JUNE/JULY 2018

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.

Updates to stories from the Pacific Standard archive.

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.

A portrait of the stressed and shrinking American middle class.

New research shows that current boyfriends or girlfriends are more likely than spouses to engage in certain types of violent behavior.

Ken Auletta's latest book explores the chaotic world of contemporary advertising.

Arsenic was long a preservative in the taxidermic process, despite criticism of the method as unnecessarily dangerous. But at least one contemporary scholar has suggested that metabolized arsenic extended the lives of late 19th-century taxidermists by decades.

Updates to stories from the Pacific Standard archive.

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.

Even though a majority of West Virginians see government health care as fundamentally un-American, even evil, they know the Affordable Care Act is saving lives every day.

In just over 40 years, we've gone from simple modifications to the development of a gene drive that could eradicate an entire species.

We are on the brink of being able to genetically engineer an extinction. Should we?

A new book argues that we can't overcome racism unless white people are willing to be a little uncomfortable.

The city prides itself on working with those who are "un-bankable," and on evaluating loans based on individual stories instead of automated credit scores.

Around the world, camels are disappearing, along with the cultures and traditions of the people who have kept them.

Orania, South Africa: Niklas Kirsten, a former paratrooper in the South African Army, instructs Erik Du Pree on handgun self-defense in the fields outside an ultra-conservative, all-Afrikaner stronghold known as Orania.

We spoke to Nicole Perlman about what she recommends reading, watching, and listening to.

Updates to stories from the Pacific Standard archive.

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.

Inside the effort to reintroduce grizzlies to California.

Rankin, Pennsylvania: Built in the 19th century as part of the Homestead Steel Works complex, the Carrie Furnaces produced up to 1,250 tons of iron per day at their peak in the 1950s and '60s.

Caleb Byerly works with indigenous communities to rediscover—and rebuild—their people's lost instruments.

On the frontlines of extinction in the Gulf of California, where the vaquita faces its final days.

The question of how one society could arrive at such diametrically opposed visions of its own history is one that vexes not just Georgia.