Breasts are among the most talked about and medically researched parts of the human body, yet many of us are embarrassed to discuss our breast health openly. 

Allure Perspectives, a new podcast hosted by Allure editor-in-chief Jessica Cruel, spends its first season exploring how breasts intersect with beauty, health, identity, sexuality, and culture. Episodes feature Olivia Munn on the test she says to take even if your mammogram is clear, sex educator Ericka Hart on reclaiming her body after breast cancer, and a Beverly Hills surgeon on why GLP-1s are driving a surge in breast lifts. All episodes available now.

Listen wherever you get podcasts.

My fiftieth country was Ukraine, right before the war started. There was an “America” festival in Kyiv that weekend: Chicago hotdogs, New York dogs, a crowd singing Backstreet Boys louder than any karaoke bar in the US. I have never met people who loved America more. I stood there with mustard and sauerkraut on my hand thinking, fifty.

Somewhere around country thirty, travel had stopped being travel and turned into a scavenger hunt. New stamp, new city, new hit. The dopamine. My ADD brain treated the departures board like a slot machine. Pull the lever, feel the surge, pull again.

The surge is a big part of what drives wanderlust, and a big part of what drives falling in love, which is why the two get tangled so often on the road. Dopamine doesn’t care whether the novelty is a person or a place. It just wants new.

I fell in love on a train from Moscow to St. Petersburg because I couldn’t afford sheets and a stranger paid for mine, and then we adjourned to the dining car for vodka. I spent a perfect day at Tivoli with a Danish girl I’d met in an aquarium in Monaco. If you’ve spent any time in hostels or coworking spaces, you know a hundred versions of this story: the German and the Australian in Ubud, the pair in Mexico City getting by on salsa and Google Translate. Every one of them feels like fate. Every one of them is chemistry.

The opposite of déjà vu is jamais vu: something you know well suddenly feels foreign. It usually lasts only seconds. Now imagine it as a permanent setting, every street, every face, every meal. New forever.

Wide is fun. Deep is meaningful.

Dopamine works like an invitation. For years I collected invitations and never went to the party. In love, the first rush fades, and what replaces it is slower, the kind that builds instead of spikes. The first glimpse of the Eiffel Tower is electric. But a friend is better than Paris.

A friend in Paris? Better still. (Bonjour, Guillaume.)

So I restructured how I travel, three ways. Go somewhere old, a place that shaped you, back to your roots. Go somewhere new: fine, feed the dopamine, it has earned a meal now and then. And go see friends you haven’t seen in years.

So, Panama. I told you I stopped at fifty, and here I am adding fifty-one.

I visited the Panama Canal and was duly impressed, but that wasn’t why I came. I came for my Colombian visa. This is the kind of last-minute thing that comes up when you live abroad and try to keep your paperwork correct. My visa needed renewing, and somewhere between the official translators, an apostille (international notary) service in Los Angeles, my attorneys, me (most likely me), and the Colombian government, one page of one document out of a dozen plus went missing. My renewal application was deemed “incomplete.” I had a 30-day grace period to fix.

We resubmitted, but the 30 days ran out. The one move left was a border run: leave the country and come back as a tourist, which resets me to a 90-day tourist visa and buys time for the renewal to go through. It’s legal, and Colombian immigration had no problem.

The easiest place to do it is Panama. Medellín to Panama City is the Southwest Airlines Houston-to-Dallas run of Latin America: flights all day, up and down, one hour one minute, barely enough time for the crew to get everyone a cup of coffee or water or, because it’s Copa, pineapple juice.

So a paperwork errand became country fifty-one. That doesn’t break the rule. Panama is the “somewhere new” on my own list.

I’ve been in Medellín seven years now. Nothing about this spikes dopamine. All of it is why I’m happier at fifty countries, parked, than I was at thirty-five countries, sprinting.

Well, now 51. And so once you got 51… here we go again.

Don’t follow my example. Skip the scavenger hunt phase if you can. If you’re a nomad, pick a place and go deep: learn the language, get out of the expat bubble, become a regular somewhere. Fall in love, get your heart broken, do it again, but at some point let one of those sparks turn into an actual hearth-filled fire.

Every Uber I called arrived in about a minute, and that alone made this hotel easy to love. The rooms are big, the views over the city make you want to leave the blackout curtains un-blacked out, and the bed is both huge and cozy. I paid about $145 a night and got more out of it than that number suggests.

Guests on TripAdvisor rate it 4.5 out of 5 across more than 2,000 reviews. They praise the breakfast, the staff and the clean, spacious rooms, and there’s a heated indoor pool and a spa. The complaints are small and consistent: some wear and tear, slow elevators, and hot water that can be inconsistent.

My main complaint was how many people in a hotel are going to other floors to visit friends. Ugh, how annoying. That’s TWO stops on my way to the lobby. But I tried to hold back my USA efficiency and realize Latin culture involves lots of going to friends’ and family’s rooms. And that is probably just a better way to live.

Verdict: a comfortable, easy base with great rooms and amenities and kind service. The housekeeper was as sweet as can be, and the valet basically walked me to the convenience store when I didn’t understand his directions on the twisty streets of Panama City.

🇨🇦 Canada - Express Entry reforms took effect November 3, adding up to 150 points for high-wage occupations and dropping the LMIA requirement for job offers.

🇹🇭 Thailand - Colombians and Mexicans could get visa-free entry back, with a proposal heading to a review committee on November 9 and nothing approved yet.

🇬🇧 United Kingdom - The Autumn Budget gives the highest-skilled sponsored workers up to six months to find a new sponsor, though there is still no investor visa route and most changes wait until 2027.

🇰🇷 South Korea - New E-7-4 skilled worker changes promise a defined path to F-5 permanent residency, though no start date has been announced.

🇺🇸 U.S. (Inbound) - DHS suspended visa-free travel to the Northern Mariana Islands for Chinese nationals, who now need a B-1 or B-2 visa.

Check your target country’s official immigration page for exact income thresholds and application windows. They move quickly.

Ann Patchett is a masterful storyteller, and what gets me is how plain she keeps it. There are barely any words in this book longer than two syllables. You never notice, because the story never lets you. If you want a masterclass in storytelling, if you want to land right on tears at the very last line of the book that the whole thing has built you towards, this is for you.

This is small and big. This is a why and then an oh I get it. A how will this come together and then an omg.

Daphne and her husband are walking through the Met when he spots a man following them. She takes a moment to place him. It's Eddie, her former stepfather, whom her mother cut out of their lives after a car accident when Daphne was nine. Her younger sister starts pulling the rest of the story loose, a piece at a time, and a horse named Whistler sits in the middle of it.

It reminded me of John Irving, his big, tangled families, his culture and history. Yet it does not need the shock Irving sometimes reaches for to keep you hooked.

I recommend the audiobook because the author read it herself and she might as well be a voice actor it is so committed and visceral.

Six stars. Even writing this and remembering the book brings tears. The good kind.

Buy here.

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See you next week. Don’t Escape. Design.