Pacific Standard March-April 2013 Cover

Uganda: The Number One (Anti-Homosexuality, Anti-Women) Place to Visit

April 8, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
uganda-woman

Here's Lonely Planet on Uganda, its number-one country to visit for 2012: It’s taken nasty dictatorships and a brutal civil war to keep Uganda off the tourist radar, but stability is returning and it won’t be long before visitors come flocking back. After all, this is the source of the river Nile—that mythical place explorers sought since Roman times. It’s also where savannah meets the vast lakes of East Africa, and where snow-capped mountains bear down on sprawling jungles. Not so long ago, the tyrannical dictator and ‘Last King of Scotland’ Idi Amin helped hunt Uganda’s big ... Read More

A World Without Gatekeepers?

April 2, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
(PHOTO: BROCREATIVE/SHUTTERSTOCK)

http://youtu.be/5MSmoWKFz5A Last year, comedian Patton Oswalt delivered the keynote address at the Montreal Just for Laughs comedy festival. The speech (like much of Oswalt's work) is both funny and profound, particularly the section he addresses to the people he refers to as comedy's "gatekeepers"—the entertainment industry executives, focus groups, talent agents, and others who determine who gets bookings, shows, and albums, and who doesn't. As Oswalt explains it, the gatekeepers are increasingly irrelevant. Any actor with an iPhone, he notes, now has as much film-making power as ... Read More

Expect Gay Marriages in the Courthouse, Not the Statehouse

March 29, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
Parisians protest against the legislature's "marriage and adoption for all" draft law in January. The girl's placard reads, "I know where I come from; I wonder where we're going." (PHOTO: ANDREY MALGIN/SHUTTERSTOCK)

Ah, liberal France, with its 35-hour work weeks, powerful unions, and ... massive anti-marriage equality rallies. With the Gallic legislature likely to legalize gay marriage next month, at least 300,000 marched in opposition. Even so, civil rights legislation guaranteeing marriage and adoption rights for same-sex couples has already passed the country's lower house, and is nearly certain to gain full approval in France. The march—which ended with police deploying tear gas—was a useful reminder that European social politics are not as simple as they can seem from across the ... Read More

Where Have All the Protesters Gone?

March 19, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
An anti-war protest in New York City in 2004 (PHOTO: PENGUIN/SHUTTERSTOCK)

A couple of years ago at a trade show I met an Egyptian business executive. He had come to Barcelona directly from the Tahrir Square protests in Egypt, where he'd been brained by a rock thrown by pro-Mubarak supporters. He was a higher-up in a successful telecom company in Cairo—to look at him you'd imagine him to have been a beneficiary of a dictatorship more than a critic of it. And yet there he was, bandaged and bruised, a few stitches over his right eye. It was only a few days after Mubarak had fallen, and he was so excited he shared several hours of video he'd recorded on his cell phone ... Read More

How We Learned to Set Aside Our Moral Qualms and Love the Bomb

March 18, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
Mushroom Cloud

Nuclear war is unthinkable. At least, that’s what we like to tell ourselves. Given the mass death and devastation from an atomic strike, surely only a desperate despot would even consider such a strike. Well, think again. A new study finds that, among the American public, the taboo against the use of nukes is far weaker than you might imagine. “When people are faced with scenarios they consider high-stakes, they end up supporting—or even preferring—actions that initially seem hard to imagine,” said Daryl Press, an associate professor at the Dartmouth College Department of ... Read More

The Strange Game Theory of the Sequester

February 27, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
Capitol Building

Barring the biggest Washington miracle since Dolly Madison ferreted paintings out of a burning White House in 1812, sequestration—the automatic, across-the-board cuts to defense, discretionary and certain health programs totaling $85 billion in the 2013 fiscal year, and $1.176 trillion over the next decade—will take effect March 1. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that these cuts will cost 750,000 jobs in 2013, and reduce gross domestic product for 2013 by up to 0.5%. The effects stand to be disastrous: that much is clear. But when it comes to the politics of the ... Read More

Misplaced Doubts About Preschool

February 15, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
President Obama presents his State of the Union speech to the Congress on Feb. 12, 2013 (PHOTO: WHITEHOUSE.GOV)

This post was originally published at the Century Foundation's Blog of the Century. Megan McArdle is raising concerns about President Obama‘s proposal for high-quality, universal preschool, arguing that successful programs with proven long-term benefits are also highly expensive and labor-intensive.  And it’s true that two of the most carefully studied and clearly effective preschool initiatives—the Perry Preschool program in Michigan and the Abecedarian program in North Carolina—were indeed costly and reliant on relatively large numbers of well-trained teachers. But there’s ... Read More

The Tunisian Litmus Test Turns Red

February 8, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
Tunisian protestors chant slogans behind barbed wire outside the Interior Ministry in Tunis, on February 7, 2013 during a demonstration against the killing of opposition figure and human rights lawyer Chokri Belaid. Police was deployed in force in the Tunisian capital amid fears the murder of the 48-year-old opposition figure could reignite nationwide violence, as the ruling Islamists broke ranks over how to defuse the crisis. (Photo: KHALIL/AFP/Getty Images)

Wednesday’s shooting of opposition politician Chokri Belaïd was the first assassination of a major political figure in Tunisia’s half-century modern history, according to Human Rights Watch. Unidentified gunmen approached Belaïd outside his home and shot him at point blank range, an act that appears calculated to threaten the progress of Tunisia’s “Jasmine Revolution,” the two year-old effort to establish a democracy in the small North Africa nation. Tunisia has one of the region’s most peaceful political cultures. While follow-on revolts in the so-called Arab Spring ... Read More

Modern Science Writers Leave Science Behind

December 28, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
redsciencebooks

Any book that touches upon politics almost automatically angers half of the American public, regardless of what is written inside of it. It takes a special person—an objective, open-minded and self-critical one—to read and learn from a science book that criticizes people with whom the reader likes and agrees with politically. Recently, Pacific Standard published a review (“Red Science, Blue Science,” January/February 2013) by Wray Herbert, a pop psychology writer,of political writer Chris Mooney’s book The Republican Brain and my new book, Science Left Behind, which I ... Read More

Someone Successfully Explained Egypt’s Politics! (In English)

December 4, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
MOHAMED-MORSI-WAVE

Below, an excerpt from must-read, Cairo-based Sarah Carr (tagline: "1/2 Egyptian. It's My Country Too You Bastards") who de-mystifies the bogeyman that is the Muslim Brotherhood. Who said international relations has to be complicated and eat-your-vegetables-esque? Every day that passes puts another dent in the legend of this 80-year-old group with its dazzling powers of organization and moderate Islamic vision and familiarity with the Egyptian street. Snort. Morsi is a dull cheating husband who misbehaves and attempts to make amends by offering surprise dinner invitations after he beats his ... Read More