Pacific Standard July-August 2013 Cover

How the Trailer Park Could Save Us All

April 22, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
trailer-park-end-of-world-lead

Residents call life at Pismo Dunes Senior Park "Pismodise." Park manager Louise Payne calls it "a holding tank for the great beyond." Louise has short hair and blunt bleached bangs that give her the air of a preteen skateboarder, but at 72 she's often found rolling by the park's 333 trailers in her electric golf cart, alternating between her roles as mother hen and whip-cracker. California is a notoriously youthful culture, but eventually the perpetually young get very old. If they're lucky enough to live in Pismodise, which is on the Central Coast, they can exit its palm-lined entrance, cross ... Read More

We Aren’t the World

February 25, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
Muller Lyer Illusion 3

IN THE SUMMER of 1995, a young graduate student in anthropology at UCLA named Joe Henrich traveled to Peru to carry out some fieldwork among the Machiguenga, an indigenous people who live north of Machu Picchu in the Amazon basin. The Machiguenga had traditionally been horticulturalists who lived in single-family, thatch-roofed houses in small hamlets composed of clusters of extended families. For sustenance, they relied on local game and produce from small-scale farming. They shared with their kin but rarely traded with outside groups. While the setting was fairly typical for an ... Read More

The Fuzzy Face of Climate Change

December 17, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
polarbearcentered

On January 24, 2004, in the frigid moonscape of an Arctic winter, wildlife biologist Steven Amstrup rode in a helicopter flying low over the ice. Using an infrared heat detector, he hoped to find polar bears in their dens. When the gun recorded a hit, Amstrup circled around for a closer look. What confronted him was something he had never seen in 34 years of research. The mouth of the den was open, and a smear of bright-red blood stretched away for more than 200 feet. At the end of a long drag trail in the ice lay the still-warm body of a female polar bear. The air temperature was 20 degrees ... Read More

A Giant Leap Forward

October 23, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
This picture taken on June 9, 2012 shows

ON A MONDAY AFTERNOON IN JUNE, belated history was made 213 miles above the Earth’s surface. At 2:07 p.m. Beijing time, the Chinese Shenzhou-9 space capsule, carrying three astronauts, plugged into a 31-inch-wide receptacle on China’s unoccupied Tiangong-1 space station. At the moment the two vehicles connected, by way of a yellow-painted latch, China became only the third nation, after the U.S. and the Soviet Union, to dock two spacecraft in orbit. The first orbital linkups of American and Soviet spacecraft occurred in 1966 and 1967. To some observers, China’s third-place finish ... Read More

The Governor’s Last Stand

August 16, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Photo by Alex Farnum

When California Governor Jerry Brown addressed the state chamber of commerce just before Memorial Day to gain support to raise taxes, he seemed to revel in admitting he was stuck in a box. This was precisely the dilemma that existentialist heroes relish: at a time when the word taxes had become dirty, he was more or less leveraging his political future, and the state’s, on a measure to broadly raise revenues. This seemed like the only way out for a government that was running up massive deficits while firing teachers, shuttering libraries, and cutting back support for the poor. But Brown ... 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

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

Is Radiation Actually Good For Some of Us?

February 17, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
goes here

Meet Reference Man, a kind of hypothetical Ken Doll: a 20-something white male, fit and hearty, out in the park doing a hundred one-armed pushups every morning at 5:30. He’s the guy most radiation exposure standards are designed to protect. But as a stand-in, he’s passé. Reference Man was born when most of the evidence about the health effects of radiation came from high-dose exposures such as nuclear bombs. But the landscape has changed. Exposure now comes from low and often chronic levels of radiation such as medical technologies, which are the fastest-growing source of radiation ... Read More

California’s Medical Marijuana Morass

January 3, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

In California, annual retail sales of medical marijuana may be as high as $1.3 billion. But to use it, people have to grow it, and deliver it, and the laws governing the substance are anything but clear. What’s more, the feds’ official position is: no marijuana is legal. And they’re cracking down. Writer David Freed takes us on a road trip through the medical marijuana morass as part of the “Medicine on the Front Lines” report in the January-February 2012 issue of Miller-McCune magazine. We’re riding south out of Northern California’s Humboldt County, pushing 75 miles an ... Read More

LAPD Cracks Cold Cases With Science, Grit

October 19, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

His list of victims could read like a yearbook: Debra Jackson, 1985; Henrietta Wright, 1986; Barbara Ware, Bernita Sparks, and Mary Lowe, 1987; Alicia Alexander and Lachrica Jefferson, 1988. Then, after a break of more than a dozen years — the "sleeper" period that inspired his nickname — Valerie McCorvey, 2003. Four years after that — Jenica Peters, 2007. All of the victims were black women. They were as young as 18 and as old as 36 when he ended their lives. Most were sexually assaulted and then shot, their bodies left in alleys or trash bins along a stretch of Western Avenue in ... Read More