Pacific Standard July-August 2013 Cover

Pay, Baby, Pay

April 30, 2010 • By • 3 Comments
July-August 2009

This story originally appeared June 17, 2009. At the start of 1981, Ronald Reagan moved into the White House and named James Watt secretary of the interior. Almost immediately, Watt became the bête noir of liberals — particularly environmental liberals — across the land. Within months, Watt announced an ambitious program that would have expanded offshore energy development into the Pacific and the Atlantic and resulted in the lease of the rights to extract oil and gas from under as much as a billion acres of sea bottom over five years. Watt's plan drew immediate and harsh criticism, ... Read More

Today’s Threat Level: Yellow, With a Chance of Phlegm

July 2, 2009 • By • 1 Comment

Mark Nicas works at the Center for Advancing Microbial Risk Assessment at the University of California, Berkeley, a position funded in part by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate. Or to put it another way: The Department of Homeland Security pays Nicas to study spittle. But rest assured: The terrorists haven't gotten their hands on a Loogie of Mass Destruction. Here's how Dr. Matthew Clark, director of the DHS grant program, explained it in a press release: "In terms of homeland security, knowing how germs are spread is an important factor in ... Read More

Everybody Into the … Um, Never Mind

July 1, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

The Buzz Around Swimming Pools During the summer of 2007, epidemiologists were puzzled by an outbreak of West Nile virus in and around Bakersfield, Calif. The weather over the preceding months had been unusually hot and dry, making the region inhospitable for the mosquitoes that carry the virus. What could account for the 276 percent increase in cases? Three words: abandoned swimming pools. That's the suspicion raised by a team of scholars led by William K. Reisen of the University of California, Davis. In the November 2008 issue of the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, the ... Read More

Freeze! You’re Under Examination

June 30, 2009 • By • 2 Comments

It's about 15 months into his four-year-long sentence at Rhode Island's minimum-security prison, and on an unseasonably brisk spring morning, Joseph has a visitor. A guard escorts the inmate, who sports a shaved head and large-framed glasses perched on a prominent nose, to a conference room just beyond a metal detector and a front door that clangs every time the deadbolt is deactivated. Joseph, who looks small in his oversized prison-issued khakis, doesn't normally get visitors. For most of his 50 years, he's been in and out of prison while battling HIV, other sexually transmitted diseases, ... Read More

A Flower Grows in West Africa

June 29, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

It is a persuasive measure of humanity's boneheaded venality that natural resources endowment often leads to a country's impoverishment. A relatively benign form of the "resource curse" can be found in developed countries, as Holland found when, in 1959, a large natural gas discovery stoked an overvalued currency and eviscerated the country's manufacturing sector, a phenomenon that came to be known as "Dutch disease." But in developing countries, the scourge is evinced more rapaciously. Natural resource earnings that should be earmarked for productive investments are siphoned off wholesale ... Read More

Germany’s Fine Failure

June 26, 2009 • By • 1 Comment

The village of Jühnde, near Göttingen, in the very center of Germany, became the nation's first "bio-energy" municipality in 2005, meaning it was the first town to run and heat its buildings without fossil fuels — the first town off the grid. It processes silage from local farms, as well as other byproducts like sunflowers or liquid manure, to get methane, which powers a small community power plant. Since 2007, the town has produced twice as much electricity as it needs, meaning the energy isn't just cheap; it's become a way to earn money. The 200 or so members of Jühnde's energy co-op ... Read More

Perfect Quiet

June 25, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

On numerous visits to Manhattan, I have found myself poking around the city trying to find a moment of quiet and once located a hint of it in Central Park during a windless, late-night snowfall. There I stood absolutely still in the lemon glow of the city, a sky full of snow. The city still roared from all sides, a thousand noises compressed down to just one. I counted that distant, mild roar as quiet, a welcome relief from the more pressing noises of the daytime city. During the day, though, heavy traffic tends to run around 85 decibels, a level that takes just eight continuous hours to ... Read More

Indiana Jones and the Temple of eBay

June 24, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

For the past couple of years, Charles "Chip" Stanish, professor of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, has been hosting a regular, rather geeky get-together of his colleagues. "I have a couple of friends over, we get a nice bottle of Cabernet, and we plug my computer into my big-screen TV," explains the director of UCLA's Cotsen Institute of Archaeology with a sly chuckle. "Then we log on to eBay, do a search for something like 'Egyptian antiques' and just roll with laughter all night long. It is really funny." That's because the items that pop up for sale on the ... Read More

Solar System

June 23, 2009 • By • 1 Comment

Francisco DeVries was familiar with all the grand plans and high-flown talk about solarizing the world's power mix to fight global warming. Then he found himself staring at a problem that seems, somehow, to have repeatedly escaped the climate evangelists' attention. DeVries is a confessed save-the-climate junkie, and his professional credentials include a stint as an appointee in the U.S. Department of Energy under President Clinton. More recently, though, he earned his paycheck as the chief of staff for Berkeley, Calif., Mayor Tom Bates. About two years ago, DeVries was charged with ... Read More

The Science of Good Government

June 22, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

As we went to press late in May, President Obama was giving another of the "major addresses" that signal how he wants his administration to be perceived. As with previous speeches on race and abortion, the Obamoration at the National Archives — a justification of his national security approach in general and the closing of the Guantanamo detention facility in particular — was long on nuanced, fact-filled reasoning and replete with implied failures by the preceding occupants of the White House. Clearly, this is an administration that hopes to be seen as deliberative and evidence-based ... Read More