KOH PHANGAN, Thailand— “HELLOOO, FULL MOON PARTY!”

KOH PHANGAN, Thailand—
“HELLOOO, FULL MOON PARTY!” the touts holler.
Welcome to Koh Phangan… I guess. The host of tuk-tuk drivers and solicitors who await the tourist ferry-load arriving every hour make no mention of the actual island. It’s all about the party. Or rather, parties. Every night.
The next greeting is a giant billboard that warns, “MARIJUANA AND MAGIC MUSHROOMS ARE ILLEGAL IN THAILAND.” Bottom-right is a photograph intended to terrify anyone fresh off the boat: a white-haired foreigner, eyes blacked out, seated before a bunch of cops. Oddly, one policeman flashes a sinister grin.
Minutes later, our minivan filled with backpackers bounces down the 10-kilometer road toward Haad Rin, where the party happens. Most passengers are carrying coffin-sized luggage and look weary. Where’s a copy of the Daily Mail with the latest about some dead Brit? These kids surely need to be warned.

A sign greeting tourists fresh off the boat warns against drug use. Photo by Robert Foyle Hunwick.
Koh Phangan’s Full Moon Party long ago lost its original innocence, devolving into a mess of drunken foreigners cramming onto a once-beautiful beach to celebrate nothing more than the party itself. But in recent years, things have gotten much worse. There have been rapes, fatal accidents, suicides, and gang-related murders. “In the nine months I lived there, one guy I admired hung himself, while another died drunk-driving his motorbike,” a former expat told me. Meanwhile, the local environment has been decimated. In fact, one’s first taste of the island pleasures that await can be found in the water itself, which glistens with oil and plastic.
Yet most visitors are blasé about it. “If you’re a girl walking down the beach, you get this all the time,” a British voice in the minivan drawls to her Danish companion, making a firm, pinching motion. “My friend gets drunk and throws up… then she’s fine again,” another brays cheerfully.
It’s nearly 3 o’clock in the afternoon, hours before action time, where I might find, as a disgusted Mail reported, “naked couples bobbing up and down in the water,” a “sordid scene… lit by a beautiful, white full moon,” “a sign saying ‘F*** me,’ ” and “[h]ard drugs.”
This, supposedly, is the best party in Asia.
On an island where nothing much happened for hundreds of years, the culture soon celebrated any excuse for a bacchanal
It wasn’t always like this. The origins of the Full Moon Party on Koh Phangan, which is about 90 percent dense jungle with some gorgeous beaches, are unclear. “The Full-Moon Party started in 1987 or 1988, nobody really knows,” the island’s official guidebook unhelpfully notes, and almost everyone on Koh Phangan has an equally vague explanation for why 30,000 people converge here every month.
The myth is that a farewell party for a dozen tourists somehow mutated into a phenomenon that’s now the island’s virtual raison d’être. The facts are less tidy, but more interesting. They reach back to the end of the Cold War, where on a remote island, flower-power idealists with Indian monikers muttered about Shiva over some bongos. The waves then were said to sparkle with phosphorescence under a blue moonlight. (Thirty years later, phosphorescence sells for a buck a bottle and no one cares about Vishnu.)
Electricity hadn’t arrived when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Instead, on idyllic Koh Samui, just 13 kilometers from Koh Phangan, the waxing moon brought respite from the ferocious packs of feral dogs and knife-toting muggers who otherwise roamed the darkness. According to Colin Hinshelwood, a Scot who attended the original gatherings, the arrival of power changed everything. For Samui’s foreign collective, electricity was more colonialist expansionism. They looked across the Thai Gulf to a dark, unknown bay where people could continue living unfettered by capitalism: Haad Rin.
Back then, there was “[n]ot much alcohol at all; certainly no buckets,” Hinshelwood writes. Instead, hed kee kwai—buffalo-dung mushrooms—were chewed around the bonfire and nights ended with naked dancing and free love. Soon, Swedish organizers were selling acid to the new arrivals and it was just a few more months before “a gang of Phangan locals chased them off the beach with machetes, after stealing their drugs, of course.”
Later came Ecstasy and electro, Lonely Planet, and what friends back in England called gap-year “wow-yeahs”—Trustafarian types who couldn’t stop muttering about “the experience.” Around Haad Rin, though, local fishermen were experiencing getting strong-armed off their land by mafia-backed mainlanders with a nose for exploitation. On an island where nothing much happened for hundreds of years, the culture soon absorbed nearly everything and everyone, celebrating any excuse for a bacchanal—Half Moon Party, Jungle Party, Midnight Party, Waterfall Party, Boat Party, Solstice Party. The economy, meanwhile has become hopelessly corrupt, urging visitors to join the celebration immediately as they dock.

