You clerked with Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. What was he like? He was very, very quick. He had a sense of the human reality of the cases, which he could size up in an instant partly because because he had been a trial lawyer. He was a repository of experience such as the human […]
History
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
‘A Century of Public Policy Designed to Segregate and Impoverish its Black Population’
As I described in the Making of Ferguson, the federal government maintained a policy of segregation in public housing nationwide for decades. This was as true in northeastern cities like New York as it was in border cities like Baltimore and St. Louis. In 1994, civil rights groups sued the Department of Housing and Urban […]
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
Slavery and Freedom in New York City
The story of slavery in New York, the messy path to abolition, and a shameful history with which America has yet to come to terms.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Roots of the Insanity Defense
For centuries, courts have struggled to protect the mentally ill while also trying to distinguish between sanity and insanity. In the 1700s, the British courts relied on the “wild beast” test as their barometer for the latter: if the defendant’s understanding of his crime was no better than that of a infant or beast, he couldn’t […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Two Purposes of History
Underlying the entire conversation was a tension between the two purposes of history, the philosophical or scientific, and the civic. The philosophical or scientific perspective considers the pursuit of historical truth to be of highest value. Like any organized scientific activity, historical research is corrupted when oriented to immediate public ends. Its public value ultimately […]
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction
Graves of the Dead
The story of a mysterious mound, and what was inside.
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction, Story
Graves of the Dead
The story of a mysterious mound, and what was inside.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The 1944 Court Decision That Changed Hollywood
The showbiz press has been abuzz all day with news of a surprise shake-up (a group of high-powered talent agents defected en masse from one top agency to another). Most of the coverage has been inside baseball, but an analysis in The Hollywood Reporter by Matthew Belloni provides some interesting insight into Hollywood history: Consider the case of the late legendary agent, who […]
Posted inNonfiction
The Cold Rim of the World
The rise and fall of Pyramiden, a Russian mining town located in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard.
Posted inNonfiction, Story
The Cold Rim of the World
The rise and fall of Pyramiden, a Russian mining town located in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard.