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They are not blue jeans. They are not slacks. They are not chinos or khakis.

"They're like a jogger," Lee Davis says of his pants, walking through an outdoor mall in Los Angeles called The Grove. He's wearing them with a professional black cardigan over a designer white tee, with a crisp fitted baseball cap and fancy tennis shoes. The pants stand out the most. They fit him impeccably, with clear, tapered lines, and a high-end, light-khaki material that flows luxuriously.

Davis is just one of several male customers at the mall walking through it in sweatpants. He says his cost $195, and that they are worth it.

"They're kind of in between a sweat pant and a dress pant," Davis says. "Denim sometimes can really be looked at as just casual. This makes it a little more dressy, because of the material."

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He and his nearly $200 sweatpants are perhaps the poster child for fashion's latest obsession.

What Is Athleisure?

Davis' sweats are part of a growing trend called "athleisure." Gym clothes are making their way out of the gym and becoming a larger part of people's everyday wardrobes, and becoming a bit fancier in the process. The NDP group says sales of athleisure apparel were more than $35 billion last year, and that athletic apparel now makes up 17 percent of the entire American clothing market.

H&M, Urban Outfitters, Aeropostale and TopShop have all launched athleisure lines. Certain collections have gotten endorsements from celebrities like Kanye West and Beyonce. Chanel even makes a couture sneaker now. The Wall Street Journal reports that some estimates predict the U.S. athletic apparel market will increase by nearly 50 percent by 2020, even as American's participate in fewer sports.

How did all of this happen? Will McKitterick, an analyst with IBIS World says there are two big factors at play in the rise of athleisure: yoga, and the cyclical nature of blue jean sales.

First, McKitterick says, there's been what he calls "a change in what's appropriate to wear." Think yoga pants. Over the last decade or so, women have led this charge, specifically in their embrace of yoga pants outside of yoga studios. Now yoga pants, tights and leggings have moved from the gym to just about everywhere. That only helped make room for men's sweatpants to leave the couch.

McKitterick says declining jean sales are part of the equation as well. Reports say sales of denim in the U.S. were down six percent last fiscal year. "Men, and people more generally, have a lot of jeans," he says. "Jean sales have done really well over the last 10 years, and we've gone through a number of different fads surrounding jeans, perhaps most recently skinny jeans.

"But, fashion denim is cyclical," says McKitterick. "So it seems we're in a downturn period right now, and that's not too surprising coming off the large amount of sales we've seen over the last 10 years."

Athleisure apparel helps fill that void. For what it's worth, McKitterick says jeans have faced competition before, from corduroys in the '70s, and khakis and chinos in the '90s. Jeans bounced back both times.

How Do You Wear Fancy Sweats?

As far as who wears fancy men's sweatpants, Tyler Kantor, store manager of Bonobo's Los Angeles establishment, says it's all types of guys.

"You're going have your fashion forward guy, specifically looking for the jogger type sweat," he says. "And then you have the customer who, it catches their eyes." Kantor says there's a third type of customer who "we get to really guide them towards the sweat and get them out of their comfort zone."

Bonobos sweatpants retail for $98. I tried on a pair at the store, and then bought some for myself. Then I went to an expert for some advice on how to wear them: Robin Ghivan, fashion critic for The Washington Post. She says the particular style of athleisure that gave birth to expensive men's sweats came from city streets.

"It really came out of the idea of streetwear, and the way that so many people who live in urban centers end up essentially carrying their entire day's worth of wardrobe and errand-running material, and half their closet with them sometimes," she said.

"What you often end up with is a guy who is perhaps on his way to the office, but he's gonna stop at the gym beforehand, so he's got on a pair of sweatpants, but maybe he's got blazer over his sweatpants, because he doesn't want to put the blazer in a gym bag. And he's got a parka over the blazer. And maybe instead of wearing his usual workout shoes, he's got on a pair of high-end sneakers. And so you ended up with this kind of [mix-match] of a wardrobe, simply out of necessity and convenience."