Why Are We Grossed Out by Women With Armpit Hair?

Social scientists will try to measure anything, it seems, and in the most recent issue of Psychology of Women Quarterly, a professor at Arizona State has published a paper that attempts to quantify the disgust women feel with regard to body hair – their own, and that of other women. The scholar, named Breanne Fahs, conducted two experiments. In one, she measured women’s responses to the thought of body hair, asking 20 women how they felt about shaving, not shaving, and about other women’s relative hairiness.

Respondents said that shaving was a minor inconvenience and a personal choice, but that overall the idea of body hair was revolting. “I think women who don’t shave are a little gross,” said one interviewee, a 22-year-old Caucasian lesbian. “Because sometimes, like if people don’t shave their entire lives, that’s just a little to much to handle for me. I always shave. I don’t like hair. I shave everything.”

In the next experiment, Fahs gave her own students extra credit if they agreed to grow their armpit and leg hair for ten weeks and keep a journal about it. Boyfriends were furious and mothers disapproving. “I constantly thought about my gross hair,” wrote one participant. “I will never ever show anyone my pit hair,” wrote another. Participants felt or were told that they were gross, disgusting, unclean, sloppy, and “ew.” The paper, which has the alliterative title “Perilous Patches and Pitstaches: Imagined Versus Lived Experiences of Women’s Body Hair Growth,” had a feminist perspective, which was, in the author’s words, to “highlight the invisibility of omnipresent sexism directed toward those who violate practices to ‘maintain’ the female body.” The compulsion to shave, in other words, is an example of how women have internalized patriarchal ideals of femininity.

These experiments are interesting mostly in their small-bore attention to a habit so mundane and so universal that most of us don’t give it a second thought. But if one continues in this vein, and scrutinizes with the seriousness of a scientist an issue usually left to beauty editors and waxing professionals, certain provoking questions arise. In an era of widespread porn, when teenagers shrug at the sight of anuses and scrotums and wide-open vaginas, why is disgust at female armpit hair, an anatomical reality so comparatively innocent, so widespread?

What is the psychological basis of that revulsion, and the corresponding need to cleanse, depilate, purify, denude? Is hygiene really the endgame, here? For bacteria do grow in unwashed armpit hair and they can cause a stink. But the answer is, probably not. Evolutionary psychologists remind me that the emotion of disgust – which protects humans by reminding them not to get too close to things that can carry disease, like excrement or corpses — can be triggered by learned prompts as well, a primitive way of preserving cultural norms or in-group or tribal status (i.e. don’t sleep with or date this or that kind of disgusting person). 

And in the developed West, revulsion at the sight of female armpit hair has to be cultural, because the places that place the highest value on hairlessness are also those where frequent if not daily bathing is routine. Most pits in 21st century America are not carrying harmful or even particularly smelly bacteria, in other words. And all the evidence you need for that is that most men continue to leave their pits au naturel, and no one fears contagion from them.

An investigation into the nature of our collective disgust seems particularly pressing now, three months after Madonna exposed the growth under her arms in a widely retweeted selfie, as summer weekends make the unveiling of America’s armpits ubiquitous. 

