I am a 27-year-old transplant from Ann Arbor, Michigan. I run a creative arts program in Richmond, California, live with my best friend in Oakland and have a wonderful group of friends. I like to think that I have reached a point where I am super comfortable with myself and secure in who I am. Despite all of this I find that I am obsessed with checking my Facebook. It’s like a sick addiction, this need to stay updated on everyone's lives, including people I barely know or care about.

In Asia, there's an ongoing irony that deepens as the natural world dwindles to the size of a parking lot. Wild animals, once revered and assigned all kinds of spiritual meaning, are increasingly ending up as the main entree. But nowhere is the irony as deep as it is in Thailand, where the regal elephant is now being served up alongside the tiger: on a fanciful diner's plate.

People in China traditionally head home for the lunar New Year holiday, marking one of the largest annual human migrations on the planet. This year, however, a growing number are opting to travel abroad, bringing in new streams of tourism revenue to destinations in the Bay Area and across the country.

Colorblind racism is the new normal in American conservative political thought. Well after the election of the nation's first African-American president, in 2012 Republican candidates are using egregious signals and dog whistles to incite racial divisiveness as an effective tool for political gain. But when confronted about the nature of their offensive rhetoric, the answer is either an innocuous denial or dismissive retort.

“America is back,” President Obama said in his 2012 State of the Union address. That sounds muscular, very Schwarzenegger-sque. But America’s new avatar is a little different from old Uncle Sam. In 2009 in his first State of the Union, President Barack Obama said “We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before … It is time for America to lead again.” What a difference one term in office makes.

Tareq, a Syrian American graphic designer living in Silicon Valley, says his life has “completely changed 100 percent over the past year,” a change he credits to protests in Egypt’s Tahrir Square exactly one year ago today. That date has since been enshrined as the beginning of the Arab Spring. That singular event launched a wave of protests, beginning in Tunisia and rapidly spreading across the region, culminating in an 18-day rally that drew on Egyptians of all stripes and from all corners who descended on Tahrir and eventually succeeded in ending Mubarak’s 30-year rule.

Mitt Romney made his first attempts to gain critical support from Latino voters this month, but failed to confront his own negative record on issues of high priority to Latino voters. During a primary race stop in New Hampshire Jan. 9, he spoke of the need to "convince more Latino Americans to vote Republican" if the GOP wants to be competitive in November against the Democrats and Barack Obama, who is already campaigning for re-election.

Once in a while tigers make international news, like the white tiger in Las Vegas that mauled illusionist Roy Horn of Siegfried & Roy, or the one that killed a teenager at the San Francisco Zoo. Most of the time, though, the news is about tigers being eaten by man. The latest involves a restaurateur in Hanoi arrested for selling tiger meat. She has been arrested before and served time in jail, but the trade proves too lucrative – $1,000 per 100 grams of tiger meat -- to give up, especially now that there are but a few tigers left in the wild. 

To anyone who grew up in the Cold War, the rhetoric of the Republican Party’s 2012 presidential candidates is strangely familiar. The United States, they warn, is threatened by an alien ideology. What’s startling is that the bogeyman this time around is not resurgent and increasingly hostile Russia, but Western Europe – Washington’s closest and most steadfast ally since the end of World War II.

Ever since the colonial riot of 1776, upper caste Britons have enjoyed imagining us Yanks as poorly educated, uncouth, and badly tailored speakers of preposterously accented English. Since Eisenhower won World War II, our comeback was simple enough: What of it, you buck-toothed bunch of post-imperial toffee snouts? We’ve got money, movies, jazz and practically all the big guns.