of the UK’s biggest music events, with combined crowd of nearly 100,000, agree to cut carbon emissions by 10%

The slow party trend

One of the coolest parties to come out of Ibiza this summer didn’t feature the next big DJ — nor was it fuelled by the next designer high. At the Barefoot Doctor’s Dub Spirit night, horizontal hedonists lounged on pillows in the outdoor chillout at the luxurious Atzaro spa, allowing the mellifluous tones of Barefoot himself, chanting over hypnotic dubstep, to take them on a guided meditation.

Leona Lewis: “I’m no pushover!”

She’s topped the charts in 30 countries and was the first Briton to have a debut number one album in America. So why is Leona Lewis still seen as shy and retiring? The Hackney superstar reveals her steely side to Barbara Ellen

U.S. Empire In Decline, Makes Way for China

“The US is an empire in decline, according to Niall Ferguson, Harvard professor and author of The Ascent of Money,” reported Aaron Task of Yahoo Finance – Tech Ticker.
Ferguson concedes:
People have predicted the end of America in the past and been wrong. But let’s face it: If you’re trying to borrow $9 trillion to save [...]

Redecorating Isn’t Always Pretty

By JULIE SCELFO
ANDREA SPERLING, a photographer and single mother who lives in Gramercy Park, had a thrilling epiphany this summer: her daughter, Grace, 11, had finally outgrown the toys and child-size furniture that had been clogging their living room for more than a decade.
This development meant Ms. Sperling could finally get rid of the hulking [...]