War and peace in brief
It may surprise some of my more conservative readers, but I couldn’t be more indifferent about the fate of pending gun control legislation now before Congress. My indifference comes from a couple of...
View ArticleKeeping violence all bottled up
Last week, I focused on the irrefutable fact that most people who are murdered in the United States are killed by someone using a handgun. Predictably the cranks came out of the woodwork to criticize...
View ArticleFatherhood: consecration of the mundane
Fatherhood is an institution as variable as the men who inhabit it. Human civilizations have long struggled to circumscribe its “proper” contours. Few enduring answers have been found. In the 16th...
View ArticleBroadmoor’s regal would-be regicides
If you’ve ever read much of what I’ve written, then you know my fascination with the history of criminal identification. L Last year, I wrote a piece on the so-called “warrior gene” which causes the...
View ArticleJune 27, 2013 Mustaches and monsters in history
With the spring semester just in the rearview, I had a look at some of my former students’ comments about my performance as their professor. While largely positive, there was one that stuck out:...
View ArticleMillennials scaling dystopian Everest
“Mashup” is a term in popular music used to describe the blending of elements from two or more different songs. Often DJs will take the vocals from one track and lay them on top of the melody or rhythm...
View ArticleOld sounds not forgotten
Writing for Wired.com, Roberto Baldwin recently published the article, “Say Goodbye to the Tech Sounds You’ll Never Hear Again.” In it he highlights a number of once-common sounds that many of us will...
View ArticleA little evolution from my friends
Survival dictates that we each make thousands of decisions every day. Most are wholly benign with little in the balance. Some are matters of life or death. Some seem benign, but hold life or death...
View ArticleLawn darts find their mark
A recent Associated Press report by Katie Zezima, “Dealers now being charged in drug overdose deaths,” details a growing law enforcement trend that bucks the traditional model of drug prosecutions....
View ArticleFacing the abyss for real
For nearly 500 million people, the social media leviathan, Facebook, is a part of their daily lives. According to recent research, Facebook’s ability to link us with long-forgotten (and new) “friends”...
View ArticleRisk, relativity and reward For Sept. 8, beyond
Last week the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics released a new report, Measuring the Prevalence of Crime with the National Crime Victimization Survey. The report contains...
View ArticleReelin' in the years
As a birthday present, Kathleen — the nice lady who lets me live in her house — took me over to the Mud Island Amphitheater in Memphis to see Steely Dan in concert. I’ve been a fan of The Dan since I...
View ArticleFeudalism all over again
In Christopher Hill’s seminal 1940 treatise, “The English Revolution,” he describes the economic and political arrangements of the European feudal era: “By feudalism I mean a form of society in which...
View ArticleMore than just dance lessons
It would be difficult to state with any certainty how many people read this column each week. Even so, I’m pretty sure about the identity of my biggest fan.
View ArticleWhen Congress shot the sheriff
Without delving too deeply into the politics of the government shutdown, one inescapable fact came to my attention: Some things deemed “non-essential” might need reclassification.
View ArticlePygmalion with pork rinds
Occasionally, I am able to pretend that such things don’t exist, but on a recent sojourn to Ohio, prejudice stared me square in the face.
View ArticleOld tune, new villains
This week the New York Times ran an article titled “Sparse Competition and Higher Premiums.” If ever five words could sum up every broken aspect of American health care, those do it perfectly.
View ArticleWhen laughter met ambition
A few years ago I wrote a book chapter on the scandal surrounding silent film star, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. The research taught me many things. I learned that Arbuckle was perhaps the first real...
View ArticlePrivacy on full public display
Ayn Rand, the controversial darling of the rightmost extremities in modern politics, once wrote, “Civilization is the progress of a society towards privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public,...
View ArticleA different kind of "Marxist"
As the holiday season creeps closer, I fall prey to the same rush and urges that many people experience in their drive to find just the right Christmas present. It’s all-too easy.
View Article
