Pacific Standard July-August 2013 Cover

‘The Internet Made Me Do It’: Stop Blaming Social Media for Our Behavioral Problems

June 10, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
social-brain

The Internet is destroying our national parks. That’s according to Lorna Lange, the spokeswoman for Joshua Tree National Park in California, anyway. Lange spoke to New York Times reporter Felicity Barringer, who wrote a depressing story about the recent uptick in graffiti on public lands. According to Lange, park personnel are blaming social media for the rise in vandalism. “In the old days, people would paint something on a rock—it wouldn’t be till someone else came along that someone would report it and anybody would know about it.” Lange told the Times, “with social media ... Read More

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

Could Richard Ramirez Have Terrorized a Whole City Today?

June 7, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
richard-ramirez

News that Richard Ramirez died in prison today at age 53 will provoke reactions in anyone who lived in Los Angeles in the '80s. What sort of reaction will vary. Ramirez, a serial killer the Southern California press dubbed the "Night Stalker," carried off a string of particularly gruesome murders in 1985. The L.A. of that year was a city whose police chief, Daryl Gates, was a deeply controversial figure. Gates had come up through the ranks as a detective on the spectacular Manson Family and Hillside Strangler cases. He had become a fan of overtly military tactics, and, faced with the emergence ... Read More

That Tattoo Makes You Look Promiscuous

June 7, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
butterfly-tattoo

Does your tattoo make a statement about you? If you’re an attractive woman, it apparently does, regardless of your intention. And that statement is: “I’m easy!” That’s the implication of new research from France, which found men are more likely to approach a woman lying on the beach if she has a butterfly tattoo on her lower back. The guys in this study didn’t think the body art made her more attractive. But they believed it increased the likelihood of her being receptive to their romantic overtures. The “stereotype of promiscuousness associated with tattoos” may or ... Read More

Should Moms Hate Childless Women?

June 6, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
tug-of-war

In a wonderfully provocative article titled “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (PDF), writer and poet Adrienne Rich argues, among other things, that the assumption of heterosexuality in the context of patriarchy alternatively erases and stigmatizes woman-to-woman bonds. Pop culture naturalizes the idea that women should turn to men, and not women, to reinforce their value. Though the title specifies lesbianism, she means intense and meaningful relationships between women more generally. In other words, an overbearing heterosexuality orients women toward men not just as ... Read More

Talking About ‘God’ With Galen Guengerich

June 6, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
Galen Guengerich.

Study after study after study suggests that more and more Americans are walking away from traditional religion. Last October, the Pew Research Center found that one-fifth of the U.S. public and one-third of adults under the age of 30 do not identify with any religion. It marked the highest rate of religiously unaffiliated people ever recorded in the polling organization's history. Likewise, sociologists from the University of California-Berkeley and Duke University recently found that religious affiliation in the U.S. has dropped to its lowest point since researchers began keeping track ... Read More

Racist? Virtual Reality Could Fix That

June 6, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
avatars

It’s time to update the classic rejoinder “Walk a mile in my shoes.” Thanks to virtual-reality technology, people prone to stereotyping—which means basically all of us—can take a far more immersive, and apparently effective, journey toward empathy and understanding. Forget the footwear: The new invitation is “Spend some time in my skin.” A research team led by Mel Slater of the University of Barcelona and Tabitha Peck (now at Duke University) reports that the virtual experience of living in a dark-skinned body “significantly reduced implicit racial bias against ... Read More

Your Donut Sandwich Is a Crime Against Sandwiches Everywhere

June 6, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
donut-sandwich

I had a KFC Double Down once. For the luckily uninitiated, sorry, but the Double Down is a cruel joke of a sandwich, a handheld pile of food, stuck in a bag, and presumably designed to give as many people diabetes as possible for five dollars. It’s two fried chicken patties as “bread” with bacon, cheese, and The Colonel’s Special Sauce in between. They stick it in a bag, and yay. You eat it, and then you feel terrible about yourself, and then yourself feels terrible because you just ate what is basically a bag of fried canola oil, and then you never eat one ever again. At least, ... Read More

The Fashion Industry and the Institutionalization of Body Ideals and Feminine Beauty

June 5, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
star-models

A Brazilian modeling agency, Star Models, recently released a new series of anti-anorexia PSA advertisements. They illustrate one of the ways ultra-thin body ideals characterizing women’s bodies in the fashion industry today are institutionalized, or made part of the way we “do” fashion. Fashion sketches—the way that people communicate designs to one another—idealize these bodies, with their exaggerated proportions, long slender limbs, and expressionless faces. The PSAs place real women alongside the sketches, graphically altered to similar proportions, in order to problematize the ... Read More

Free Music Is Better Because It’s Free

June 5, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
Nayvadius-Cash-Future

Preserving the last remnants of my youth requires staying in touch with rap music, and this year I have enjoyed no two rap albums more than Future’s F.B.G.: The Movie and Tree’s Sunday School Pt. 2. Future is commercially successful, consistently on the radio, and featured on songs by Rihanna and Lil’ Wayne, whereas Tree is more of an underground sensation, just beginning to make a national name for himself. F.B.G.: The Movie is a cinematic haze of keyboard steroids draped over Future’s warbling and Sunday School Pt. 2 is a soulful, introspective walk through Chicago’s war zones. ... Read More