Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

New Libraries Revitalize Cities

March 2, 2010 • By • 10 Comments
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A new library is being planned for the center of Aarhus, Denmark's main port city. It will certainly contain books on shelves. Beyond that, it will not resemble the hushed and stately central libraries of the past. In fact, it is referred to not as a library but an "urban mediaspace." The building will include flexible conference and project rooms, multimedia learning labs, performance venues, studios for artists and business startups, a shop, a cafe, a tram station and government-service offices where patrons can, for example, apply for social security. Its design competition envisioned "a ... Read More

Desperately Seeking Landmines

March 1, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
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On his knees in a field of freshly cropped weeds, protected by a Plexiglas visor and a bulletproof smock, Mohammed Inazario-Mendes digs carefully in sun-baked dirt. He loosens a little with a long-handled steel spoon, then scoops it out with his hands. Then he does it again. Inch by inch, he painstakingly advances a little trench toward the spot a foot away marked with three red sticks. Inazario-Mendes has good reason to work slowly. Just this morning, two landmines were unearthed only yards from where he's digging. His job is to find out if the object that triggered his metal detector — ... Read More

DNA Meets the Distribution Channel

February 26, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

There are few areas of science sexier than personalized medicine. The predictive potential of diving deep into our DNA has been featured everywhere from GQ and Oprah to The New York Times Magazine. Young adults hold "spit parties" to gather saliva samples for genetic analysis, while a gray-haired Alan Alda does much the same thing by expectorating and narrating during a public television special. Meanwhile, Dr. Francis S. Collins, the man who directed the sequencing of the human genome, was recently appointed director of the National Institutes of Health. At the other extreme of the ... Read More

Who Are You and What Did You Eat?

February 25, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

One of the most schizophrenic aspects of American border policy since 9/11 is the way Washington treats its friends: "Welcome to America," the government all but literally says to people arriving from Europe. "Line Up Here for Secondary Inspection." The controversy over body scanners at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport last December — after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to destroy a plane with his undershorts — was just a powder flash in the ongoing struggle between the U.S. and Europe since 2001 over how to manage America's traditionally open borders. Individual acts of pressure to foist ... Read More

The Mind of a Terrorist

February 24, 2010 • By • 1 Comment

Can reading William James help us defeat terrorism? University of Maryland social psychologist Arie Kruglanski is convinced of it. He opened a recently published paper on the motivation of suicide bombers with a quote from the Victorian-era psychologist and philosopher: Mankind's common instinct for reality has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism ... no matter what a man's frailties otherwise may be, if he be willing to risk death, and still more if he suffer it heroically in the service he has chosen, the fact consecrates him forever. Ninety-nine years after those ... Read More

A Mind of Crime

February 23, 2010 • By • 8 Comments
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Kent Kiehl, a prominent neuroscientist hired to study an admitted murderer named Brian Dugan, had already been under cross-examination in the hushed, wood-paneled suburban Chicago courtroom for more than an hour when a brain diagram, hatched with X's, was projected on a screen. The X's marked areas where Kiehl had discovered abnormally low grey matter density in Dugan's brain. In a curious meeting of law and neuroscience, those X's would help jurors decide whether he should be executed or sentenced to life in prison. Did the way Dugan's brain had developed leave him spring-loaded for violence? ... Read More

John Gwynne: Bronx Zoo Designer, Conservationist

February 23, 2010 • By • 2 Comments
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When he was 9, John Gwynne visited the Bronx Zoo, where for the first time he saw a gorilla, in a claustrophobic cage, in the manner of zoos in the 1950s. The mournful-looking creature impressed him; the confinement saddened him. But Gwynne was also fascinated by a huge cockroach wandering across the floor of the cage. He'd never seen anything like it. Before his 15th birthday, Gwynne told his parents that a good present would be having a pond dug on the family's land on a rural peninsula in southern Rhode Island. "I wanted to create an environment," he says. So his parents hired someone to ... Read More

Triumph of the Cyborg Composer

February 22, 2010 • By • 136 Comments
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The office looks like the aftermath of a surrealistic earthquake, as if David Cope’s brain has spewed out decades of memories all over the carpet, the door, the walls, even the ceiling. Books and papers, music scores and magazines are all strewn about in ragged piles. A semi-functional Apple Power Mac 7500 (discontinued April 1, 1996) sits in the corner, its lemon-lime monitor buzzing. Drawings filled with concepts for a never-constructed musical-radio-space telescope dominate half of one wall. Russian dolls and an exercise bike, not to mention random pieces from homemade board games, peek ... Read More

Can California Redistricting Reform Change Congress?

February 19, 2010 • By • 3 Comments

If I taught journalism, the final project would have students write an article about municipal bonds. The assignment would be a reality check: As a profession, journalism is so difficult nowadays that only those young people who have the drive and style needed to accurately enliven the second-most boring subject in the news universe — municipal finance — have any chance of a significant career. If you can make bond covenants sing, you might earn a journalistic living in an age when people dislike paying for news, and countless millions of blockheads write for no money. But even I have ... Read More

The New York Times and a Mistaken Infant Mortality Trend

February 18, 2010 • By • 2 Comments
State Comparison

Anecdotes and stories have long been a dominant means of conveying information and establishing principles, especially moral and religious ones. In a science-oriented society that has entered the information age, the public appetite for empirical data about every aspect of life has emerged as a complementary and sometimes competing way of understanding the world and, particularly, governmental decisions. But if policy-relevant data are often widely available, the capacity to effectively analyze and fully comprehend that data is more limited. As presented in the news media, anecdotes and ... Read More