Victor Pelevin made his name in 90s Russia with scathing satires of authoritarianism. But while his literary peers have faced censorship and fled the country, he still sells millions. Has he become a Kremlin apologist? At 18, Mustafa was told his only way out of prison was to join the regime forces. After 14 years, his past as one of Assad’s fighters could get him killed When fossilised remains were discovered in the Djurab desert in 2001, they were hailed as radically rewriting the history of our species. But not…
Tag: Life and style
Trump, tech barons and a title-less Andrew: how well do you remember 2025? – quiz
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Want to be hotter? Try this one weird Republican trick | Arwa Mahdawi
Maybe she was born with it, maybe it’s Mar-a-Lago face Forget expensive moisturizers or designer clothes. Ladies, if you want a quick and easy glow-up, you may want to try Republicanism. This one weird trick of voting against your own reproductive rights will instantly make you 10 times hotter. That’s not my personal sales pitch, I should note. But it’s increasingly how conservatism is being marketed to young women. As is painfully clear almost one year into Donald Trump 2.0, Maga authoritarianism doesn’t have any meaningful selling points for most…
Cuddling capybaras and ogling otters: the problem with animal cafes in Asia
The second floor of an unassuming office building in central Bangkok is a strange place to encounter the world’s largest rodent. Yet here, inside a small enclosure with a shallow pool, three capybaras are at the disposal of dozens of paying customers – all clamouring for a selfie. As people eagerly thrust leafy snacks toward the nonchalant-looking animals, few seem to consider the underlying peculiarity: how, exactly, did this South American rodent end up more than 10,000 miles from home, in a bustling Asian metropolis? Capybara cafes have been cropping…
The man who froze his wife and got a new girlfriend: a stranger, sadder tale than I expected | Imogen West-Knights
One of the last remaining fun things about the internet is getting to pass judgment on the goings-on in households that you would never hear about otherwise. On Reddit, for instance, there is a whole thriving sub for just this purpose called Am I the Asshole?, where people describe conflicts from their lives and ask strangers to adjudicate on them. This week, a story on the BBC threw up a particularly juicy piece of other people’s business that has been sparking debates on Chinese social media. It starts in 2017,…
The Beijing courier who went viral: how Hu Anyan wrote about delivering parcels – and became a bestseller
Hu Anyan is not a fan of online shopping, but, as he discovered during the months he spent as a courier in Beijing, plenty of people are. Not long into the job, he was assigned to delivering parcels to a large construction site. He didn’t have to deliver that many – 10 to 20, most days – but getting them to their rightful owners wasn’t always easy. There was a crane driver who was often in the air when Hu arrived. He would ask him to come again the next day,…
Swatch pulls ‘slanted eye’ ad after backlash in China
The Swiss watchmaker Swatch has apologised and removed an advert featuring a model pulling the corners of his eyes, after the image prompted accusations of racism and calls for a boycott on Chinese social media. Internet users heavily criticised the “slanted eye” gesture made by the Asian male model as racist. In a post on Instagram and the Chinese social media platform Weibo on Saturday, Swatch acknowledged the “recent concerns regarding the portrayal of a model” in the advert and said it had deleted the promotional material worldwide. “We sincerely…
The rapid rise of Luckin coffee: is this the end of the Starbucks supremacy?
Name: Luckin. Age: Seven – it was founded in October 2017. Appearance: 20,000 locations and counting. Locations doing what? Serving coffee. It’s a giant coffee chain. Oh yeah? If it’s so giant, how come I’ve never heard of it? Because it started in China. Isn’t China better known for tea? Yes, but they have drunk a lot more coffee since Starbucks opened its first outlets there in 1999. Luckin overtook Starbucks as China’s biggest coffee chain in 2023. If Chinese people want Chinese coffee, so be it. It’s a big…
‘Mom, am I the missing twin?’: the story of two babies separated by the Chinese state – and their emotional reunion
One night in September 2009, a widowed mother in Texas named Marsha was up late at her kitchen table, scrolling through correspondence, when she opened an email that would change her family’s life. It was from an acquaintance who was sharing a newspaper article – as it happens, an article I’d written from China – about government officials who had snatched children from impoverished families to supply the lucrative adoption market. The article featured an interview with a nine-year-old girl speaking wistfully about her identical twin who had been taken…
The sweet story of how a chance meeting led to Australia’s ‘old baby cake’ going viral on Chinese social media
When Paul Adam sees a long queue forming in front of his patisserie in the northern suburbs of Sydney, “That’s when I know I’m going to start working hard,” he says. In the weeks since one of his cakes went viral across several Chinese social media platforms, that has been nearly every day. The gluten-free hazelnut, meringue and chocolate mousse cake, with lorikeets stencilled in icing sugar on top, is, by Adam’s estimation, “only a cake” but it seems to mean much more to the customers queuing for it, some…