Jul/Aug 2013

When a thing you just found out about suddenly seems to crop up everywhere.

• By Pacific Standard Staff

Long before email, it was predicted that traditional letters would be dropped off using the ever-advancing technology of the Space Age.

• By Matt Novak

A look back at the influential history of one of the sporting world's most elite events, which has also managed to attract attention from the masses.

• By Pacific Standard Staff

Flying high with the new Airborne Snow Observatory.

• By Brian Calvert

Five years after the financial crash, psychologists are still asking economists to hand over the keys.

• By Jesse Singal

An inside look at what it's like when austerity measures lead to direct cuts in your city's emergency services.

• By Zac Unger

Bottom-of-the-barrel creature features. Topless-teen comedies. "Mockbuster" rip-offs. In Burbank, California, one low-budget studio cranks out whatever Netflix wants.

• By Amanda Hess

How military-style policing became America's new normal.

• By Peter Moskos

Worries about oil and gas hog the airwaves. But copper is also essential to keep the world running: It threads through your house, your computer, your eco-correct hybrid car. And it's getting just as difficult, expensive, and environmentally menacing as oil to extract. We have entered the era of tough ore.

• By Tim Heffernan

Four destinations across the Web that Pacific Standard staffers find themselves returning to again and again.

• By Pacific Standard Staff

Tiny numbers, big impacts.

• By Pacific Standard Staff

Washington's Initiative 502 legalized pot across the state, but provided only a few guidelines for how to produce, process, and retail the drug. What regulations will lawmakers put in place—and will they convince black market users to switch to a new, regulated industry?

• By Vince Beiser

Melodramas promoting literacy and family planning? Tune in next week.

• By Kevin Charles Fleming

It was a dark time in a long, drawn-out war. Afghanistan was festering with resentment. The Pentagon brass were desperate. It was the kind of last-ditch moment when authorities start throwing an era's weirdest ideas at its most hopeless bureaucratic mistakes.

• By Brian Calvert

Updates to past Pacific Standard print stories.

• By Pacific Standard Staff

Meet some of the people behind the July/August 2013 issue of Pacific Standard.

• By Pacific Standard Staff

Introducing the July/August 2013 issue of Pacific Standard.

• By Maria Streshinsky

From Rust, Regeneration, and Romance to The Global Crime Scene: Crime Narratives Beyond Borders, academic gatherings you should be aware of.

• By Pacific Standard Staff

From the Twelfth Annual World UFO Day to the Running of the Bulls, events you should be aware of.

• By Pacific Standard Staff

Worries about post-traumatic stress have become a stock part of the media narrative surrounding tragedies like Boston and Newtown. And resilience is supposedly the best we can hope for in the face of adversity. But what if there's a third option? The story of one mass shooting, and the surprising tug of post-traumatic growth.

• By Mark Obbie

Seminal research that changed how we think about homosexuality—one step at a time, over the past century.

• By Pacific Standard Staff

Psychiatry is under attack for not being scientific enough, but the real problem is its blindness to culture. When it comes to mental illness, we wear the disorders that come off the rack.

• By Ethan Watters