Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

About Michael Fitzgerald

Michael Fitzgerald is an associate editor at Pacific Standard. He has previously worked at The New Republic and Oxford American Magazine.

Are Babies Healthier in North Korea or Northeast Ohio?

infant-mortality

Infant mortality within a three-mile radius around one of the nation’s best children’s hospitals, in Cleveland, Ohio, is worse than that in some third-world countries, Dr. Michele Walsh, neonatology director of Rainbow Babies & Children’s Hospital, claimed in a radio interview last week. The hospital anchors the relatively affluent University Circle neighborhood, home to Case Western Reserve University, on the east end of an otherwise pretty impoverished city. (Seventy percent of the infants that enter Walsh’s intensive care unit are on Medicaid.) Infant mortality rates higher ... Read More

The Deluge Continues

great-rift-valley

East Africa’s largest economy is about to become a major oil producer, according to Bloomberg BusinessWeek. The U.K. oil giant Tullow estimates that Kenya’s Great Rift Valley area—known as the "Cradle of Mankind" due to the discovery there of the earliest known human remains—could yield 10 billion barrels of oil, enough to supply the country for three centuries. Production remains years away; officials first hope to build a $5 billion network of pipelines to the nation’s Indian Ocean coast in order to facilitate shipping to, notably, China, India, and other Asian countries. With ... Read More

How Etsy Got Over Middle-School-Cafeteria Syndrome

http://youtu.be/w4LExVkv4Pw Kellan Elliot-McCrea, the CTO of Etsy, recently shared the anecdote below at a private seminar held by a leading venture capital firm for its portfolio companies. (For the un-initiated, Etsy is a wildly popular online craft marketplace with over 15 million users—80 percent female—and, until recently, a 4.5 percent-female engineering staff.) Etsy also had a substantial “boys versus girls” dynamic, where engineers (mostly male) sat on one side and the women on the other... It was a broken system that required changes on both sides of the house. Not a ... Read More

Some Stuff You May Have Missed This Week

The crazy lengths—fraud, hacking—some go to generate positive academic peer reviews The drug-running tunnel capital of the Southwest This video would have been super boring pre-Al Gore An elegy for Aleppo “Bantil admitted to having slept with dozens of his followers’ wives to cleanse their sins.” Caravan Magazine’s profile of India’s biggest newspaper baron might be better than the New Yorker’s The piece we’ve all been waiting to read about the implications of the trend towards older parenthood What it’s like to apply for college when you live in a ... Read More

Can a Test Tell If You’re a Good Entrepreneur?

rorschach

Bankers around the world know there are profits to be reaped by making loans to promising small businesses that fall just short of traditional definitions of “creditworthy.” Ever since Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus’ Grameen Bank pioneered "microfinance" by making tiny loans to single mothers in Bangladesh, development policymakers also have believed that getting credit to small businesses—those too large for Grameen-style microloans but still lacking collateral or credit history—is not only possible, but the key to helping a nation’s economic growth. So how to figure out ... Read More

Fiscal Cliff Round-Up

John Dickerson has a fine piece up at Slate that separates  the signal from the noise on the “Fiscal Cliff”. He points out that nothing Saxby Chambliss or any other Senator or White House official says means much, and that House Republicans are the only voice that matters right now. Obama has previously offered to make spending changes to Social Security and Medicare and has more recently made a very concrete revenue offer: Let the Bush tax cuts expire for the wealthiest Americans. So it might be safe to say that the only question is whether House Republicans will give on this revenue ... Read More

The Game Done Changed, Governor Brown

Election Day is tomorrow, and Prop 30, a California ballot initiative notable for its tax hike on the wealthy to fund education, is hanging by a thread if recent polls are any indication. This is a huge deal, given the budget cuts the state will face without additional revenue. For the measure’s supporters, it must have been frustrating to read California Governor Jerry Brown’s butt-covering maneuvers (he's championing the initiative) in the New York Times yesterday: The money is needed for schools. I don’t want people to wake up the day after the election and say, ‘Why didn’t ... Read More

Yet Another Reason to Live on the California Central Coast

It’s the only place in the country where you can't get killed by one of the 5,000 or so homers hit each year in major league ball parks. (via The Morning News) ... Read More

The iPhone 5 Economy

Would you pay someone $250 to get in line now for the iPhone 5 launch tomorrow, so you can take his place in the morning? In case you’re buyin’ in the Bay Area, this guy’s sellin’.   Fresh evidence that America runs on Apple. UPDATE: The Craigslist post this article linked to  has been taken down. ... Read More

What Academic Research Really Says About Race and the Obama Presidency

Whether or not Obama serves another term, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new 10,000-worder for The Atlantic will probably stand as one of the totemic deconstructions of race and the Obama presidency. Coates weaves together various racially charged events and trends, historical and current, in arguing how and why a man with demonstrably nuanced views on race came to scrupulously avoid the issue of race in his public statements as president. There’s much more than that, too; suffice it to say it’s worth reading, if only to keep up with the discussion that has ensued. But one research paper Coates ... Read More