Pacific Standard July-August 2013 Cover

The Physics of Terror

September 9, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The Physics of Terror

Last summer, physicist Aaron Clauset was telling a group of undergraduates who were touring the Santa Fe Institute about the unexpected mathematical symmetries he had found while studying global terrorist attacks over the past four decades. Their professor made a comment that brought Clauset up short. "He was surprised that I could think about such a morbid topic in such a dry, scientific way," Clauset recalls. "And I hadn't even thought about that. It was just ... I think in some ways, in order to do this, you have to separate yourself from the emotional aspects of it." If the professor's ... Read More

Rescuing the Rural Edge — It Takes a Village

September 6, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Where suburbia merges into countryside typically looks peaceful enough, with lawns giving way to forests and fields. But in most places, this is a zone of conflict and dysfunction. The steady loss of farmland and natural habitat to sprawl-pattern development endangers food supplies and other resources, as well as the health, wealth and survival prospects of individuals and even whole communities. Take California's fifth-largest city, Fresno, located in one of the most productive areas on Earth, the San Joaquin Valley. Agriculture is the principal industry in Fresno County — generating ... Read More

9/11 Memorial: Ground Zero as Dark Tourist Site

September 5, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

New York's ground zero, where the World Trade Center's Twin Towers once stood, is a place of what was and what will be. Ten years after terrorists flew planes into the buildings, the memories of what had been are fading into the dust of time and new construction. Chaos mixes with normality, pilings are driven into the ground, steel clatters as new structures rise. Bicyclists whiz past briefcase-toting commuters, both groups oblivious to curious onlookers straining to see through slits in the construction fences. These are the ground zero pilgrims, numbering daily in the thousands, many ... Read More

Chicago Charter Schools Aim to Lift Urban Education

August 23, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

The Woodlawn neighborhood on Chicago's South Side has been beset for decades by a familiar and depressing assortment of urban ills — gangs, arson and depopulation. The commercial buildings that once lined East 63rd Street, the main business thoroughfare, have simply vanished, leaving blocks of vacant lots. Yet, Woodlawn Secondary School, a sixth-through-12th-grade charter in the heart of the community, is thriving. Last year, 98 percent of its graduates, most of whom are African American, were admitted to four-year colleges. It's an especially impressive outcome, considering that 85 ... Read More

Corporations, Meet Transparency

June 27, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

The international commodities trader Cargill Inc. has unveiled a prototype: a kite-powered cargo ship that could reduce by as much as a third the amount of fossil fuel it takes to operate the enormous vessels that move the world's goods. Alcoa Inc., one of the world's biggest aluminum makers, gives away a cellphone app that tallies the cash to be made from recycling beer and soft drink cans. The chemical giant E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Co. says it not only has made impressive strides in improving its environmental performance, it is also building a lucrative new revenue stream from ... Read More

Congo’s Violent Rape Epidemic Needs a Cure

June 21, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Congolese army dentist provides free care

November is hot in Congo. Every month is hot in Congo. So it's likely their faces shone with sweat when the first residents of Duru, in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo, raced from mud hut to mud hut with a warning that sounded like, "El are ah!" That's "LRA," in French or the Congolese dialect Lingala. For years, the rebel Lord's Resistance Army has haunted northeastern Congo. Chased from neighboring Uganda in 2005 by the Ugandan army, the LRA found heavily forested, poorly governed Congo ideal for hiding and ripe for pillage. For more than two decades, the LRA had fought to ... 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

Slugging — The People’s Transit

March 7, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Slugging Benefits

Workers who have come down from the surrounding high-rise offices begin to line up on a sidewalk in downtown Arlington, Va., across the Potomac from the nation's capital, about 3:30 in the afternoon. They stand in a perfect queue, iPods and newspapers in hand, and they look, by all indications, like they're waiting for the bus. Public transit never shows. But, eventually, a blue Chrysler Town & Country does. The woman behind the wheel rolls down her window and yells a kind of call-and-response. "Horner Road?" "Horner Road?" repeats the first woman in line. "Horner Road!" And ... Read More

The Invisible Hate Crime

March 1, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

In February 2010, Jennifer Daugherty, a 30-year-old, mentally challenged woman from Greensburg, Pa., was brutally murdered by six people pretending to be her good friends. Holding her hostage for days, the perpetrators allegedly tortured Daugherty, shaving her head, binding her with Christmas decorations, beating her with a towel rack and vacuum cleaner, feeding her detergent, urine and various medications and then forcing her to write a suicide note, before stabbing her to death. The sadistic attack on Daugherty was anything but unique. Still, few Americans are aware of the special ... Read More

California’s Delta Water Blues

January 3, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

"Complaints are everywhere heard that the public good is disregarded in the conflict of rival parties." — James Madison, The Federalist, No. 10 Gilbert Cosio stands with his feet spread, one foot higher than the other, astride a sloping, 100-year-old levee surrounding Bouldin Island, 40 miles due south of Sacramento, Calif. We're here to take a look at improvements that Cosio, a civil engineer, has made to this levee, part of a serpentine network of flood control infrastructure that was imposed piecemeal over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries on the largest estuary on the West ... Read More