Pacific Standard March-April 2013 Cover

Fatherhood Scholars Know Best

June 16, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
breaking_news2_square-50x50

The post-World War II era was the age of Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best, when a benign patriarch's authority over his household was complete and unquestioned. Or was it? Writing in the Journal of Family History in 2004, Georgia State University sociologist Ralph LaRossa concluded the culture of fatherhood between 1945 and 1960 "was a lot more complex than the standard narratives allow." His survey of popular magazines, top-rated television series and child-rearing manuals of the day suggest the role of the father was in flux, with rigid gender roles in society becoming increasingly ... Read More

Welcome to Shelbyville: Loving, Fearing Thy Neighbors

May 22, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

In news headlines and broadcast bulletins, the word "Somali" is inevitably followed by a dread-inducing plural noun: "pirates" or "warlords" or "terrorists." So it's no surprise that natives of the war-ravaged East African country of Somalia are viewed with fear and suspicion by many, if not most, Americans. When significant numbers of Somali refugees moved to Shelbyville, Tenn., (population 16,000) to work at the nearby Tyson Foods processing plant, the town's residents reacted with deep suspicion. "We don't know what diseases they have," a former mayor frets in the opening minutes of the ... Read More

Did the Stimulus Quench America’s Economic Thirst?

May 3, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
How Does Your Garden Grow - Stimulus Graphic

For the next financial crisis, what would be the best way to spend stimulus dollars? While some economists suggest a national fire sale and some pharmacists heaping helpings of hormones, an examination of how the current stimulus-dollar cascade has helped or hindered the recovery bears examination. That's what graphic artist Stanford Kay has done with buckets of data drawn from the Congressional Budget Office's scintillating bestseller from last September, "The Economic Outlook and Fiscal Policy Choices," plus the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Department of Commerce. While what strange ... Read More

Start Slow With Bullet Trains

May 2, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

The prospect of building new rail corridors in the U.S. must seem expensive and daunting, as it did to Europeans 20 or 30 years ago. Old American track, in many cases, is too rickety or crowded for modern electric trains to vault between major cities at speeds that compete with short-haul passenger flights. To upgrade the U.S. rail system in any significant way, there will have to be at least a few dedicated high-speed lines, on whole new rights-of-way. The cost will be staggering. And what if the people don't come? "No one will ride this train," was a refrain on message boards in Florida ... Read More

New Dinosaur Gets a Rather Large Name

April 29, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

A new dinosaur discovered in Utah has been named Brontomerus mcintoshi. Now, we have no quarrel at all with the species name, mcintoshi, because it was chosen in honor of John "Jack" McIntosh, who is described as "a retired physicist at Wesleyan University, Conn., and lifelong avocational paleontologist." But guess what Brontomerus translates into? You guessed it: "Thunder Thighs." "Brontomerus mcintoshi is a charismatic dinosaur and an exciting discovery for us," said the project's lead author Mike Taylor, a researcher in the department of earth sciences at University College London, in ... Read More

Save the Birds — With Doppler Radar

April 28, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Toothache Tree

After slogging through knee-deep water, past palmetto thickets and trumpet vines dangling from the treetops, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Mike Lange stops short. He signals toward a gnarled live oak, straight out of the magical charm of The Shire, its trunk the width of a car. Crumpled resurrection ferns line its branches, waiting to sprout in green abandon with the next rains. Nearby, the trunks of an elm and a water hickory wrap around each other like a sculpture of intertwined lovers. Lange is rightly proud of these woods. Over the past 20 years, he has been largely ... Read More

Can Biosecurity Go Global?

April 27, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

A tall, modest academic with graying temples, Ren Salerno was happily toiling away in obscurity at a small biological threat research program at Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, N.M., "studying issues nobody really cared about," he recalls. Then the attacks on Sept. 11 burst his academic bubble. As one of the few experts on the security of biological agents, Salerno was called to Washington, where, as soon as he arrived, he met with Deputy Secretary of Agriculture James Moseley, a man with a lot to worry about. Some of the greatest bioterror threats are zoonotic pathogens — ... Read More

ARCHIVE Says Home Is Where the Health Is

April 26, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Peter Williams

Growing up in Kingston, Jamaica, Peter Williams took for granted the holes in the wood floors of his house — and the rats that crawled through them. But when his father contracted a bacterial infection that left him paralyzed, Williams, a budding architect, began to recognize the connection between shoddy housing and ill health. "The disease was directly attributed to the fact that the house was poorly constructed," says Williams, 35. "I saw firsthand how housing was both responsible for his illness and also incapable of meeting his care needs, given that he was quite immobile." If the ... Read More

Save the Poor by Selling Them Stuff — Cheap

April 25, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

The first slide comes up on the white-walled lecture room's double display screens. In capital letters, it declares: "EMPATHY." The 40-odd Stanford students gathered in a semicircle of plastic chairs on the cement floor blink at the screen, awaiting explanation. Almost all of them are pursuing graduate degrees in some form of engineering or business — disciplines known more for unemotional logic and bare-knuckle competitiveness than getting in touch with someone else's feelings. Erica Estrada, a recent Stanford mechanical engineering grad with long, loose black hair, clicks to the next ... Read More

Mentally Ill Homeless Improve With Group Living

April 22, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Homelessness, Housing and Mental Illness

In 1990, a research team in Boston launched an ambitious experiment with some of the city's sickest residents — the chronically homeless and severely mentally ill. With $13 million in federal funding, the team recruited 118 volunteers from the shelters and randomly placed them in group homes and independent apartments. The group homes were envisioned as a kind of utopia, in which the mentally ill clients — up to 10 in each of six homes — would become "active agents in shaping their future." By the end of 18 months, they were supposed to replace the paid staff. The project team, led by ... Read More