So, to start, what is the evolutionary explanation for body hair, particularly in the armpits? Why do humans, who more or less discarded somewhere in the mists of evolutionary time the full suit of hair that blanketed their primate ancestors, retain hair under their arms at all? (Pubic hair has an obvious, protective function, keeping unwanted flotsam from entering sacred zones, but armpits?) And if the hair under one’s arms does have an evolutionary purpose, then what is the psychological  basis of the nearly universal assault against it? In Australia, more than 90 percent of women shave their legs and armpits. In England, 99 percent of women have depilated at some point in their lives. In the U.S., writes Michael Scott Boroughs in 2010 his dissertation for a psychology degree at the University of South Florida, depilation is “so normative that it goes almost unremarked in casual discourse or in the research or casual literature.” Among men, the practice is growing: “data collected from a sample of 118 men at a large southeastern American university resulted in an estimated prevalence of 63.6% for body depilation at one or more body sites.”

There are two main theories about why humans ultimately became hairless. First, because the hair was making us too hot when we foraged for food on the African plains. Second, because ape-like body hair provided a happy haven for vermin, and the bugs were making people sick. Ergo: No hair, no bugs; no bugs, a healthier population. But the hair under our arms, on our legs, and around our genitals persisted, stubbornly announcing its presence around puberty. And something about that hair has disgusted humans for centuries, to the point where religions explicitly command its removal. According to Islamic tradition, the plucking of armpit hair and the shaving of pubic hair is required of an observant Muslim. In Leviticus, a complete body shave is mandated in the treatment of leprosy.

So, humans have a long history of being disgusted at armpit hair even though, in the modern era, that disgust is based more in culture than in any real risk to health. Then what might be its evolutionary purpose? Why didn’t we long ago discard these tufts, along with our tails and the fluff on our shoulders? One theory is that it’s protective against chafing, not unlike a sock or a pair of underwear: “It is probably there by ‘design’ in that it reduces friction between the arm and the torso,” Johan Lundström, a neuroscientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, writes in an email. So that’s useful, though probably not critical in the age of spandex and wicking fabrics.

Here’s the best guess. Armpit hair works as a conveyor of pheromones, those scented molecules that, crucially, abet human mating, by giving each person his or her particular, alluring scent. Armpit hair (and hair around the nipples, and some groin hair) grows atop the sweat glands that produce a body’s natural smells, and it works as a kind of human fragrance diffuser, allowing one’s personal scent to waft into the atmosphere and announce one’s presence (and one’s fertility) to potential mates. “The specific development of hair in these regions (in our otherwise largely naked bodies) is thought to aid the dispersal of odorants in sexually mature humans,” writes Mahmood Bhutta in his 2007 article “Sex and the Nose.”Humans recognize each other by their scent. They can tell, on the basis of scent, whether a sweaty T-shirt belongs to a man or a woman. Women say they feel more relaxed in the presence of male smells. In men, the smell of estrogen lights up an area of the brain that controls erection.

People say body odor matters more than almost anything else when they’re picking sex partners. In a 2001 study published in Evolution and Human Behavior, psychologists found that men and women ranked an attractive body odor at or near the top of the list of other physical traits when selecting a mate. Women put “good smell” above everything else: looks, the sound of their mate’s voice, and the feeling of their mate’s skin. Men put “good smell” second only to looks. Both men and women said they preferred a good natural smell to perfumes or other fragrances.

So if hair conveys smell, and smell is so crucial to mating, then why this insistence on shaving?

The answer, it seems, is embedded deep in the evolutionary nature of disgust. And in the central role sex plays in the evolutionary story. Disgust is a protective reflex, writes Daniel Kelly, author of Yuck! The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust, in an email. “The heart of this particular emotion’s primary job or core mission is to protect us from infectious diseases, and keep us away from the types of critters – microbes and parasites – that transmit them.” Its opposite is pleasure, or attraction. And no human experience evokes more intense pleasure, or disgust, than sex. People are drawn to and repelled by sex and sex acts in equal measure. “It’s always a delicate dance with sex and disgust. Maybe if the underarm hair as mate selection relevant scent carrier idea is right, we’re just seeing another facet of the ongoing back and forth,” Kelly writes.

Evolutionarily speaking, sex is the whole game. Sex with the wrong person can kill you and your genetic line – through disease, infertility, misfortune. With the right person, it can assure that your genes are transmitted to the next generation. Armpit hair signals sex because it grows during puberty and is one of the first signs of maturity (and fertility). And it signals sex because it transmits the scents that lead to mating. It triggers disgust because it reminds humans how dangerous sex can be. And that’s why we shave it off. Because armpit hair betrays the western fantasy about sex, which is that sex is fun, pleasurable, innocent, and inconsequential, a fantasy that elides the evolutionary truth. The revulsion at armpit hair might be evolution’s way of saying "proceed with caution," and its removal one less barrier to cross.

