Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

The Music Man

Minolta DSC

JOSÉ XUNCAX FIRST LANDED IN JAIL at 13 for armed robbery. Since then, he’s been in and out of the system, as he calls it, six times. Now, at 15, tall, muscled, with close-cropped brown hair and a scar over his left eye, he’s serving six months for another robbery. He lives at Camp Mendenhall, a juvenile-detention facility tucked between the mountains at the northern edge of Los Angeles County. School never meant much to José, and he stopped going entirely after probation officers showed up in his classroom to execute a warrant. When he arrived at the camp, he was, by his own account, ... Read More

Reading the Great Unread American Novel Without Having to Read

Always wanted to read Moby Dick, but never actually wanted to read Moby Dick? Then look no further! Now, thanks to Plymouth University and the Moby Dick Big Read, celebrities will read it to you. Every day a new chapter will be available for download from their website. So far you can download the first six chapters, which means there's only 129 to go. H/T Open Culture   ... Read More

Infant Intelligentsia: Can Babies Learn to Read? And Should They?

Baby with Book

THE VIDEO CLIP on Larry Sanger’s website shows the cofounder of Wikipedia looking both scholarly and paternal with his owlish glasses, thinning pate, open book, and lapful of chubby-cheeked 3-year-old. Sanger’s son is gazing hard at the book pages and pronouncing words with the charming r-lessness of a toddler: “Congwess shall make no waw wespecting an establishment of wewigion or pwohibiting the fwee exewcise theweof or abwidging the fweedom of speech or of the pwess…” It’s not clear whether the boy is working toward a doctorate, like his dad’s, or training to be our future ... Read More

To Stay Thin, Eat Like the Cultural Elite

Reading in fancy library

You don’t burn many calories flipping pages in a novel, or walking to your seat in the opera house. But new research reveals an intriguing association between weight control and enjoyment of culturally enriching but sedentary activities. That’s the conclusion I reach in a paper published in the Sociology of Health and Illness. The results show how specific sedentary activities reflect one’s lifestyle, and tell us something about the social sources of health. The study uses survey data from 17 nations, most of which are in Europe. In each country, a representative sample of the ... Read More