But Ghivan admits the look might not appeal to all men. "On the one hand, they are a bit irresistible because they are familiar and they are comfortable, and they represent all the things that we love about clothes," she said. "They make us feel warm and cozy. But there's also this voice in your head telling you, 'these are not appropriate to be worn to the office or in any professional situation.' And I also think there's a part of us that thinks, 'I cannot believe I should spend that much money on sweatpants.'"

Still, she says if men do choose to wear fancy sweats, they should dress them up, not down. "I would not wear them for instance, with a t-shirt. I would wear them with a sport jacket, and maybe a sweater underneath the sport jacket."

Done right, Ghivan says the look "feels very familiar and reassuring, but just makes men look like themselves, just better."

As for me, I wore those Bonobos sweats to work one day. My colleague Travis Larchuk said of my look, "It's like Monet clothes. From far away you look like a put together person. But then close up, you can you can see that you're really schlubbing it up at work."

And maybe, with all of athleisure apparel, that's the point.

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Ride-sharing services are changing the way Americans commute, but just how big their impact is can be gauged by a report released today.

In the first-quarter of 2015, Uber accounted for 46 percent of rides expensed by workers whose employers use Certify, the No. 2 provider of expense-reporting software in North America. Uber's market share in the first quarter of 2014 was 15 percent. Uber's rival Lyft accounted for 1 percent of rides in the first quarter of this year.

At the same time, Certify said, cab, limo and shuttle rides – collectively categorized as taxicab rides — were expensed 53 percent in the first quarter of the year. The figure for the same period in 2014 was 85 percent. Car rentals stayed almost steady in both years: 36 percent in 2015; 39 percent in 2014.

"The business community is looking for value and convenience, and at the same time this is a group that is interested in innovation," Robert Neveu, CEO of Certify, said in a statement. "Ridesharing services are making inroads into corporate budgets because they combine all of those things."

Certify also noted Uber's growth in several cities in the U.S.: In Los Angeles and Washington, it now accounts for nearly half the rides expensed by business travelers, Certify says. In Dallas, it's 56 percent, and in San Francisco, it's 71 percent. Taxis still dominate New York City, the company noted.

One reason could be cost. Certify noted that the average cost per ride of Uber was $31.24; the corresponding figure for taxis was $35.40.

Certify said its report was based on "user data from their cloud-based expense management system."

Uber

President Obama is lobbying hard for a full-fledged nuclear deal with Iran. He hopes to raise the U.S. flag at an embassy in Cuba before he leaves office. He traveled to Myanmar last fall as he moves to normalize relations.

Obama's tenure has been marked by this outreach to pariah states that previous U.S. presidents, Republican and Democrat alike, isolated for decades. It's an approach that springs from his belief that engagement is more likely to encourage good behavior than punitive measures.

It's also a notion still being tested. All these moves are playing out and there's no clear-cut success yet. So far, the president has probably earned at least as much criticism as praise.

But Obama argues that the U.S. is strong enough to take chances and see if these countries are open to his initiatives. He likes to point to instances where countries have simply hunkered down and blamed the U.S. when facing sanctions, embargoes and isolation.

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"The country that is most isolated in the world is North Korea," Obama said in an interview with NPR's Steve Inskeep. "I think it would be hard to argue that, by virtue of the fact that they can't feed their people, and that they are almost entirely cut off from global trade, that that somehow lessened their capacity for mischief and trouble-making."

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Still, many Republicans say the president has offered too many concessions, offering economic relief to Iran, Cuba and Myanmar without insisting on fundamental, irreversible change. Iran could cheat on a nuclear deal. The Castros remain entrenched in Cuba. The former generals in Myanmar, also known as Burma, may have taken off their uniforms, but they still call the shots.