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Kimmel Holds A Bellyflop Competition

Kimmel Holds A Bellyflop Competition

We have a cherished tradition here at the show to ring in the start of summer. Every year we set up an above-ground swimming pool behind our theater. Then we pull a group of confused pedestrians off the street, put them in bathing suits and make them compete in a belly flop contest. Those flops are judged by a celebrity panel, which this year features former Olympian Greg Louganis, Cheryl Burke from "Dancing With The Stars" and "Wipeout" host John Henson.

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You Know You Want To Watch This Cool Dog Eat Corn On The Cob

You Know You Want To Watch This Cool Dog Eat Corn On The Cob

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That's how much parents care about there kids - Nancy Grace Tells Father His Missing Son Has Been Found Alive

That's how much parents care about there kids - Nancy Grace Tells Father His Missing Son Has Been Found Alive

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What to do if police try to search your phone without a warrant

 What to do if police try to search your phone without a warrant

In a profound win for digital privacy rights, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that police officers must obtain a warrant before searching your phone. If they don't, the search is illegal—a violation of the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment.

“Modern cellphones are not just another technological convenience,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in the court's decision. “With all they contain and all they may reveal, they hold for many Americans ‘the privacies of life.’ The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand does not make the information any less worthy of the protection for which the Founders fought.”

For police who feel they need to have access to a suspect's device, Roberts had one simple instruction: “Get a warrant.”

In a perfect world, all 7.5 million sworn police officers in the U.S. would take the court's decision to heart and hustle before a judge to get a warrant before they search anyone's phone.

But let's be realistic—this ruling reverses a five-decades-old interpretation of the law that allowed arresting officers to search suspects’ pockets, phones, and anything else within his or her reach. Not to mention that some cops don't always play by the books. Just because the Supreme Court said police must now change the way they do their jobs doesn't mean they will—or at least not immediately.

So, what is a law-abiding citizen like yourself supposed to do if an officer tries to snoop on your phone without a warrant? Here's what.

Smartphone lockdown

The absolute best way to protect your phone from police inspection is to keep it locked with a passcode, which will keep an officer from rummaging through your Facebook photos as you stand beside him in handcuffs.

“The most simple precaution you can take is to make sure your phone is locked and/or encrypted,” says Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “The police may take your phone, may try to look at it unconstitutionally, but they won't be able to.”

Deny consent, respectfully

If you forgot to lock your phone (or just didn't feel like it), the next step you must take is to “calmly and respectfully tell the officer that his search is in violation of the Constitution under the court's Riley decision,” says Stanley. (Riley v. United States is the name of the court case that triggered this new search warrant rule.)

Stanley suggests that anyone who is arrested “repeatedly” state to the arresting officer and any nearby witnesses, “I do not consent to this search.” By saying this key phrase more than once, you help ensure that “there is no question or ambiguity about whether you've consented” to the search, Stanley adds.

Making your feelings known is vitally important in this situation. And if you leave any room for the officer to legally justify the search, then no warrant is necessary.

“Anytime there's ambiguity,” says Stanley, “you end up in a court fight over whether you did or did not consent. If an officer says, 'I'm going to search your phone now,' and you don't say anything, he's going to argue that he implicitly thought you had consented.

“You don't want to be in a situation where there's any doubt.”

If you’re not under arrest, then definitely don’t consent

The Supreme Court's ruling in Riley specifically addresses searches performed during an arrest. But even if you're not under arrest—say, you just got pulled over for a blown tail light—then you have absolutely no obligation to consent to a search of you phone, your car, or your person. In fact, says Stanley, the police “are even less allowed to search the phone.”

“If they have evidence that you've done something,” says Stanley, “they can bring that evidence to a judge and get a warrant.”

