Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Comic Con on the Couch: Analyzing Superheroes

July 11, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Comic Con on the Couch: Psychoanalyzing Superheroes

The shrink wants to know how Batman is feeling. In this case, Batman is a husky mid-40s native of uptown Manhattan’s working-class Washington Heights neighborhood, his own personal Gotham. Under his thick black rubber mask, he grunts in his best Christian Bale, “The person that’s under the mask doesn’t exist.” But the woman he’s talking to wants to get deep under that mask. She’s Robin Rosenberg, a middle-aged Palo Alto psychologist in private practice who specializes in an unusual clinical cohort: superheroes. Rosenberg, a columnist for Psychology Today and the author and ... Read More

Mapping the Evolution of the West

May 4, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Mapping the Evolution of the West

The U.S. West Coast: what’s not to love? It smells like citrus (at least near our office) and everybody wears sandals — even our CEOs. In the current issue of Pacific Standard, we took aim at the West—the people and their paychecks—to quantify a few ways in which it defined the latter half of the “American Century”. Click the graphic below for a breakdown of the ways the West won the last 50 years. For example: In population, growth in California, Washington, and Oregon has been more explosive than in major East Coast cities in recent decades; in terms of aggregate compensation ... Read More

The Restructuring of Capitalism in Our Time

May 3, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
The Restructuring of Capitalism in Our Time

This book wasn’t yet published when the Occupy Wall Street protests got under way, but The Restructuring of Capitalism in Our Time provides a solid foundation for that movement’s critique of the financiers who brought the global economy to the edge of collapse. William Tabb, professor emeritus of economics, political science, and sociology at the City University of New York, challenges those who claim that the 2008 meltdown was some kind of weird accident that could not have been anticipated. He sees the crisis as a logical consequence of policy shifts dating back to the early 1980s that ... Read More

The Book of Mormon: A Biography

May 3, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
The Book of Mormon: A Biography

America is experiencing something of a Mormon moment, thanks to Mitt Romney’s bid for the presidency and a Tony Award-winning musical named after the Book of Mormon. But much remains unknown about this faith, including the circumstances surrounding its primary sacred text. Paul C. Gutjahr’s well-written and erudite account of the history of the Book of Mormon fills much of this void. In The Book of Mormon: A Biography, he describes an earthly drama that begins in upstate New York in the 1820s, connects with a mythological past about ancient North American civilizations (which includes ... Read More

Grover Norquist’s Proposal to Raise Taxes

May 2, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
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Recently, in an interview with Ira Glass on This American Life, Grover Norquist — the famed founder of Americans for Tax Reform, and organizer of the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, which asks political candidates across the United States to commit themselves in writing to oppose any and all increases in taxes — argued that one of the most fundamental reforms necessary to shrink the size of government is to move all state and local government employees from publically funded pension systems to 401(k) plans. At this point, the problem with state and local government pensions is not a matter ... Read More

Researchers & Discoveries: Black Hole Hunter

May 1, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
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What’s her story? In January, Andrea Ghez became the first woman to win the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ Crafoord Prize, one of the highest honors in astronomy. How’d she do that? Proved that a supermassive black hole sits at the center of our galaxy. Ghez helped develop optical technologies that cut through the sight-muddying effects of Earth’s atmosphere, enabling her team to see the Milky Way’s center — 26,000 light years away — far more clearly than ever before. Which let them monitor thousands of previously invisible stars. Their orbital trajectories, Ghez showed, ... Read More

R.I.P. Traditional Marriage

April 30, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
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The idea of Government-managed marriage — the institution that dates from the 1600s and has long been considered one of the foundations of the social structure of civilization — is rumored to have passed away, quietly, in 2011. It has been widely reported that the institution died of complications from a progressive disease. The causes include growing equality in the workforce, social acceptance of licenseless sex, and the dissolving of the stigma of being either single or gay. In its prime, marriage offered economic structure and support to women who didn’t work outside the home, ... Read More

Cancer Wars: An Outcast Researcher’s New Theory

April 27, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
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Compact and white-haired at 75, Peter Duesberg has wide-set blue eyes magnified by corrective lenses as thick as his German accent. He is the picture of a courtly Old World scientist. But Duesberg is given to through-the-looking-glass scientific theories, the most recent of which, about the origins of cancer, could turn an accepted truth of molecular biology on its head. Viruses like hepatitis C don’t cause cancer, he says, and neither do collections of mutated genes — as nearly every other scientist believes. Instead, he argues, cancer arises when the number and appearance of a cell’s ... Read More

Ocean Garbage Patches: A Scientific Sifting

April 26, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Ocean Garbage Patches: A Scientific Sifting

Our oceans are filled with trash. Oceanographers, environmentalists and biologists have been working for years to better understand the problem of, and solutions to, marine debris. In the current issue of Pacific Standard we highlight the problem of, and some possible solutions to, marine debris in “Swimming with Nurdles” (PDF). Add to that: Marine debris is easy to think of as an environmentalist’s problem. But, according to an Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation report, marine debris cost Pacific nations’ fishing, shipping and marine tourism industries $1.27 billion in ... Read More

Turning Diabetes Treatment Upside Down

April 25, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Turning Diabetes Treatment Upside Down

There is something eerily familiar about Athens, Ohio, even if you grew up in New York City. It’s the accessible beauty of Appalachia, which surrounds the town — the gentle hills, the long, flat fields, the meandering brooks and neat, smallish farms. It’s something more nefarious as well: the profound rural poverty vivid in the mini-malls and convenience stores on the outskirts of town. It’s the curse of plenty — the deal with the devil that this area made long ago with large mining corporations and fast-food chains. And it’s the number of overweight and obese people of all ages ... Read More