Advertisers and marketers spend millions of dollars trying to get inside women's minds--for good reason. Female consumers are responsible for buying or influencing the purchase of 85% of all goods and services nationwide. Now Mary Lou Quinlan, former CEO of ad agency N.W. Ayer, has produced Just Ask a Woman, a breezy distillation of 3,000 "listening interviews" about women's purchasing decisions. Among her insights: Men move quickly in and out of a store. Women notice everything about a shopping experience--and ...

As a divorced woman over 35, I'm well aware that my chances of marrying again are roughly equal to the probability of my being taken hostage in a terrorist incident. O.K., I know that statistic has been debunked, but from where I sit, it still feels true. Ten years after my divorce, I'm beginning to think I might actually prefer being taken hostage to any more dating. "So," I'd say to Osama bin Laden, "you come here often?" Dating ...

On the one-year anniversary of a bloody confrontation between Red Shirt protesters and Thai government security forces that left scores dead and Bangkok in flames, the opposition Pheu Thai party listed 10 Red Shirt leaders among its candidates for parliament in national elections scheduled for July 3. But the controversy over Red Shirt leaders running for office was overshadowed by the party's choice for its lead candidate: Yingluck Shinawatra, who Pheu Thai hopes will become Thailand's first ...

Stepping up the attackSometimes it seems that success fathers its own problems. In its campaign to hook smuggled drugs, the Reagan Administration has claimed some impressive catches: since establishing a regional interdiction center in South Florida in March 1982, it says that cocaine and marijuana seizures there are up 54% and 23% respectively, drug arrests have risen by 27%, and the street value of intercepted dope amounts to around $5 billion. Smugglers, however, have risen to the challenge by trafficking in smaller, harder-to-detect loads and by moving ...

With the announcement of national elections on July 3, Thailand's Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva has placed his fate in the hands of the voters, and put the country's developing democracy to what may prove to be a perilous test. At 8 a.m. Tuesday morning, parliament was officially dissolved after 30 months under Abhisit which were marked by bloody protests, economic crisis and deepening social and political polarization. The elections will be Thailand's second since a bloodless military ...

Li Li has lost exact count of how many men she has bedded, but she knows the number is far above 100. "I don't keep statistics," says the former journalist, 27. But she isn't averse to kissing and telling. For the past couple of years, Li has kept a blog--written under the pen name Muzi Mei--that has chronicled everything from her penchant for orgies and Internet dating to her skepticism toward marriage when it means staying faithful to one man. ...

Men in border-patrol caps tackle a young Mexican to the ground amid jagged rocks and cacti. "You need papers to come to this country. This is not a game!" shouts one agent as he yanks the man's arms behind his back, almost tearing them from his shoulders. It looks like a scene on the U.S. border that would get human rights groups yelling. But actually, it is a game, and it takes place in the mountains of ...

Fresh from Ellis Island, Stavros gets a job shining shoes at Grand Central Terminal. It is the last scene of Elia Kazan's film America, America, the story of a young Greek's fierce determination to immigrate to America. Quickly, but as casually as an afterthought, a young black man, also a shoe shiner, enters and tries to solicit a customer. He is run off the screen -- "Get out of here! We're doing business here!" -- and silently disappears. This interloper ...

With 85 million baby boomers and 50 million Gen Xers, there is already a yawning generation gap among American workers--particularly in their ideas of work-life balance. For baby boomers, it's the juggling act between job and family. For Gen X, it means moving in and out of the workforce to accommodate kids and outside interests. Now along come the 76 million members of Generation Y. For these new 20-something workers, the line between work and home doesn't really exist. They ...

A fellow at New York City's Weill Cornell Medical Center, Dr. Sam Parnia is one of the world's leading experts on the scientific study of death. Last week Parnia and his colleagues at the Human Consciousness Project announced their first major undertaking: a 3-year exploration of the biology behind "out-of-body" experiences. The study, known as AWARE , involves the collaboration of 25 major medical centers through Europe, Canada and the U.S. and will examine some 1,500 survivors of cardiac arrest. TIME spoke with ...