Issue #62: February 2018 Archives - Pacific Standard

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Prisons have no incentive to pay inmates better—to the contrary. Unlike workers in the free market, who (theoretically, anyway) can weigh factors like pay, working conditions, and other benefits when deciding where to work, inmates do not have a choice between employers. If they need the money, or the experience, they must take or leave what the prison is offering.

The Death Penalty in America: A Lethal History

In colonial Virginia, authorities could hang settlers for a crime as small as stealing grapes or killing a neighbor's chicken. The penal code in America's first colony was, in fact, so harsh its governor eventually reduced the number of capital offenses out of fear that settlers would refuse to live there. Since then, the number and severity of crimes punishable by death in the United States have fluctuated; today, the death penalty is still legal in 31 states. Here are some of the critical turning points in the history of capital punishment in America.

Bryan Stevenson’s Quest for Justice

From growing up in rural Delaware to opening the National Memorial for Peace and Justice.

Since We Last Spoke: Honey From Global Bee Populations Is Contaminated With Pesticides

Updates to stories from the Pacific Standard archive.

Pacific Standard Staff

Demonstrators demanding an increase in pay for fast-food and retail workers protest in the Loop on December 5th, 2013, in Chicago, Illinois.

The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages

Historian Annelise Orleck traveled to Mexico, Cambodia, and Bangladesh, plus all across America, to interview low-wage workers fighting for better conditions and pay.

Activists hold signs in front of the the United States Supreme Court during the 2018 March for Life on January 19th, 2018, in Washington, D.C.

PS Picks: Katie Watson’s ‘Scarlet A: The Ethics, Law, and Politics of Ordinary Abortion’

PS Picks is a selection of the best things that the magazine's staff and contributors are reading, watching, or otherwise paying attention to in the worlds of art, politics, and culture.

Kristina Kutateli

Artist and illustrator Maria Qamar.

Artist Maria Qamar Blends South Asian Sensibilities With Pop Art

We spoke to Maria Qamar about what she recommends reading, watching, and listening to.

California Governor Jerry Brown.

Since We Last Spoke: California Bans Mandatory Life Sentences Without the Possibility of Parole for Juvenile

Updates to stories from the Pacific Standard archive.

Pacific Standard Staff

Some of the Laysan albatrosses on Midway die from stomach punctures. Others slowly starve, weak and weighted down, their bellies full but empty of anything to nourish them. Their bodies litter the ground. Some wash broken in the waves, their great wings trailing behind them.

Since We Last Spoke: A Petition to Recognize the Great Pacific Garbage Patch as an Official Nation

Updates to stories from the Pacific Standard archive.

Pacific Standard Staff

PS Picks: The ‘Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today’ Exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art

PS Picks is a selection of the best things that the magazine's staff and contributors are reading, watching, or otherwise paying attention to in the worlds of art, politics, and culture.

Kristina Kutateli

Letter From Qaanaaq, Greenland: The Man Who Listens for Nuclear Tests Above the Arctic

Svend Erik had not intended to spend the last 37-odd years of his life permanently in Qaanaaq, stewarding critical data through decades of changes in computing and communications technologies, but he had fallen in love.