Climate change and sustainability, criminal and social justice, education reform, mental-health issues, the future of work and employment—there are a number of broad subjects we’ve returned to again and again. You can see that when you take a moment to step back and survey our work. These are areas that need constant attention, that need to be continuously watched and reported on. And they’re areas we’re still covering to this day, and plan to cover going forward, now on more platforms than ever before—on PSmag.com, through our social accounts and publishing partners, and on The Edit, a brand new podcast that offers a behind-the-scenes look at how our in-depth reporting is done. But we’re opening this, our special 10th anniversary issue, with a brief look back at 10 big stories—one for each year since our founding in 2008 as Miller-McCune—that ran here, in our printed pages.
2008: The Environmental Pyramid
A respected geochemical engineer proposes a new way to deal with toxic waste: Make it into shrines that people can work, shop, and even live on.
2009: Weathering, the Storm
African Americans and other minorities get sick and die younger than whites. After decades of research, Arline Geronimus offers a controversial explanation: The long-term stress of living in a white-dominated society “weathers” blacks, making them age faster than their white counterparts.
2010: A Day in the Life of a Sleepy Student
The benefits of letting high school students sleep in.
2011: How to Stop Suicide by Cop
An investigation into the growing movement to train police officers not to kill citizens—even when they seem to be asking for it.
2012: The Death Penalty Is Experiencing Technical Difficulties
Your execution may not resume shortly. How legal wrangling over the chemicals used in lethal injection could shut down capital punishment.
2013: The Social Life of Genes
Day by day, week by week, your genes are in a conversation with your social world. Your neighbors, your friends, your family. They don’t just get under your skin, they get into the control rooms of your cells.
*Winner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Kavli Science Journalism Award for Magazine Feature Writing, recognizing outstanding reporting for a general audience.
2014: Women Aren’t Welcome Here
“Ignore the barrage of violent threats and harassing messages that confront you online every day.” That’s what women are told. But these relentless messages are an assault on women’s careers, their psychological bandwidth, and their freedom to live online. We have been thinking about Internet harassment all wrong.
*Winner of the Sydney Hillman Foundation’s Sidney Award for outstanding journalism that fosters social and economic justice.
2015: Bees, Inc.
A decade ago, people started panicking about the collapse of the honeybee population and the crash of our food supply. But today there are more honeybees than there were then. We have engineered our way to a frenzied and precarious new normal. Inside the pollination-industrial complex.
*Winner of the National Association of Science Writers’ Science in Society Award, which honors outstanding investigative and interpretive reporting about the sciences and their impact for good and ill.
2016: Adrift
An unprecedented number of refugees are boarding unseaworthy vessels for a dangerous crossing of the Mediterranean.
*Winner of the American Society of Magazine Editors’ National Magazine Award for Feature Photography, considered the highest honor in the magazine industry.
2017: Arms Dealers
When eight human heads arrived at a shipping warehouse in Detroit, the feds uncovered some unsavory details about the little-known trade in human remains.
A version of this story originally appeared in the March/April 2018 issue of Pacific Standard. Subscribe now and get eight issues/year or purchase a single copy of the magazine.
