Pacific Standard March-April 2013 Cover

Datebook: What’s Happening in May and June—and Why It Matters

May 3, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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MAY 10 First 2013 Solar Eclipse “For millennia,” according to NASA, “solar eclipses have been interpreted as portents of doom by virtually every known civilization.” Today, hundreds of “eclipse chasers” travel the world to catch the celestial action. A recent survey by an Australian psychologist found that 92 percent of them are male, and they have seen, on average, seven total eclipses—a feat that requires at least 10 years of trying. MAY 12 Mother’s Day Anna Jarvis of West Virginia organized the first Mother’s Day observances in 1908, and helped convince President ... Read More

More like this: Culture, May-June 2013
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Why Is Iran Running Out of Medicine?

April 12, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Earlier this week, an earthquake in southern Iran knocked down at least 800 houses, killed dozens, and injured 900. Lax building codes meant the cement structures crumbled fast, trapping people inside. Some of the victims were taken to hospitals in nearby Bushehr, also home to the country’s lone nuclear reactor. That’s where the problems really start—nukes and injury. Earthquakes tend to break bones, and bad breaks require surgery. Starting last fall, however, Iran appears to have run out of basic surgical supplies, owing to sanctions designed to limit the country’s nuclear program. ... Read More

More like this: Health
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Is America’s ‘Strategic Pivot’ Towards China Premature?

September 10, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

In the cover story of our inaugural issue back in April, we took note of the Obama administration's strategic pivot towards Asia and the commensurate shift away from our entanglements in the Middle East and South Asia. In a new essay in the Journal Society, the communitarian sociologist Amitai Etzioni takes a dim view of this strategic move: The shift reminds one of the old parable about a child who was looking for his lost dime next to the lamp post, not because it was there that the dime went missing—but because it was there that the light made searching easy. In Etzioni's view, ... Read More

More like this: Politics, The 101, Uncategorized
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First They Came for the Bahá’í …

August 21, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

For a country trying to swim upstream against a torrent of international approbation, Iran makes some intriguing choices that burnish its reputation. Last month Angilee Shah explained how members of the Bahá’í faith are prohibited from higher education. Earlier this month, the Islamic Republic of Iran moved to ban women from taking degree-level courses in 77 areas. The restrictions on women’s education are not as overt as the one on the Bahá’í. For one, while promulgated from on high they are enacted at the country’s 36 government-run universities apparently on an ... Read More

More like this: Education, The 101
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The Ayatollah Drops by the Stem Cell Lab UPDATED!

August 7, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
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"Ayatollah Khamenei visiting Royan Institute for Reproductive Biomedicine," Instagram via @Khamenei_ir, the Iranian Supreme Leader's Twitter feed. The Royan Institute is Iran's center for stem cell research. Khamenei has just over 5,100 Twitter followers. The image first appeared three days ago. UPDATE: While scrolling through Khamenei's list of followers, the address @USEmbassyIran leapt out at us. Two hours later the State Department's Laura Seal, a spokeswoman, confirmed that the US had rolled out a digital Radio Free Europe-esque effort directed at Iran last December. Called the ... Read More

More like this: The 101
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Iran’s Secret University for Baha’i: Global and Underground

July 27, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Here’s how classes work: Holakou Rahmanian turns on his computer early in the morning or late at night. He goes to a website whose address is known only to students, faculty and administrators of his university. Sometimes he's in his pajamas when he logs in. Sometimes, he guesses, his professors are also in their pajamas. In his four years of classes, he has only seen his online teachers' faces once or twice. The bandwidth is saved for their voices and online whiteboards. Rahmanian, 23, completed a degree in computer science last fall and is close to finishing his second major in ... Read More

More like this: Education
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Engaging Iran Through Vaccine Diplomacy

November 30, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

To counter Iran’s emerging nuclear threat, we might look back to a little-known but highly effective Cold War collaboration between the U.S. and Soviet Union that defused international tensions and led to one of the world’s greatest humanitarian discoveries. Today, we are on the verge of achieving the global eradication of polio. Most of this success can be attributed to the development of a safe and effective live oral polio vaccine, a discovery that first began during the 1950s in the Cincinnati laboratory of Dr. Albert Sabin. Few are aware, however, that Sabin’s initial discovery ... Read More

More like this: Science
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War With Iran? Stuxnet May Be First Cybersalvo

September 28, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

The last time a Middle Eastern government hostile to Israel came close to building a nuclear bomb, the Israelis reacted with a swift, clandestine air raid that destroyed the reactor in question (Saddam Hussein's Osirak plant) before it could enrich uranium. Advance rumors of a similar raid by Israeli or American planes on Iran's nuclear facilities have been circulating, of course, for years. But some computer experts wonder if a new form of warfare — namely the computer worm called Stuxnet — hasn't been launched against Iran already, either by Israel or the United States. Guessing ... Read More

More like this: European Dispatch, Politics
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Inside the Cyberwar for Iran’s Future

December 18, 2009 • By • 1 Comment

On Friday, June 12, Iran voted. On Monday, June 15, Tehran erupted. In the face of fast ballot counting that credited high levels of electoral support to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the dense urban centers and Azeri communities known to back opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, the country exploded in demonstrations and violence. Over the next few days, Tehran and other major urban centers saw the largest street protests and rioting since the 1979 revolution. Domestic politics has often interfered in the administration of elections in Iran, where even competing at the ballot box requires ... Read More

More like this: Culture, January-February 2010, Media, Politics, Rational Argument
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Iran 2009, Meet Ohio 2004

June 18, 2009 • By • 1 Comment

With violence and mass protests dominating media coverage in the aftermath of elections in Iran, relatively little ink addresses whether scientific evidence supports the idea that the election was in fact stolen. In several ways, Iran 2009 looks a lot like Ohio 2004: errors in the voting rolls, votes counted by partisans and strange anomalies in the results. Who knew we had so much in common? As for Iran, opinion polls leading up to the election were sketchy, though widely cited as the most convincing evidence of fraud just as exit polling in Ohio raised eyebrows. But not so fast. The ... Read More

More like this: Findings
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