Though mixed martial arts has successfully peeled away fans from boxing (a sport that’s lost any compelling champions and much of its dignity) and WWE (a “sport” that’s always existed in quotation marks) it’s had trouble shaking its reputation as “human cockfighting.”

While boy-crazy American girls labor at sophistication, Japanese women of marriageable age tend to act like girls, and are popularly called burikko—“pretending kids.”

the land rolls gently, so that, upon cresting a low rise or passing a copse of wind turbines, you suddenly spot a lot full of lorries or a complex of gigantic sheds.

I began to consider the contradictions in these descriptions: that although Mastroianni, as commodity, was often marketed as the quintessential Italian man, his characters betrayed instead a much more conflicting image of Italian masculinity than the category of Latin lover allowed.