The WashPost (a/k/a the WP or WaPo) published two terrific Blaine stories this weekend.
Today he has an entertaining, creepy piece about the plastic surgery capital of Asia: Seoul, South Korea. The headline is "Assembly Required" and here is the lede.
"With wide eyes, sleek cheekbones and delicately upturned noses, the soap stars look alluringly and somewhat numbingly alike -- thanks to their own visits to the scalpel-wielding wizards whose gleaming clinics are clustered in a part of this city called "Makeover Town."..."
Yesterday (Saturday), Blaine had a story about Billy's Bootcamp, an exercise fad in Japan that has earned an aging American exercise guru more than $120 million, in a country where women and men are already shockingly thin.
Here are some choice grafs:
"Feel the power!" commands Blanks, who first felt the power of infomercials in the 1990s, when TV spots for his "Tae Bo total body fitness system" made him gobs of money and helped him land appearances on "ER" and "The Oprah Winfrey Show."
"Blanks has made himself into a household name here by tapping into two lucrative streams that flow from the modern Japanese psyche: an unselfconscious passion for fads and a self-conscious concern about being overweight...."
Stories like these set Blaine apart as a newspaper writer in America, not just because they are fun to read but because he identifies and wittily explains the social contexts that give birth to trends like these. Okay, so I'm his wife, but I also know what makes a good story even better.
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