Pacific Standard

After a child molester has been released from incarceration, where does he go?

Matt Bowden (a New Zealander at the forefront of the chemically engineered legal highs arms race) helped create one of the most viral outbreaks of new drugs in history. He might also have the antidote.

A first-person account of how mental illness reshapes a marriage.

Los Angeles gave America the modern street gang. Groups like the Crips and MS-13 have spread from coast to coast, and even abroad. But on the streets of Southern California they’ve seen a significant decline. Why?

More Americans are working late-night and early-morning hours, creating a demand for a new breed of childcare centers that can meet the off-hours demand.

How biblical counseling became commonplace for millions of Christians, and why that may be problematic.

While pro-life activists fight to rescue IVF embryos from the freezer, pregnant women in their third trimester with catastrophic fetal anomalies have nowhere to turn.

Inside the increasingly difficult business of running your own franchise—margins get tighter, and vendors assert even more control.

From 1960s Korea, through Brazil, to today’s Los Angeles: Inside the world that brought you Forever 21—and those skinny jeans in your closet.

Over the past 15 years, the fashion industry has undergone a profound and baffling transformation. What used to be a stable three-month production cycle—the time it takes to design, manufacture, and distribute clothing to stores, in an extraordinary globe-spanning process—has collapsed, across much of the industry, to just two weeks. The “on-trend” clothes that were, until recently, only accessible to well-heeled, slender urban fashionistas, are now available to a dramatically broader audience, at bargain prices. A design idea for a blouse, cribbed from a runway show in Paris, can make it onto the racks in Wichita in a wide range of sizes within the space of a month.

The surprising, emotionally affecting origin story behind artisanal toast:

The smallness of her cafés is another device to stoke interaction, on the theory that it’s simply hard to avoid talking to people standing nine inches away from you. And cinnamon toast is a kind of all-purpose mollifier: something Carrelli offers her customers whenever Trouble is abrasive, or loud, or crowded, or refuses to give them what they want. “No one can be mad at toast,” she said.

Carrelli’s explanations made a delightfully weird, fleeting kind of sense as I heard them. But then she told me something that made Trouble snap into focus. More than a café, the shop is a carpentered-together, ingenious mechanism—a specialized tool—designed to keep Carrelli tethered to herself.