The New York Times project enabled me to read more about recent articles that I normally would not look at. The topic my group and I chose to write about was fashion. I found many interesting articles and chose one talking about beauty pageants for young girls in France. The French government is looking to make the pageants illegal, charging fines for anyone helping a young girl participate. I found the differences between American culture and French culture truly surprising. Here in America we see shows such as Toddlers and Tiaras that serves as entertainment for a portion of American audiences. It is far from illegal here, but the French Parliament makes a good argument. Beauty pageants may cause self esteem, issues in these young children and try to mold them into a very strict definition of beauty. The topic of fashion was interesting because it is something we as college students are introduced to everyday. Many of us need to keep up with the latest trends and buy the latest handbags, making fashion important to us. It is advertised wherever we go, and learning about it in other places was pretty fascinating.