Crime
Madness for Decivilization
For much of human history, people with mental illness were thought to be possessed by gods or devils. Madness, as it was called, was believed to be supernatural, not natural. Some Greeks, including Plato, viewed mental illness as a kind of spiritual gift, a portal into new ways of seeing.
Louise Penny’s Armand Gamache: Quebec’s Too-Perfect Police Officer
My introduction to Canadian mystery writer Louise Penny came through a friend who’d urged me to hate-read Bury Your Dead—a 2010 novel that was so bad, he told me, it had ended up as kindling in his wood stove. Yet not only did my own copy escape the
Charles Murray's 'Facing Reality'—A Review
A review of Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America by Charles Murray. Encounter Books, 168 pages. (June, 2021) I’ve known about Charles Murray since 1994, when I was a voracious and unsupervised teen reader in rural Oregon grabbing the library’s latest issue of the New Republic
Are Activists Protecting Asians from Hate—or Protecting Their Narrative of White Supremacy from Criticism?
Asia Society, the global NGO dedicated to “forging closer ties between Asia and the West through arts, education, policy and business,” recently shared a video in which activist Manjusha P. Kulkarni spoke about anti-Asian attacks in the United States. Kulkarni, whose own group self-describes as a “national coalition addressing anti-Asian
When Will Activists (and the Media) Get Honest About Police Shootings?
Minutes before Derek Chauvin was convicted on all three counts of murder and manslaughter, Ma’Khia Bryant, a black teenage girl in Columbus, Ohio, was shot dead by police. Almost immediately, enraged protestors gathered outside police headquarters. “Say Her Name!” they chanted. The New York Times reported that the girl’
The Ugly History of Rape Panics
The abduction and murder of Sarah Everard in London on March 3rd created a wave of outrage and protest. It is easy to understand why a crime like this would generate reflexive disgust, but less straightforward to explain why society chooses to focus so intently on a small minority of
Rinaldo Walcott’s On Property—A Review
A review of On Property by Rinaldo Walcott. Biblioasis, 96 pages (May 25th, 2021) The true founder of civil society was the first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying, “This is mine,” and came across people simple enough to believe him. How many crimes, wars,
Black Lives Matter, So Refund the Police
During the summer of 2020, following the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, it was easier to count how many cities didn’t have Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests than to count the ones that did. Metropolitan areas across the United States, and the world, saw massive turnouts protesting
