OCT 2017

Pacific Standard recommends this tense exploration of how a female officer can affect the course and outcome of a case involving another woman.

• By Kristina Kutateli

We spoke to Stephanie Allain about what she recommends reading, watching, and listening to.

• By Katie Kilkenny

Injuries and deaths from Norman doors are often later chalked up to human error, designer Don Norman says. But the error is not the user's. It's the designer's.

• By Sarah Witman

Pacific Standard recommends Marshall, a new movie about a pivotal character in the civil rights movement.

• By Kristina Kutateli

Despite political unrest during the early months of protest during the Arab Spring, a Yemeni man keeps his shop open, selling nuts and dried fruit.

• By Pacific Standard Staff

Why big, boring bureaucracy is the best tool for restoring wetlands around the Bay Area.

• By Eric Simons

The extinction crisis extends far beyond rare and endangered species.

• By J.B. MacKinnon

Rafa Esparza's adobe installations serve as a backdrop for the work of others, but they also tell Esparza's own story—and that of his immigrant parents.

• By Willy Blackmore

Will the environmental impact of cannabis balloon as legalization sweeps across the country?

• By Julia Rosen

With the very humanness of its sound, vinyl offers a sense of sentimentality—of mortality, even—that only imperfection allows.

• By Max Ufberg

In her new book, journalist Jessica Bruder argues that, in post-2008 America, the nostalgic vision of RVs and other "wheel estate" is incomplete.

• By Peter C. Baker

In central China's Gansu Province, nomads can buy insurance policies for their sheep and yaks.

• By Will Ford

Their generation is more connected to the outside world than ever, but their art reflects a struggle to see a future in their own country.

• By Deni Ellis Béchard

Pacific Standard recommends The Origin of Others, which looks to spark discussion about the written word's role in perpetuating and complicating black-and-white binaries.

• By Kristina Kutateli

A doctor and nurse stitch a man's finger in Al-Shifa Hospital, one of the largest medical complexes in the Gaza Strip.

• By Pacific Standard Staff

In her new book, lawyer Tanya Osensky argues that constantly monitoring height is a symptom and driver of a pervasive "heightism" that unjustly frames tallness as powerful and shortness as weak.

• By Peter C. Baker

American school-lunch policy has always been at the mercy of broader ideological trends, from patriotic militarism to corporate neoliberalism.

• By Malcolm Harris

Pacific Standard recommends Strong Island, more cinematic memoir than true-crime investigation.

• By Kristina Kutateli

Waiting wasn't a misery the Africans expected on Europe's shore. At least a hundred of the migrants felt so desperate that they tried to swim to France.

• By Gosia Wozniacka

In April, children watch a dust devil whip up sand as it travels across the desert landscape near the town of Huth, about 50 miles north of Yemen's capital.

• By Pacific Standard Staff

Breastfeeding may not make bright kids brighter, but it apparently does benefit the kids who could most use a boost.

• By Tom Jacobs

Journalist Lauren Markham's new book tells the story of twin teenage brothers who migrate from gang-ridden El Salvador to Oakland, California.

• By Peter C. Baker

New anti-poverty programs, focused on helping children and parents both, are succeeding where others have failed.

• By Dwyer Gunn

On the outskirts of the city, a man stands in a government building that was burned by the opposition in February of 2011.

• By Pacific Standard Staff