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The Dangers of Prosecutorial Tunnel Vision
Last week, Dahlia Lithwick posted a story on Slate.com about Mark Weiner, a man convicted of abducting a young woman in Charlottesville, VA in 2012. Lithwick offers some background: The story began on...
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The Cultural Revolution in Hindsight
I’ve just read The Chinese Cultural Revolution Reconsidered: Beyond Purge and Holocaust, a collection of essays that consider the social, political, economic, and psychological factors that contributed...
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The Black Panthers: Revolutions and Dinner Parties
I recently watched Stanley Nelson’s The Black Panthers: Vanguards of the Revolution. While the documentary is clearly pro-Panther, I nevertheless found it to be a surprisingly critical examination of...
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Ta-Nehisi Coates on Mass Incarceration: Parts I and II of IX
As a number of my past posts indicate, when Ta-Nehisi Coates writes something, I read it. This is especially true when he publishes his brand of long-form, in-depth, history-in-context pieces, like he...
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Ta-Nehisi Coates on Mass Incarceration: Parts III and IV of IX
This week, I am continuing to read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ in-depth analysis of mass incarceration in the United States. Having provided some of the historical-political background in the early chapters of...
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Eyes on the Street
Perhaps Jane Jacobs’ most acclaimed contribution to urban studies in The Death and Life of Great American Cities is her “eyes on the street” theory. “[T]here must be eyes upon the street, eyes...
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Ta-Nehisi Coates on Mass Incarceration: Parts V, VI, and VII of IX
This week, I am continuing to read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ in-depth analysis of mass incarceration in the United States. In part V of the piece, Coates studies the policies that led to increased...
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Ta-Nehisi Coates on Mass Incarceration: Parts VIII and IX of IX
This week, I am continuing to read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ in-depth analysis of mass incarceration in the United States. In the remaining two parts of the piece, Coates revisits the legacy of Daniel Patrick...
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Modern Debtor’s Prisons: A Brief Update
Last year, I read and posted about an article in The Nation that highlighted a growing trend: private companies commissioned to collect fines from low-level criminal offenders who were in arrears. The...
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Previewing the Supreme Court’s New Term
Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern’s recent Slate.com post offers a brief preview of what’s to come this term in the nation’s highest court. For readers with a liberal bent, the news may be...
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Race and Racism in Jury Selection
Slate columnist Dahlia Lithwick published an excerpt of her interview with Stephen Bright, president of the Southern Center for Human Rights, during which they discussed race as a factor in criminal...
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Criminalizing HIV
Yesterday was World AIDS day, which is how I found myself reading an article from earlier this year. Writing for The Nation, Rod McCullom tackled the sad and informative case of Michael Johnson, former...
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Massacres, Slow Violence, Solidarity
Note: a rough draft of this essay was posted in error mid-week The massacres in Paris or Beirut, the stabbings and instant “justice-by-cop” in Israel, unabated slaughter in Syria or Yemen, or the...
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Donald Trump the Fascist?
Seemingly every statement regarding Donald Trump in recent weeks either explicitly or implicitly compares him to Hitler. It’s almost as though both social and mainstream media are trying to pay homage...
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For Tamir Rice, A Steep Pathway to Justice
There is a chorus of voices this week denouncing yet another grand jury’s failure to indict yet another killer of a young person of color. This time, that person is Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old...
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Lynch Mobs
Shortly after posting my previous week’s article about Donald Trump, fascism, and communal violence, the New York Times published footage of a woman being lynched in Kabul, Afghanistan. The preceding...
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Common Ground: What the Oregon Militia Gets Right
Armed activists took over a small government building in Oregon this weekend, eliciting mostly negative reactions from left-leaning commentators who have (quite fairly) pointed out a number of...
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Florida’s Death Penalty Ruled Unconstitutional
Anna M. Phillips of the Tampa Bay Times reported big news yesterday from the US Supreme Court. In an 8-1 vote, the high court held in Hurst v. Florida that the state’s death penalty statute is...
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Sex and Death
While reading Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, I came across a most thought-provoking passage on Bollywood, which applies to Hollywood as well. On pg. 348, Mehta writes (emphasis...
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Making a Murderer, Steven Avery, and Vigilante Journalism
The documentary series Making a Murderer, currently airing on Netflix, is generating a lot of reaction from viewers and commentators. Many people (including hundreds of thousands who have signed a...
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