Justin Bieber, Royal Plowing Day, and Spring Break Phnom Penh…

1. Spring Break Phnom Penh - After five days of liver destruction, I’m finally back at home trying to detox my body. There was a time when I could bounce back pretty quickly after a few nights of drinking, but apparently those days are long gone. I’m really getting too old for this.

2. Deviated Septum – On top of being a little under the weather from too much alcohol consumption, I also found out yesterday that I have a deviated septum and mild sinus infection. Apparently I’ve had the deviated septum for years, which affects my breathing and helps explain why I’m such a mediocre runner.

Note to all my running friends out there — if you’ve ever beaten me in the past, this is the only reason why.

3. Debauchery - Peace Corps Volunteers “preserving and protecting the Constitution”…

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4. Is Buying Sex Better than Buying a T-Shirt? – Yesterday my friend Corey sent me this Slate.com about the sex industry in Cambodia. The article compares sex work with factory labor and draws some pretty surprising conclusions. Check it out…

So how does pay for factory work compare with pay for sex work? Apparel jobs in Cambodia are not an escalator out of poverty, as Kristof would have it; they’re a treadmill at best. Textile workers earn about 33 cents per hour, lower than anywhere except Bangladesh. Even with significant overtime, monthly pay rarely tops $80. They commute in, sometimes from villages hours away, or live four and five to a room in shanties outside the factory gates. A study by two International Labor Organization specialists said that apparel workers were rarely able to save any money, and few had “the opportunity to advance their career, either in the garment industry or outside.”

Apparel workers are on their feet all day, other than for a short lunch break, and they work such long hours that they see little sunlight. The plants are hot and noisy, with the steady drone of the machines making conversation impossible. They are subject to strict workplace rules (i.e., asking permission to go to the bathroom), are pressured to meet high quotas, and, despite Cambodia’s “sweatshop-free” reputation, growing numbers work on short-term contracts that deprive them of basic labor rights.

Hostesses also work long hours—typically late afternoon until 2 a.m.—but they usually eat at least one meal at work, hang out with friends, and watch television when business is slow. Some but by no means all of the hostesses whom I spoke with had sex with customers, and they were free to decline offers (though accepting clearly increases pay).

I’m not touting sex work as an attractive profession. HIV is an obvious risk, and prostitutes are subject to violence by customers, police, and at “rehabilitation centers.” Most of the women I met ordered juice when they were with me, but some drink either at their own initiative or the insistence of customers. Sex work is just as much of a dead-end job as apparel work; when women get older, they either find something else to do or move from clubs and bars to the street. Still, 20 percent of Cambodian sex workers interviewed for the 2009 U.N. report said they took their jobs because of good working conditions or relatively high pay. (Fifty-five percent did so due to “difficult family circumstances.” About 3.5 percent were lured, cheated, or sold into sex work.)

“A lot of women no longer want apparel jobs,” Tola Moeun, a labor-rights activist with a group called the Community Legal Education Center, told me. “When prostitution offers a better life, our factory owners need to think about more than their profit margins.”

You can read Ken Silverstein’s entire article at Slate.com: Is Buying Sex a Better Way to Help Cambodian Women Than a T-Shirt?

5. Happy Royal Plowing Ceremony – Every year, right around the beginning of the rainy/rice-growing season, Cambodian’s celebrate the Royal Plowing Ceremony. During the ceremony two royal oxen are offered plates of food, including rice, corn, green beans, sesame, fresh-cut grass, water, and whisky. Depending on what the oxen eat, monks then predict which crops will have a good year and which won’t. It’s kind of like the Cambodian version of Groundhog’s Day.

Anyway, today was Royal Plowing Ceremony and according to the internets, the royal oxen went for the green beans and corn. So if any of you out there are farmers, you might want to reconsider your crop selection this year…

6. Quote of the Week - “Almost one quarter of children below the age of 6 in the United States were in poverty in 2009. That number had been increasing over the years before that.  Think about it. One in four children in the richest country in the world are in poverty. The next most prevalent group was children 6-18. Think about that as we talk about cutting Medicaid, which covers one third-of children… ” (The Incidental Economist)

7. Bieber Fever – I know this is going to sound strange and I’ll probably regret saying this later, but I just finished watching the Justin Bieber movie, Never Say Never and I honestly really liked it. As someone who has been out of the country for a while and missed this entire cultural phenomenon, it was interesting to see what’s behind the craze. And as much as I thought the kid would annoy me, he’s pretty hard not to like.

Have any of you see it? What did you think?  

8. Advice for Young Journalists – Nate Silver, who writes the FiveThirtyEight blog at NY Times.com (one of my favorite blogs) delivered a speech at Colombia School of Journalism last week. In the speech he gives some good advice for young journalists. I liked this piece of advice the best… 

The first skill is simply in learning how to read. In developing a good media consumption diet. One of the bigger mistakes that people make when they think about writing a story is that they assume that it literally consists of typing ‐‐ or, absent that, staring at a blinking cursor on a computer screen. But really, that should normally come close to the end of your process. The third step is writing. The second step is thinking. And the first step is normally going to be reading. What should you be reading? Everything. This is the flip‐side of cheap content: you have access to more information than ever before. Read blogs. Newspapers. Trade magazines. Books. Interview transcripts. Financial filings. And this is an important one that a lot of journalists miss: academic papers, which are more accessible than ever on sources like Google Scholar. Some academics don’t know how to write, but a few of them do, and there’s a lot of wisdom there once you get used to parsing through the language.

You should read broadly ‐‐ from people who come from different backgrounds and different sides of the political argument. You should read critically. Don’t assume that someone is right just because they have a big credential attached. There have been a number of studies ‐‐ including some I’ve conducted myself ‐‐ which have demonstrated that a group of four political pundits is often no more insightful than a barbershop quartet. A high percentage of what passes for news is really just filler. But definitely spend a lot of time reading. Don’t feel guilty if you spend the first 90 minutes of your day drinking coffee and reading blogs ‐‐ it’s your job. Your ratio of reading to writing should be high.

(Read More Advice from Nate Silver at the NYT’s FiveThirtyEight Blog)

9. Say it Ain’t So – If George Hincapie, (who Lance Armstrong said was “like a brother”) claims that he saw Armstrong use performance enhancing drugs, I think Lance’s days as an innocent man are numbered. Yet it’s hard for me to believe anything drug cheat Tyler Hamilton says. Just watch him in this clip: 60 Minutes. So strange.

10. More Pictures – And finally a few more pictures from the K3′s final Phnom Penh weekend…

Have a great weekend! I’ll be back again on Monday.