Pacific Standard July-August 2013 Cover

How the Artificial Pancreas Eases Diabetes Therapy

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

You don’t have to tell your heart to beat or your lungs to breathe. These actions are automatic. But more than 1 million Americans are stuck with a pancreas they have to operate manually. They have type 1 diabetes, meaning their pancreases don’t produce enough insulin, the hormone that regulates blood sugar. There’s no cure — only treatment in the form of regular insulin injections, which require diabetics to constantly monitor their blood sugar, or glucose, levels. Few diseases require this much attention, every day, all day. A handful of researchers in America and Europe aim to ... Read More

Why Obama Is Looking West

April 23, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Why Obama Is Looking West

With little fanfare and far less media awareness than one might expect, last fall the Obama administration initiated a series of defense-policy moves that amount to the most significant transformation of America’s military position in the world since the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union collapsed. This new defense posture may even rework the post–World War II order itself. After all, if we are witnessing the dwindling in importance of Europe, a withdrawal from insoluble Middle East and South Asian crises, the inexorable pull of a growing China, and America turning to face the Pacific ... Read More

Unleashing a Wall Street Watchdog

April 23, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
ps-martin-act

No one doubts that the Great Recession has been the worst economic crisis in this country since the Great Depression. By whatever yardstick — the near collapse of the banking system, the 8.8 million jobs lost between 2008 and 2010 — no downturn in the intervening 80 years comes close. The crisis has forced a fundamental rethinking of the financial system, a conversation that is now centered on the 2010 reforms known as the Dodd-Frank Act. But the 2,319 pages of legislation do not hold all of the answers. If the regulators who are responsible for enforcing the hundreds of new rules are not ... Read More

Paul Theroux on What’s Really Wrong With Africa

April 23, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Paul Theroux on What’s Really Wrong With Africa

Paul Theroux’s new novel, The Lower River, is one of a series of books in which the longtime author and travel writer reimagines seminal events in his own life. Like his protagonist, Ellis Hock, Theroux was in the Peace Corps in Malawi in the early 1960s. In his 44 books — fiction and nonfiction — he has never shied from commenting on the possibilities and perils humans face in their quest for solutions. Here is his recent conversation with Pacific Standard Editor-in-Chief Maria Streshinsky: Question: You have said it is contemptible “to stay home and invent the exotic, as Saul ... Read More

Is Facebook Stunting Your Child’s Growth?

April 23, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
ps-emotional-intelligence

I waved as I walked past Sara’s room: I’m a resident supervisor, a “Dorm Dad,” in a coed dorm at Stanford University. Sara told me she was texting Billy, her “sort of” boyfriend. I had just seen Billy sitting in the lounge down the hall, and told her so. “I know,” she said. “It’s more efficient to text him.” I smiled. The computer screen behind her was filled with Facebook pages, chat windows, YouTube videos, and a smattering of homework assignments. Efficiency? I’ve never seen a group of people better at wasting time than college freshmen. Not long before this, I ... Read More

China’s Accidental Spies

April 23, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
goes here

The jet fighter suddenly appears directly overhead, twin engines roaring, landing gear dangling like claws, diamond-shaped wings tracing an impressive black silhouette against the grayish sky. The airplane, displaying the red-star insignia of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, whips past and disappears beyond the opposite horizon. In its wake, there is only the gray sky — and the excited chatter of a cameraman and the other airplane aficionados huddled around him. “The wind was strong!” someone says in the local Sichuan dialect, referring to the blast from the fighter’s ... Read More

The Death Penalty on Life Support

April 12, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
mmw-death-penalty-041212

(Editor's Note: The Connecticut Legislature voted today to abolish the death penalty for all future cases, becoming the fifth state in the last four years to do so. The following is a piece written by Vince Beiser for the upcoming debut issue of Pacific Standard. It explores the reasons why the death penalty is falling out of favor.) You may have noticed something about the debate over the death penalty in the presidential race: there’s hardly been one. That speaks volumes about how this persistent institution is quietly fading away in the U.S. — for the second time in history. Most ... Read More

Why Thomas Kinkade’s Art Touched So Many

April 6, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
mmw-kinkade-040612

Alexis Boylan felt a jolt as she leafed through the October 15, 2001, issue of The New Yorker. An art historian just completing her doctorate in contemporary American art, Boylan was pleased to see a profile of a painter and printmaker, but in her years of scholarship, she had never come across the saturated pastel colors of Thomas Kinkade. Then she started seeing his imagery everywhere: prints of stone cottages nestled in verdant gardens, calendars showing small-town main streets, coffee cups featuring sunsets over lighthouses perched on rocky cliffs. “An often-cited figure is that ... Read More

How Rube Goldberg Would Have Watered the West

March 2, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
ps-super-soaker2

Los Angeles has always been short of water, and rarely more so than in the 1940s. In that decade, wartime industries boomed and the city’s population grew to nearly 2 million people. Water use shot up 59 percent. Construction engineer Sidney Cornell had a unique idea to fix the city’s water woes: hydro-cannons. The October 1951 issue of Mechanix Illustrated magazine included a drawing by legendary futurism illustrator Frank Tinsley that showed Cornell’s plan in action. As the magazine described, man-made geysers would shoot water from “the mouth of one into the funnel of the ... Read More