FEATURES
Bonanza
Conservative billionaire Philip Anschutz wants to turn his 500-square-mile cattle ranch into the world’s largest wind farm, generating enough energy for power all of the households in Los Angeles and San Francisco. It would also make Anschutz the nation’s most unlikely environmental hero—if he can ever get the thing built.
By Gabriel Kahn
• Sidebar: Coal Country
Class Struggles
School choice is tough for even the savviest parent. For immigrants, it can be hell.
By Alissa Quart
• Sidebar: New York City’s 2014-15 Directory of Public High Schools
This Doctor Knows Exactly How You Feel
A rare condition causes Joel Salinas to experience other people’s emotions and sensations. Is mirror-touch synesthesia a superpower or a curse?
By Erika Hayasaki
• Sidebar: Empathy for the Rest of Us
PROSPECTOR
Professor, Can You Spare a Dime?
Adjuncts on the edge resort to helping each other.
By Alissa Quart
Biting the Hand That Feeds You
A bedbug researcher bleeds for science.
By Laura Parker
Sonic Doom
The clank of silverware, the sound of chewing, and other forms of torture. The trouble with misophonia.
By Ed Cara
Will to Lose
The unsung glory of coming in last.
By Maureen O’Hagan
ESSAYS
Economics: We Know What’s in Your Medicine Cabinet
Our personal health conditions are part of a vast but hidden market for our medical data. Don’t we deserve to know about it?
By Adam Tanner
Culture: Who, What, Where, When, Weird
How oddball items came to dominate the news business.
By Daniel Engber
BOOKS
Review: Give Me That Old-Time Religion
From ISIS to the Christian right, three books explore the modern urge to go back to an original, uncorrupted version of faith.
By Alex Strick von Linschoten
Review: Brutal Kinship
The tribal rites of motherhood on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
By Helaine Olen
- Shelf Help: The Wrong Hands: Popular Weapons Manuals and Their Historic Challenges to a Democratic Society
- Shelf Help: Enabling Acts: The Hidden Story of How the Americans With Disabilities Act Gave the Largest U.S. Minority Its Rights
- Shelf Help: Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men
DEPARTMENTS
There’s a Name for That
The Porcupine Problem
Why we don’t like each other.
Research Gone Wild
Happiness on the Hill
Are conservatives more miserable than liberals?
In the Picture
Featherweight Champions
Laurel County, Kentucky
Five Studies
In Transition
What you need to know about transgenderism, according to the research.
Subculture
Workampers
On the road again.
Life in the Data
Which Comes First, the Chicken or Your Wallet?
Quick Studies
Stress and the Superwoman
Quick Studies
It Gets Better, Except…
ETC.
- Social Networking
- From the Editor: True Grit
- Contributors
- Who Funded That?
- Since We Last Spoke: Sex Traffic Jam
- Since We Last Spoke: Too Cool for AltSchool
- Since We Last Spoke: Bears, Oh My
For more from Pacific Standard, and to support our work, sign up for our email newsletter and subscribe to our print magazine, where this piece also appeared. Digital editions are available in the App Store and on Zinio and other platforms.