Making His Case For An Iran Deal

The president acknowledges there's no guarantee these countries will respond in the way he hopes. But in making his case for a nuclear deal with Iran, Obama says the U.S. will be better positioned regardless of the path Iran chooses.

"This is a good deal if you think Iran's open to change; it's also a good deal if you think that Iran is implacably opposed to the United States and the West and our values," Obama said in the NPR interview.

"Now, ideally, we would see a situation in which Iran, seeing sanctions reduced, would start focusing on its economy, on training its people, on reentering the world community, to lessening its provocative activities in the region," the president added.

He went on to say, "But the key point I want to make is, the deal is not dependent on anticipating those changes. If they don't change at all, we're still better off having the deal."

The focus will be reaching a final agreement by the end of June. But the negotiations are also seen as a development that could chip away at decades of distrust on other fronts. The U.S. and Iran, for example, share common goals that include defeating the self-declared Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and suppressing the Taliban in Afghanistan.

A New Approach In Cuba

In Obama's view, developing a dialogue can give the U.S. a better feel and understanding of long-standing rivals as opposed to simply trading recriminations from afar.

This was part of his thinking with Cuba, where the president says the U.S. embargo, dating back more than a half-century, has failed and that a new approach is needed.

"Do we have the ability to change the relationship with the United States and Cuba in such a way that it benefits the Cuban people over the long term?" the president told NPR.

Obama concluded, "I don't expect immediate transformation of the Cuban-American relationship overnight, but I do see the possibility — a great hunger within Cuba to begin a change — a process that ultimately, I think, can lead to more freedom and more opportunity."

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This year, the U.S. and Japan mark the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, a bitter time that left deep wounds. In the 1980s, Japan and U.S. were at times economic adversaries, caught up in bilateral trade disputes.

Today, most Americans say they're pleased with the state of U.S.-Japan relations. In a new survey by the Pew Research Center, more than 8 in 10 Americans said they prefer the two nations remain close or get closer. Three-quarters of Japanese surveyed around the same time — in February of this year — say they trust the United States.

Another point of agreement: The rise of China gives both Americans and Japanese some anxiety. Pew surveyed both Americans and Japanese citizens for its latest research and found only 30 percent of Americans and 7 percent of Japanese say they trust China. Sixty percent of Americans said that China's rise as a military and economic power only makes the U.S.-Japanese alliance more important.

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Responses when Japanese were asked, "Which of these characteristics do you associate with American people?" Pew Research Center hide caption

itoggle caption Pew Research Center

Responses when Japanese were asked, "Which of these characteristics do you associate with American people?"

Pew Research Center

Despite American doubts about China as a trading partner, those surveyed indicated that more young Americans think it's important to have strong economic ties with China than to have them with Japan.

Still, the study authors note, "The future of U.S.-Japan relations will, in large part, be a product of bilateral economic interaction."

Japan is currently the United States' fourth-largest trading partner. And Tokyo and Washington are in the process of negotiating deeper trade and investment bonds between the two nations, an effort that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will be trying to shore up when he visits Washington later this month.

What We Think Of Each Other

The Pew study contains all sorts of interesting data about how much the countries know about each other.

For example, only about 10 percent of American surveyed said they know anything about tensions over "comfort women" — women from China and Korea and other Asian countries forced to provide sex to Japanese army soldiers during World War II. This issue still receives extensive coverage from where I write this post, in South Korea.

There's also the matter of what characteristics Americans associate with Japanese, and vice versa. The chart here shows you the results, which seem to align with stereotypes — Americans see the the Japanese as honest and hardworking, while Japanese overwhelmingly find Americans to be "inventive," but not particularly hardworking.

Only 19 percent of Americans associate the word "selfish" with the Japanese, while about half the Japanese surveyed see Americans as "aggressive" and "selfish."

And when it came time for free association in the survey, Americans overwhelmingly said they think of "food" or "sushi" when they think of Japan.

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Pew Research Center

Pew