Pacific Standard March-April 2013 Cover

A Twist of Faiths: Claremont’s Mission to Desegregate Religion

June 22, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Books from different religious traditions

“Have you seen our prayer room?” Mahmoud Harmoush bolts up a stairway on the campus of Claremont School of Theology, the tails of his navy sports coat flying. He’s a stocky man of 52, quick on his feet, with a beard flecked salt and pepper. On the first day of spring semester, just a few students have returned to the United Methodist graduate school in this Southern California college town. Harmoush, a master’s candidate, had hustled from his home in Temecula—an hour south—to an 8:30 class that morning on interfaith counseling, driven home, and then returned. He was ready to ... Read More

Going Ballistic: From Cold War to Commercial Space

June 21, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Delta IV rocket launches from Vandenberg

JUST ANOTHER DAY AT THE BEACH, April 3, sunny and balmy, across from Amtrak’s Surf railroad station, a two-track whistle stop along the California shoreline. Campers and drivers in open jeeps and more than a few BMWs keep joining the gathering crowd, their kids running off toward the waves. Others pace the platform. Two hours to go, according to the red Amtrak schedule board, where the 4:12 is listed. The station is a speck of California, just shy of Vandenberg Air Force Base. Amtrak runs right though the base, but today the 4:12 isn’t a train; it is the time scheduled for blastoff of a ... Read More

Just Breathe: Confirming Meditation’s Benefits

June 20, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Profile of Face with Swirls

IN THE SPRING OF 1985 THINGS STARTED TO GO WRONG. A jittery teenager held a pistol to my wife’s head and robbed us a few blocks from our home in Houston. A few months later, I had too much to drink at a party and felt as though I was asphyxiating. At the emergency room, they decided I was just hyperventilating but the next morning I woke up feeling disoriented, with tingling extremities. Our doctor thought I had mononucleosis, so I spent the next three weeks resting, obsessing about what was wrong. Before long, I was taking antidepressants and seeing a therapist. We spent months unraveling ... Read More

Pacific Rim Trade: a Great Blue Highway Out There

June 19, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Preview of global trade graphic

While the triangle trade once dominated the American economy, these days the United States' biggest trading partners by far are fellow Pacific Rim nations. In the current issue of Pacific Standard the graphic below highlights the staggering scope and scale of goods that move between Ring of Fire nations and the U.S. Though NAFTA dominates the podium positions—thanks largely in part to Canada and Mexico being our first and third largest suppliers of crude oil, respectively—each year it gets harder to find products on American shelves without that ubiquitous label: "Made in ... Read More

Letter from the Editor

June 18, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

IF A BATTERED ECONOMY AND CEASELESS WAR ARE THE STORIES OF THE DECADE, the stress they have produced in the national psyche is the health story of the decade. We are only just starting to focus on the anxiety and mental anguish both have inflicted. Which is why we’ve included a special section on stress in this issue. One evening early this year I was having dinner with writer David Freed and his wife, psychologist Betsy Bates Freed. The subjects of stress and war came up: the two had just learned that their son was soon shipping to Afghanistan. After he left, David would write, in the ... Read More

A State of Military Mind

June 18, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Navy SEAL candidates hit the beach

AS THE FOOT PATROL SNAKED INTO THE MOCK AFGHAN TOWN in the foothills of Camp Pendleton, just north of San Diego, the marines scanned courtyards, rooftops, and the crowd of locals milling around the market. A simulated improvised explosive device, or IED, exploded in a trash pile and shook the ground. The role players—Afghans hired to play street vendors, teachers, village officials—shouted and scattered, leaving the streets empty save for two marines lying in the street, deemed wounded for the exercise. One lay motionless. The other writhed and screamed for help. “Get the casualties back ... Read More

Prometheus Adviser Kevin Hand: Aliens’ Advance Man

June 8, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Astrobiologist Kevin Hand

IT’S A SUNNY SPRING DAY at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory outside Los Angeles when I show up at Kevin Hand’s office to talk about his work with Ridley Scott on the new film, Prometheus, a sort-of prequel to the Alien series. But it seems only polite to ask first about the trip Hand has just returned from: a quick expedition to the middle of the Pacific Ocean with another star director, James Cameron, who was taking a custom-made submarine on a historic dive to the deepest point on Earth. Cameron spent three hours at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, 33,000 feet below the sea, the ... Read More

Weaponizing Mosquitoes to Fight Tropical Diseases

June 7, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Artist's conception of mechanized mosquito

IT WAS THE WORST OUTBREAK OF DENGUE FEVER IN AUSTRALIA IN 60 YEARS. More than 1,000 people were stricken by the potentially fatal, insect-born infection in a 2009 epidemic that swept through the beach towns of northern Australia with lightning speed. “Right over there is where it started,” Scott Ritchie says, pointing to a green clapboard cottage perched on stilts to avoid floods. It’s an overcast but warm April day in a quiet, palm-tree-dotted suburb of Cairns, a jumping-off point for expeditions to the Great Barrier Reef. Ritchie, a medical entomologist, explains that the Aedes ... Read More