Pacific Standard July-August 2013 Cover

About Michael Todd

Most of Michael Todd's career has been spent in newspaper journalism, ranging from papers in the Marshall Islands to tiny California farming communities. Before joining the publishing arm of the Miller-McCune Center, he was managing editor of the national magazine Hispanic Business. Follow him @MTodd_PSMag.

More Evidence We’ve Reached the Era of Peak Cars

June 19, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
traffic-jam

We’ve all heard of peak oil, which the gallant knight Sir Fracking has slain for the time being. But in the United States, perhaps for all the rich world, we may have already passed into a related period of transition, peak cars. Globally, of course, that’s bosh. India and China and other newly embiggened economies with growing middle classes will continue to sate that class’ taste for personal vehicles for decades to come. As the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace wrote last year: Even if the rate of growth of passenger cars in circulation in China and India remains very ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics
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That Lingering Whiff of Scandal Lasts About 4 Years

June 19, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
gingrich

Just for the sake of argument, let’s say you’re a seven-term congressman and you’ve got a little problem with the House Ethics Committee. How long before the folks back home forgive and forget? About two terms, according to a new study in the Social Science Quarterly. This assumes that you stick around—about a quarter of House members resign or retire when scandal comes a’knockin'—and that you’re among the half who survive the next election. Given that initial election to the House is as good a promise of continued employment as modern America can provide these days, such ... Read More

More like this: Politics
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Face to Face With More Electronic Privacy Concerns

June 17, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
surveillance-face

Whether or not your electronic life is your own to share or not fuels debate over the propriety of U.S. government trolling of phone and Internet sources. But the face you present to the world—literally, your face—generates new questions about privacy as various local government-created databases are surveyed with facial-recognition software. That’s the takeaway message of a piece in today’s Washington Post, which reviews the legal and legislative terrain of law enforcement using all those driver’s license photos to track down (for now, at any rate) bad guys. With a whiff of ... Read More

More like this: Legal Affairs, Politics
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How Do We Know the Death Toll in Syria Is Accurate?

June 14, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
syria-dead

“Unlike his opponent ... [Union Gen. Samuel R.]  Curtis had not been satisfied to report his casualties in round figures. That would have been neither respectful to the dead nor indicative of sound administration.” —Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative   How many people have died in the Syrian civil war? The answer to that question affects world policy—a high number impels outsiders to intervene, a low number generates tut-tutting and but little action. It also affects the aftermath—who gets put against the wall by the victors, or in a kinder outcome, how many ... Read More

More like this: Politics
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NSA Surveillance: Better Down the Stretch Than at the Start

June 12, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
surveillance-cameras

In the furor over revelations that the U.S. National Security Agency has been tracking phone calls, social media, and other Internet metadata, the question remained whether this monitoring actually keeps Americans safer. Today, the head of the NSA told the Senate Appropriations Committee that data from the program broke up “dozens” of plots aimed at the U.S. and its interests abroad. "It's dozens of terrorist events that these have helped prevent, both here and abroad, in disrupting, or contributing to the disruption of terrorist attacks," said Gen. Keith Alexander, who promised to get ... Read More

More like this: Politics
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Companies Learn the Value of Being a Step Ahead of the Law

June 11, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
cap-and-trade

In 2003, as the human role in warming the planet was being widely accepted, it was pretty obvious which way the wind was blowing on efforts to reduce carbon in the atmosphere. There would be regulation, sooner if not later, and businesses that trod with a large carbon footprint had to decide how to respond. Should they fight new rules, accept them as inevitable, maybe hedge their bets with a little greenwashing while mostly standing pat, or start adopting some of the likely new rules to prepare for the inevitable and perhaps even influence the regulatory outcome? A handful of businesses, ... Read More

More like this: Environment
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Putting Your Weird Word Choices on the Map

June 7, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
soda-map

Over the years I’ve had observer status in a number of brushfire grammar wars, like the pop/coke/soda conflict, the spat over whether they’re highways or freeways, and the skirmish on sneakers versus tennis shoes. About a decade ago, linguist Bert Vaux made some waves with his Harvard Dialect Survey, which didn’t attempt to settle these weighty matters but to catalog them. “I ... realized that none of the existing dialect grammars or dictionaries actually contained forms that were relevant today,” Vaux told the Harvard Crimson in 2002. “They were all based on the speech of old ... Read More

More like this: Culture
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Peace Protest Kabuki Now Booked for the High Court’s Stage

June 6, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
SpaceX_Falcon_verticle_on_the_launch_pad

Last October I talked about the kabuki of the Vandenberg peace protesters, who routinely demonstrate right outside of the California missile base’s front gate, are just as routinely arrested, and then not quite as often are released without facing trial or have their charges dismissed. It’s an intriguing constitutional ritual, combining concerns about free speech, domestic tranquility, and providing for common defense with just a tinge of farce. Only a tinge, because the protesters are deadly serious, and so is the work of the base, which when it test fires Minuteman missiles is ... Read More

More like this: Legal Affairs, Politics
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Pulling the Curtain Back From Scientific Publishing

June 5, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
publishing-keys

There’s a fear that the science that gets published—and remember it’s still “publish or perish,” even as “fundraise or perish” moves up on the outside—is the science that shows the experiment succeeding. While on first blush that might not seem so awful, if you think about it for a moment there’s daisy chain of unwanted consequences (assuming with proper scientific reserve that this initial hypothesis is, in fact, accurate). This publishing regime’s consequences are so unwanted that some people term them “toxic to science”: Recent studies have shown how intense ... Read More

More like this: Science
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Academic Publishing Flirts With the You(Test)Tube Age

June 4, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
caxton-painting

Pacific Standard keeps a watchful eye on the academic press, both for social science-oriented story ideas and because our major benefactor is SAGE Publications, a big player in the journal world. A lot of that observation focuses on weighty issues, like the future of open access or peer review’s feet of clay. Then there’s JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments, which bills itself as the “first scientific video journal.” They also describe themselves, in somewhat more Ivory Tower-y terms, as “the first and only PubMed/MEDLINE-indexed, peer-reviewed journal devoted to ... Read More

More like this: Education
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