Don’t get physical

If an officer decides to search your phone despite your clear expression that you do not consent, your best option is to let him do it, and leave whatever fight may come to the court room. And whatever happens, says Stanley, “do not physically resist an officer or attempt to physically stop the search.”

“You're in an arrest situation—you have no power. And you're just going to make the situation worse if you try anything like that,” he says. “You basically have to wait for the courts to 'fix' any injustices that have taken place.”

In addition to keeping your hands to yourself, says Hanni Fakhoury, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), you should “certainly take note of who the officers are that are conducting the search and then consult with a lawyer.”

There’s always a catch

Despite the strong privacy protections established in the court's Rileydecision, police still have the right to search your phone without a warrant in a few certain scenarios known as “exigent circumstances.” This includes, for example, the abduction of a child, when police suspect a person is in imminent harm, or “some imminent threat of evidence destruction,” says Fakhoury. “So its not like a carte blanche rule.” In those instances, there's simply not much you can do.

Fortunately for us all, says Stanley, “those kinds of circumstances should be very rare.”

If you have further questions about your rights during encounters with police officers, both the ACLU and the EFF have created handy “Know Your Rights” pages (here and here, respectively) that dive into many of the main questions citizens have about what they can and cannot legally do when confronted by law enforcement.

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Why Does Everyone Look Hotter in Sunglasses?

 

And now, Science of Us attempts to unravel the answers to a summertime question of monumental importance: Why does nearly everyone instantly look more attractive with sunglasses on? 

You know you’re at least a little curious. And so was Vanessa Brown, a senior lecturer of art and design at Nottingham Trent University in the U.K. Her research focuses on the meaning we assign to commonplace, everyday objects, and in an academic book that’s coming out early next year, she explores the cultural and psychological relationship between sunglasses and our modern idea of “cool.” In an email to Science of Us, Brown explained what her research has uncovered about why most of us look better in shades.

Because they really do make your misshapen face look better.Put on a pair of sunglasses, and voilà – instant symmetry! The dark lenses cover up any asymmetrical oddities around your eyes, and research on facial attractiveness shows a clear link between symmetry and our perception of beauty.

As an added bonus, Brown pointed out, sunglasses provide a kind of scaffolding effect, imposing the appearance of an external, extra-chiseled bone structure on top of your relatively softer-featured face. 

Because mystery. Many of the snap judgments we form about people come from looking them in the eyes; shade yours, and you’re instantly a more intriguing presence. “The eyes are such a tremendous source of information — and vulnerability — for the human being,” Brown explained. Eye contact helps us form judgments about someone’s intelligence,confidence, and sincerity, and sunglasses keep us literally in the dark about forming those perceptions about a person. And it works both ways, because the wearer of the sunglasses feels more inscrutable, too. One recent study showed that people who wore sunglasses acted more selfishly and dishonestly than those wearing eyeglasses, which, the researchers argue, suggests that shades delude us into feeling more anonymous, or unknown. 

It's colloquial wisdom that an air of mystery increases sexual desire, andresearch bears that notion out. Think of the common “the thrill is gone” complaint that accompanies the long-term relationship, for one. And one recent study showed that women who were uncertain of a man's feelings toward them ended up reporting more attraction to those men. It's essentially the plot of many a rom-com: We're drawn to the people we can't quite figure out. 

Because of their historical link with edginess and glamour. We take their ubiquity for granted today, but sunglasses are a relatively modern everyday accessory, Brown said. Sales started to pick up in the 1920s, but they didn’t become commonplace until about two decades after that. The way sunglasses were most often used prior to their commercialization helps explain some of their inherent coolness, Brown said, because in their early days sunglasses were primarily used during risky water and snow sports, and were also associated with new technologies like airplane travel, which made them seem “daring and thoroughly modern.”

Soon after that, Hollywood stars of the 1950s and 1960s started wearing sunglasses to defend themselves from being recognized by the public or harassed by paparazzi, whose flashbulbs would often explode violently, sometimes literally in their faces, Brown said. But regardless of practicality, movie stars’ adoption of the accessory cemented the link between sunglasses and glamour.

Also – and this is more from my own personal research than Brown’s — hang-overs. They’re really great for hiding hang-overs. 

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