Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

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

The Melting-Pot Gazette

May 13, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
alhambra

Seventeen people squeeze around a dark wood table in a low, redbrick office building on the outskirts of Los Angeles, picking at a potluck dinner of fried chicken, pad thai, and Cherry Coke. The group is as oddly matched as the menu. There’s Eric Sunada, an engineer who also runs a small environmental non-profit. Kerrie Gutierrez, an instructional aide and mother of five. Joe Soong, an analyst for the Los Angeles Police Department. But they do have one thing in common: They are all newly minted journalists, contributors to a novel kind of local news outlet in the ethnically fractured, ... Read More

The Big One

May 10, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
the-big-one-cow

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

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

Why Would a Medical Doctor Embrace an Unproven Treatment?

May 8, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
prospector-naet

Face down on a massage table, a 30-something corporate attorney grips a tiny vial of clear liquid and breathes deeply, again and again. My wife, Kathryn, an internal medicine specialist whose practice focuses on the arcane arts of alternative healing, presses her thumbs on each side of the woman’s neck and moves slowly down her spine. The woman suffers from chronic fatigue, nasal congestion, and a severely runny nose, which conventional medical treatments have failed to cure. So she’s come to see Kathryn. A few weeks later, after a handful of similar treatments, the woman calls to ... Read More

Why Focusing on Exports Doesn’t Make Economic Sense

May 7, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
trade-mirage

In January 2010, a year after taking office, President Barack Obama unveiled a singularly ambitious idea for boosting the economy. “Tonight, we set a new goal,” he said in his State of the Union address. “We will double our exports over the next five years, an increase that will support two million jobs in America.” Under the banner of a National Export Initiative, the president pledged to support new trade missions overseas, offer export assistance to small and medium-size businesses, and step up enforcement of trade agreements. “Because the more products we make and sell to other ... Read More

What Does It Take for Traumatized Kids to Thrive?

May 6, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
traumatized-kids-3

Paine High School was a shambles when Jim Sporleder arrived to serve as its new principal in the spring of 2007. Housed in a run-down, brown-brick building with metal security screens on its windows, the “alternative” secondary school served 77 of Walla Walla, Washington’s most challenging students. And for years, by nearly all accounts, it had served them exceedingly poorly. About half of Paine’s students had been ordered to attend the school by a judge; most of the rest had been ejected by the city’s mainstream high school due to behavioral problems. Students weren’t the only ... Read More

California’s Gun Medicine

May 3, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
gun-medicine

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

Conference Call: What’s Happening in May and June—and Why It Matters

May 3, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
conference-call-hacker

MAY 17-19 HackMiami 2013 Hackers Conference (Miami, Florida) Information-security professionals join nerds and novices to discuss “cutting-edge tools, techniques, and methodologies ... at the forefront of the global threatscape.” Fun events include a bitcoin hackathon, a “robot-building village,” and a “shootout” that “will feature both network pentesting scanners and Web-application security scanners to see which ones discover the most exploitable vulnerabilities in predetermined targets.” We know where our money will be. JUNE 4-5 DSM-5 and the Future of Psychiatric ... Read More

Datebook: What’s Happening in May and June—and Why It Matters

May 3, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
trayvon-banner

MAY 10 First 2013 Solar Eclipse “For millennia,” according to NASA, “solar eclipses have been interpreted as portents of doom by virtually every known civilization.” Today, hundreds of “eclipse chasers” travel the world to catch the celestial action. A recent survey by an Australian psychologist found that 92 percent of them are male, and they have seen, on average, seven total eclipses—a feat that requires at least 10 years of trying. MAY 12 Mother’s Day Anna Jarvis of West Virginia organized the first Mother’s Day observances in 1908, and helped convince President ... Read More