Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Good Night, Vietnam

November 6, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
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Carol Worthman Anthropologist of Unconsciousness, Emory University WHAT’S HER DEAL? Trying to find out how television affects our sleep. HOW IS SHE DOING THAT? Worthman and her staff are currently documenting patterns of slumber among residents of 14 off-the-grid villages in a remote corner of Vietnam. Some of the 3,000 residents will soon be fitted with wireless GPS monitors and wristwatch-like gadgets that sense movement to determine whether the wearers are awake, resting, or asleep. Those devices will feed Worthman’s lab in Atlanta real-time data on where and when her subjects ... Read More

More like this: November-December 2012
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Kisaalita Engineers Solutions for Africa’s Rural Poor

November 1, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
William Kisaalita and milk

For a moment, William Kisaalita is distracted. In a spacious, sunlit office at the University of Georgia, Kisaalita should be focused on the book he just published, or the pile of papers teetering on his desk, or the phone calls and visitors that repeatedly interrupt his afternoon. Instead, Kisaalita, a professor and tissue engineer at the university, leans back in his chair, locking his hands behind his head, his dark eyes narrowing. "When you come here and are successful," he says, gesturing around the large office, "you have this nagging feeling. What have you done for the people at ... Read More

More like this: November-December 2010, Profile, Science
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Charles Harvey: Water Detective

August 17, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Data-Logging Electronics

When a new U.S. president takes office, the first official announcements often undo policies set under the previous administration. In 2001, for example, President George W. Bush notoriously suspended a new standard for arsenic in drinking water that had been announced late in the Clinton administration. The new rule cut the allowed level of arsenic from 0.05 micrograms per liter of water to 0.01, bringing the U.S. in line with the European Union and the World Health Organization. Arsenic was known to cause cancer, but the earlier limit had been considered safe for decades. Under Clinton, ... Read More

More like this: Environment, Profile, Science, September-October 2010
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The Value of Dead Bird Watching

June 15, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Julia Parrish

In a truly free state, citizens do everything with their own hands... — Rousseau, The Social Contract The smell makes my eyes water, but that doesn't stop Jane Dolliver from plopping down and digging the carcass out of the sand. She is not wearing gloves. Stefanie Porter, who is, stands off to the side, wincing a bit. Slowly, a shape appears: a long bill, a billowy fleshy pouch, thin bedraggled wings, large webbed feet — a juvenile brown pelican. From the general decay and the size of the maggots and, of course, the stink, Dolliver guesses that it has been dead for several days. She ... Read More

More like this: Environment, July-August 2010, Profile
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The U.N.’s Death Squad Watchdog

June 3, 2010 • By • 5 Comments
Philip Alston

In a troubled African nation one morning not long ago, Philip Alston was driven in a convoy of three white SUVs, with armed escorts front and rear, to a town south of the capital. Alston, the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, was going to meet with eyewitnesses to, and victims of, a violent crackdown by local police on political opponents of the government. An Australian native who now lives in New York, Alston has spent more than three decades working in human rights and international law. He was in the country (which Alston asked not be ... Read More

More like this: Legal Affairs, May-June 2010, Profile
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John Gwynne: Bronx Zoo Designer, Conservationist

February 23, 2010 • By • 2 Comments
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When he was 9, John Gwynne visited the Bronx Zoo, where for the first time he saw a gorilla, in a claustrophobic cage, in the manner of zoos in the 1950s. The mournful-looking creature impressed him; the confinement saddened him. But Gwynne was also fascinated by a huge cockroach wandering across the floor of the cage. He'd never seen anything like it. Before his 15th birthday, Gwynne told his parents that a good present would be having a pond dug on the family's land on a rural peninsula in southern Rhode Island. "I wanted to create an environment," he says. So his parents hired someone to ... Read More

More like this: Environment, March-April 2010, Profile, Science & Environment
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The Exonerator

January 5, 2010 • By • 2 Comments

The photographic pose seems a cliché now, given the frequency with which it's been struck during the past 25 years: Jim McCloskey, a self-taught private investigator, stands next to a man or a woman just released from prison after serving time for a murder or a rape committed by somebody else. Sometimes a third person shows up in the photograph, quite likely a lawyer who helped McCloskey expose the incompetence or misconduct of police detectives, prosecutors, crime laboratory analysts, psychiatrists, defense attorneys, judges, jailhouse informants, well-intended witnesses and jurors. There ... Read More

More like this: January-February 2010, Legal Affairs, Profile
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A Home Remedy For Day Care

October 28, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

Elizabeth Fair has been taking care of children since she was 14. Now a grandmother many times over, Fair shows off her newly established child care center, complete with the usual, bright trappings — cubbies, blocks, tiny furniture. What's unusual is the location. The center is in Dwight, a New Haven, Conn., neighborhood where 40 percent of the residents live below the federal poverty level. It's also in Fair's living and dining rooms. (Peek past the colorful weather chart on the wall, and you'll see the owner's adult son making himself breakfast in the kitchen.) Fair is operating a ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Culture & Society, November-December 2009, Profile
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An Iodine Chaser

August 19, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

The health risks of radiation exposure are notoriously difficult to measure, but the link between radioactive iodine and thyroid cancer is among the strongest for any radiation-induced disease. The thyroid gland uses iodine to make hormones that are important to development and metabolism. From the Chernobyl nuclear accident in the Ukraine and the U.S. atomic bombings of Japan in World War II, there is good evidence that the ingestion or inhalation of iodine-131 causes genetic damage that in turn can lead to thyroid cancer. In addition to iodine-131, nuclear fission reactions produce other ... Read More

More like this: Profile, Science, Science & Environment, September-October 2009
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A History in the Making

April 22, 2009 • By • 2 Comments

The renowned American-Indian writer, historian, theologian, professor and activist Vine Deloria Jr. once posed a question: "Did they ever think of asking the Indians?" Deloria was referring to the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, administered from the top down, like so many programs that have charted the course of Indian life in the United States. But he could have been talking about just about any encounter Indians have had with the federal government. It's surprising just how little is known — or understood — about American Indians beyond the Hollywood stereotype of noble savage and ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Culture & Society, Education, May-June 2009, Profile
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