Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Terrorism’s Centerfolds

May 23, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Michelle Legro runs a website called My Daguerreotype Boyfriend, a Tumblr where readers can submit photos of really attractive and long dead men. One of the men featured is this guy. That’s Louis Lingg, the German anarchist partially responsible for the 1886 Haymarket Bombing. Haymarket started as a labor demonstration. When the police came in to break up the demonstration someone threw a dynamite bomb at them. Seven police officers, and four other people, were killed in the event. Investigators later discovered dynamite bombs in Lingg’s apartment. He was arrested and tried with seven ... Read More

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The Changing War on Terror

May 17, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Is the United States safe enough? That is the fundamental question being asked by the public, policymakers, and members of the Obama Administration after the Boston bombing. What shape is al Qaeda in now and how does it affect those of us living in the United States? While working at the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) Counterterrorism Center as an analyst and targeting officer I focused on a loose network in Iraq that eventually grew into the al Qaeda we recognize. From my perspective, we are almost witnessing—today—the reverse engineering of al Qaeda back into its initial state ... Read More

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How Many People Have Died in Terrorist Attacks This Month?

April 19, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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In 2011, the most-recent year of the Global Terrorism Index, there were 4,564 terrorist incidents, which led to 7,473 deaths. The numbers presumably take a while to compile, and last year's numbers are still unavailable, but there's a a constantly-updated chart of this year's terrorist attacks here. It's by no means exhaustive, but it's at least a list of attacks and deaths that have definitely happened. From this past month: 75 dead in bombings and shootings in Iraq on the 15th 55 dead in an assault in Afghanistan on the 3rd 45 dead in a bombing in Iraq on the 1st 35 dead in suicide ... Read More

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Terrorism and Privilege: Tim Wise on the Power of Whiteness

April 18, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Editor's Note: This post originally appeared on Sociological Images, a Pacific Standard partner site. As the nation weeps for the victims of the horrific bombing in Boston, one searches for lessons amid the carnage, and finds few. That violence is unacceptable stands out as one, sure. That hatred—for humanity, for life, or whatever else might have animated the bomber or bombers—is never the source of constructive human action seems like a reasonably close second. But I dare say there is more; a much less obvious and far more uncomfortable lesson, which many are loathe to learn, but ... Read More

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How Safe Can a Marathon Be?

April 16, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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The marathon-as-spectacle is, more than any other sporting event, built on the responsibility and rationality and general non-wickedness of other human beings. You’re at this long, winding, sweeping thing—event really is the best way to put it. It’s a stadium 26.2 miles long. And you’re allowed to be up close to the competitors—cheering them on, handing them water, sneaking onto the course and claiming you've won—at any point. Marathon Day was Boston’s day to not be Boston. That is, the day that all the stereotypes of the city—loud, belligerent, belligerently drunk fans ... Read More

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Driving Is Much Deadlier Than Terrorism—Why Isn’t It Scarier?

April 16, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Whether you're driving in a car, walking down the street, or merely sitting in a chair, there are about a hundred ways that life could end: instantly, slowly, ironically, stupidly, early, or even painfully. Yet despite the precariousness native to existence, most of us manage to soldier on. Every so often, however, we get hung up on something, and our stoic composure gets tossed out the window. Topics like nuclear power, genetically-modified foods, and, more recently, horse meat in food, bring out humanity's true nature, "guided by emotion rather than by reason, easily swayed by trivial ... Read More

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Why Do We Hurt Each Other?

April 15, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Shortly after reports started coming out—from professional journalists and citizen reporters alike—that two explosions had gone off in downtown Boston this afternoon near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, the world's oldest annual marathon and one of the most high-profile road-racing events anywhere in the world, my friend and former colleague, Max Fisher, now the foreign affairs blogger for The Washington Post, tweeted out a message from his sister, a runner, that got me thinking. "I have been running long distance events for many years and every time I go by a crowd I get that ... Read More

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America’s Sea-Born Terrorism Challenge: the Panga Boat

April 1, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
(PHOTO: SHUTTERSTOCK)

Officials with the Department of Homeland Security were roundly eviscerated on Capitol Hill last week, blistered for their surprising failure—“stunning” was the word often used—to devise a reliable metric to gauge the status of border security. Both sides in the battle for immigration reform insist an improved measurement is critical to the passage of any legislative package. High-ranking officials with Homeland Security had no answer; worse yet—at least according to the members of Congress giving them the third degree—they said none was likely in the near future. No one at the ... Read More

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Terrorist? Cigarette Distributor? Both?

January 16, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Is France at war with terrorists in Mali? Or with smugglers? A study from September suggests the confusing answer is, yes. Back in September, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published a paper arguing that trans-Saharan smuggling of goods like cigarettes, and kidnapping for ransom, where far more central to the breakdown of order in that part of the desert than were desires for a terrorist base from which al Qaeda could attack Europe. The mess in North Mali was about corruption and money, argued the endowment's Wolfram Lacher: Over the past decade, the United States and ... Read More

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Rethinking the Classic ‘Obedience’ Studies

November 25, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
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They are among the most famous of all psychological studies, and together they paint a dark portrait of human nature. Widely disseminated in the media, they spread the belief that people are prone to blindly follow authority figures—and will quickly become cruel and abusive when placed in positions of power. It’s hard to overstate the impact of Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments of 1961, or the Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971. Yet in recent years, the conclusions derived from those studies have been, if not debunked, radically reinterpreted. A new perspective—one that ... Read More

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