New York City is certainly not immune to destructive urban “progress.” Here’s a shot from Shorpy of Cortland Street from 1908. Here’s the view today: But what’s really interesting is what happens when you turn around. Back then, it would have looked much like the picture above. You were in the heart of what was…
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The other day I saw a young black man on the corner of 32nd Street and 6th Avenue with his arm up, trying to hail a cab. He wasn’t particularly well dressed, but he didn’t look like a hoodlum (the same could have been said of me). “How many empty cabs are going to pass…
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James Q. Wilson writes some good stuff on crime in the Wall Street Journal. But this worries me: Culture creates a problem for social scientists like me, however. We do not know how to study it in a way that produces hard numbers and testable theories. Culture is the realm of novelists and biographers, not…
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OK. That’s not really news. But this report is kind of a big deal. So says the BBC, the “Global war on drugs has ‘failed’.” Imagine that. The panel included former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the former presidents of Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil, the former US Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, the current Prime…
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I not a fan of arbitrary grammar rules. And now I’m going to bore you with one. I don’t like rules for rules’ sake (eg: split infinitives, ending sentences in preposition, etc.) Along with being based in some bizarre Latin-lover’s 19th-century wet dream, such rules get in the way of style. Rules are supposed to…
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“We are witnessing the bipartisan normalization and legitimization of a national surveillance state!” As told to us by a cartoon (“This Modern World” by Tom Tomorrow).
The Blaze(that’s Glenn Beck) and Metro(that’s subway). Metro is new material. Oh, and there’s a third punch. Let’s call it an uppercut. The Takeaway (National Public Radio) 7:45 AM (which is really the worst possible hour of the day for me to do anything. If it were any early, I’d just stay up all night…
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I’ll be on CNN, Sunday, from 7:30 to 7:35pm (Eastern Time) with Drew Griffin. I get to sport the suit I got made for me in Thailand. I’ll probably even wear a tie. If you miss the broadcast, don’t worry, you’ll be able to see the same suit again the next time I’m on TV.
I like when Clarance Page calls me a “rascal”! He writes in the Chicago Tribune: When Peter Moskos’ new book landed on my desk, I wasn’t sure if it was going to be a treatise on crime and punishment or some sort of kinky sex manual. Its title: “In Defense of Flogging.” You rascal, I…
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Mansfield Frazier write in The Daily Beast: At first glace, the title of Peter Moskos’ new book, In Defense of Flogging, strikes you as a barbaric hoax being perpetrated by some sort of right-wing ideologue or kook. In fact, it initially appears to be an idea so outrageous, so provocative, as to not even rate…
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