Crime
The Cause of America’s Gun-Death Epidemic? It’s Guns
When comparing state to state, and nation to nation, more firearms usually means more firearms-related deaths
AWOL Black Fathers
When my mother called me in from play one afternoon to meet the man seated in our living room, her introduction was redundant—I immediately knew who he was. And, right off, I did not like him. His absence had been a painful matter in my life. The house that
The Transmogrification of Harvey Weinstein
I was a good friend of Harvey Weinstein during his early years as a concert promoter, before he became Harvey Weinstein, movie mogul. We subsequently drifted apart, and while Harvey went on to find astronomic success in Hollywood, I worked as the chief psychologist at the Massachusetts Treatment Center for
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’
