Pacific Standard July-August 2013 Cover

About John Gravois

John Gravois is an editor at Pacific Standard magazine.

The Shoppers of Babel

May 9, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
shoppers-babel

We live in a world of global brands but local tastes. Arabs tend to drink their tea slowly; Indians load theirs with spices and sugar. So Lipton ships a different optimized formula to each, under its standard yellow label. The Earth may seem united by loyalty to Coca-Cola, but Coke famously tailors sweetness to different regions. The world of consumption is still a Balkanized place. If you want to see these divergent proclivities in all their finely segmented glory, spend some time at the Dubai International Airport. The world’s third busiest air hub, Dubai boasts the most lucrative and ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, May-June 2013
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The Last Word on ‘Accidental Racist’: Brad Paisley Probably Isn’t Talking to You

April 15, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
paisley-response

In case you missed it, last week the country music star Brad Paisley came to the attention of a whole bunch of folks who don’t ordinarily write about country music, thanks to his new song “Accidental Racist.” A crossover hit? Not exactly. Paisley’s song—a duet with LL Cool J—has been the subject of heaping ridicule and indignation for its, well, accidental racism. Or so the charge goes. In the song, Paisley’s narrator walks into a Starbucks wearing a Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt with a Confederate flag on it, and then, in a kind of epistolary reverie, addresses the (presumably ... Read More

More like this: Culture
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Hurricane Sandy and the Presidential Election

October 26, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

An October surprise is usually something ginned up by a political campaign, but this year it seems that mother nature has one up her sleeve, in the form of Hurricane Sandy. What effect might this have on the election? Here are two data points that nature's oppo researchers might have considered. According to a historical analysis by the political scientists Christopher H Achen and Larry M Bartels, fluke natural disasters--droughts, flu epidemics, even shark attacks--tend to damage an incumbent by association: We find that voters regularly punish governments for acts of God, including ... Read More

More like this: Politics, The 101
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A Genealogy of the “Makers/Takers” Theory of America

September 20, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

The Mitt Romney video you've probably heard about—the one where he talks about the 47 percent of Americans "who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it"—has certainly not suffered a lack of commentary. But I can't resist linking to a particularly clear-headed intellectual history, written by the Roosevelt Institute's Mark Schmitt, of the broad view Romney is laying out here. The makers/takers theory went ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, Politics, The 101
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Cilantro Hatred Explained by Modern Science

September 12, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

But not, according to your coriander-loving correspondent, excused: Julia Child loathed the stuff, one in six Nature staff (informally surveyed) says it tastes of soap, and a popular website collects haiku poems denouncing it. Now, researchers are beginning to identify genetic variants behind the mixed reception for the herb Coriandrum sativum, which North American cooks know as cilantro, and their British counterparts call coriander. A genetic survey of nearly 30,000 people posted to the preprint server arXiv.org this week has identified two genetic variants linked to perception of ... Read More

More like this: The 101
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Is America’s ‘Strategic Pivot’ Towards China Premature?

September 10, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

In the cover story of our inaugural issue back in April, we took note of the Obama administration's strategic pivot towards Asia and the commensurate shift away from our entanglements in the Middle East and South Asia. In a new essay in the Journal Society, the communitarian sociologist Amitai Etzioni takes a dim view of this strategic move: The shift reminds one of the old parable about a child who was looking for his lost dime next to the lamp post, not because it was there that the dime went missing—but because it was there that the light made searching easy. In Etzioni's view, ... Read More

More like this: Politics, The 101, Uncategorized
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The Buffalo Massacre Spinoff Economy

August 30, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

You can learn a lot about a time and a place from its choice of building materials. In the 1880s, for instance, a street in Topeka, Kansas was paved with buffalo skulls. That's just of several spine-tingling details from a new piece over at Bloomberg View; in it, Tim Heffernan offers a history of the various spinoff economies that emanated -- one after the other -- from the epic buffalo massacres that accompanied the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1868. The hunters themselves made off with tens of millions of hides; the skinners, who worked on commission, took a few ... Read More

More like this: Environment, The 101
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Silicon Valley’s Siege of Higher Ed

August 29, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

The new tech boom in the Bay Area isn't just driving up rents in San Francisco; it's also driving up anxiety levels at America's universities, and for good reason: According to the National Venture Capital Association, investment in education technology companies increased from less than $100 million in 2007 to nearly $400 million last year. For the huge generator of innovation, technology, and wealth that is Silicon Valley, higher education is a particularly fat target right now. The above comes from a terrific new piece by Kevin Carey just published by my old shop, The Washington ... Read More

More like this: Education, The 101, Uncategorized
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The Oy of Cooking

August 27, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Over at Slate, Tracie McMillan writes about the trouble with having a prevailing food ethic that both glamorizes cooking and promotes it as an everyday practice: When the stories we tell about cooking say that it is only ever fun and rewarding—instead of copping to the fact that it can also be annoying, time consuming, and risky—we alienate the people who don’t have the luxury of choice, and we unwittingly reinforce the impression that cooking is a specialty hobby instead of a basic life skill. McMillan, who published an excellent book last year called The American Way of Eating (and ... Read More

More like this: Culture & Society, Health, The 101

Who’s Most Optimistic in America? The Answer Will Break Your Heart

August 24, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

This is a finding that has turned up in a number of studies, and it's always fascinating: Many of the demographic groups that have fared the worst during the recession—including young adults (ages 18 to 24), blacks and Hispanics—have the most upbeat assessments of their own economic mobility, their children’s economic prospects and the nation’s economic future. This comes from a new Pew report called "The Lost Decade of the Middle Class: Fewer, Poorer, Gloomier," which just about sums up where things stand. "Since 2000, the middle class has shrunk in size, fallen backward in income ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, The 101
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