Pacific Standard July-August 2013 Cover

About Vince Beiser

Vince Beiser is Pacific Standard's articles editor. Follow him on Twitter @vincelb.

When Will the Census Stop Collecting Race Data?

June 14, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
census-data

These are strange times for the race-conscious. As you’ve probably heard, America’s white majority is literally dying off, according to the latest Census data. Last year, for the first time ever, more non-Hispanic whites died than were born in the U.S. Whites still make up 64 percent of the population, but immigration and higher birth rates among pretty much every other demographic category mean whites will likely become a minority somewhere around 2050. In fact, most babies born in America are already non-white. Knowing that African Americans make up 13 percent of the population makes it ... Read More

More like this: Culture
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Alone With Everyone Else

May 21, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
pluralistic-ignorance

Ever pretended to be entranced by a Portuguese art film that everyone else in the theater seemed to find fascinating? Ever agreed with your dinner companions that a pricey bottle of wine was exquisite, even though it tasted like Windex? You may not have been as alone as you thought. You and everyone else in the room may have just been victims of pluralistic ignorance. The term, coined in 1931 by psychologists Daniel Katz and Floyd Allport, describes the surprisingly common situation in which individual members of a group privately believe one thing, but think that everyone else in the group ... Read More

More like this: Culture, May-June 2013
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The Big One

May 10, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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One percent of all U.S. dairy farms produce 35 percent of America's milk. One American milk cow produces an average of 22,000 pounds of milk per year—up from 8,000 pounds per year in 1965. One percent of patients account for 22 percent of all health care spending in the U.S., costing more than $90,000 per person. One percent of all drivers on weekend nights have blood alcohol levels above 0.15, nearly twice the limit; such drivers are involved in over 20 percent of all fatal crashes. One percent of U.S. electricity consumption—the output of seven large electric power ... Read More

More like this: May-June 2013
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California’s Gun Medicine

May 3, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Night after night, dressed in a black jumpsuit and a bulletproof vest, John Marsh knocks on the doors of violent felons and mentally ill people and asks them for their guns. People hand them over more often than you might expect. Last year, Marsh, a special agent with the California Bureau of Firearms, and the 33-person team he heads, confiscated 2,000 illegally-owned weapons. Marsh is the lead agent for the Armed Prohibited Persons System, a program in which state officials comb through mountains of data to find people who have lost the right to own guns, and then send Marsh’s team to ... Read More

More like this: May-June 2013, Politics
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Holy Holi

March 26, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
(PHOTOGRAPH: PORAS CHAUDHARY)

This March 27, millions of people will gleefully splatter each other with brightly colored powders and water in celebration of Holi, a centuries-old Hindu holy day. The annual ritual, also known as the Festival of Colors, is observed mostly in northern India, but in recent years has been embraced by non-Hindu fans of multihued fun from Australia to Utah. Photograph by Poras Chaudhary ... Read More

More like this: March-April 2013
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The Big One

March 15, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment

... Read More

More like this: Big One, March-April 2013

Sinkholes, from Florida to the Middle East

March 5, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment

Florida, where the earth recently literally opened up and swallowed a man as he lay sleeping in his own bed, isn't the only place where sinkholes are endangering people. As we reported here, the Dead Sea is drying up, and the process is creating sinkholes in neighboring Israel and Jordan, devouring local villages. ... Read More

More like this: The 101

The Deluge

March 4, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
(PHOTO: CHRISTOPH MORLINGHAUS)

OIL SEEPING TO THE SURFACE of the lazy Kern River, just north of Bakersfield, California, first caught James Elwood’s attention in 1899. The state was in the midst of an oil boom, and Elwood wanted in on the action. He rounded up a few relatives, got some picks and shovels, chose a patch of sun-baked earth near the river seep, and started digging. Forty-odd feet down, they switched to an auger, and punched down another couple of dozen feet. Oil—trapped in the stone’s pores for millions of years—began oozing into the crude well. The strike made the front page of the local ... Read More

More like this: Environment, March-April 2013
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The Law of Averageness

March 1, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
(PHOTO: EDWARD BURTYNSKY; COURTESY NICHOLAS METIVIER GALLERY, TORONTO/HOWARD GREENBERG & BRYCE WOLKOWITZ, NEW YORK)

Why do Burger King and McDonald’s offer indistinguishable chicken salads—often right across the street from each other? Why do Home Depot and Lowe’s outlets huddle near each other like lovelorn teenagers? Why is Coke so much like Pepsi? They’re just obeying Hotelling’s Law. Stanford University economist Harold Hotelling posited back in 1929 that rival sellers tend to gravitate toward each other—in location, price, and product offerings—because otherwise they risk losing some of the broad mainstream of customers. In other words, if your competitor has found something that sells ... Read More

More like this: March-April 2013
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The Feminine Tweet-stique

February 21, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment

Men are from Mars, women from Venus, and the Twitter feeds they send back to Earth prove it. A new study of the tweets of 14,000 people by researchers from Carnegie Mellon, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Stanford University found that men and women tend to use language differently, even in 140-character bursts. As Fast Company's Kyle Vanhemert reports, the researchers determined that women's tweets "include a relatively large number of emotion-related terms like sad, love, glad, sick, proud, happy, scared, annoyed, excited, and jealous." They also use more emoticons, and what the ... Read More

More like this: The 101