Pacific Standard

Inside the byzantine, secretive, Rube Goldbergian world of food inspection and safety (or, why we still can’t stop bags of baby spinach from making us sick).

How an esoteric piece of farm equipment created America’s breadbasket — and threatens to destroy it.

What happens when cruise ship tourism descends on the communities of the Northwest Passage?

A harrowing look at what can happen when a home birth goes wrong, and the limited training required for midwifes in some states.

A former dentist dropped a promising career at the Kaiser Foundation to dig through old sugar industry archives, looking for proof that Big Sugar steered scientists away from looking at the ingredient’s harmful effects.

In St. Louis, Missouri—where someone can qualify for food stamps but not a public defender—hundreds of the city’s poorest are left without a lawyer.

Young, desperate, and laden with student loans, Michael Fitzgerald takes a job as a for-profit college inspector, enticing other students into debt to pay back his own.

A harrowing investigation into child abuse masked as religious practice in the Twelve Tribes sect.

“I can no more safely forget racism than a sea captain can forget about waves and weather.”

David Dunning, the psychologist who gave the Dunning-Kruger effect (half) its name, reflects on our human propensity to wildly overestimate how much we know.