I want to ride my bicycle

Megan McArdle asks, Why is it that in Vietnam girls wear the traditional ao dai as part of their school uniform, and boys just wear a shirt and pants and a tie? "Surely," she wonders, "the men would look equally fetching in whatever the Vietnamese elite males wore 200 years ago?"

In response, I submit the above photo from the Apec summit in Hanoi. Obviously, your average Vietnamese man would make this look work much better than George W. or Putin do. Still, I think it's fair to surmise that the ao dai just looks better on women than it does on men:

Incidentally, one of the things I really came to appreciate when I lived in Vietnam and saw schoolgirls riding their bikes around town in their pristine white ao dai is how egalitarian a costume the ao dai is. You get all the flattering and graceful benefits of wearing a dress without any of the annoying physical restrictions, because the silk shift has a split down the side and you're wearing silk trousers underneath. The public schools in New Zealand, where I grew up, all require students to wear uniforms, and I remember riding my bike to school in a skirt on windy days and being very grumpy about the impracticality of the whole thing.

Photo of cyclists from Flickr user thaths used under a Creative Commons license.

New soldiers

Head over to the Washington City Paper and take a look at this photo essay by Darrow Montgomery featuring new recruits to the armed forces. The implied question is, Who is signing up for the military in the middle of the Iraq War? Here are a few answers from the accompanying text by Jason Cherkis (but follow the link and listen to the subjects speak for themselves in the audio-visual slide show):

* From a 21-year-old Navy recruit: “'I can’t swim...That might be a challenge.…I know it’s awkward. I didn’t want to go in the Air Force. I figured, ‘Hey, I’ll learn how to swim."
* From a 17-year-old who one day hopes to be a broadcast journalist: “Don’t know what to expect. But after basic training, it looks like smooth sailing.”
* A 23-year-old antiwar Duke graduate with a degree in Middle Eastern history and a minor in Arabic is shipping out with a copy of Tom Ricks's Fiasco in his luggage.
* And an 18-year-old whose job will include interrogrations and who knows she might be asked to use torture: "I’m not really concerned with it... If I have to do it, I will. Hopefully I won’t have to do anything like torturing anybody. If I have to do that to do my job, it will just come along. If it’s to help protect someone else, then yeah."

Jenna v. Chelsea!

My esteemed colleague T.A. Frank is backing Jenna. Why? Well, while Jenna has been assiduously working to erase our memories of her hard-drinking, thong-baring youth with a Unicef internship and a new book, what has Chelsea been up to?

"Chelsea's post-9/11 resume has consisted of stints as a McKinsey consultant and as an investment analyst at Avenue Capital, a hedge fund run by the nuns of Calcutta. Oh, sorry-- make that Clinton donor Marc Lasry... Quoth the Times: 'Friends say financial independence is important to Ms. Clinton; she may improve on her low- six-figure McKinsey salary by hundreds of thousands of dollars.'
[snip]
Chelsea didn't exactly spend her Oxford days tending to the world's unfortunates, either: Among the events she attended were a Versace couture show in Paris (sitting next to Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow), a ball thrown by Sir Elton John, and a film premiere with Paul McCartney. Nor did she join her British celebrity friends in visiting landmine amputees, unless the amputees happened to be holed up at Oscar de la Renta's Dominican villa. In New York, Chelsea has befriended celebrities like Tara Reid (who, to be fair, may actually qualify as a public service cause) and become a regular at establishments like Schiller's and Bungalow 8. In short, while Jenna has used her celebrity--at least in part--to help impoverished children, Chelsea has used her celebrity to get herself good tables at Nobu."

Read the rest here.