Modern American policing began in 1909, when August Vollmer became the chief of the police department in Berkeley, California. Vollmer refashioned American police into an American military. He’d served with the Eighth Army Corps in[…]
Two kinds of police appeared on mid-century American television. The good guys solved crime on prime-time police procedurals like “Dragnet,” starting in 1951, and “Adam-12,” beginning in 1968 (both featured the L.A.P.D.). The bad guys[…]
Simulmatics is a relic of its time, an artifact of the Eisenhower-Kennedy-Nixon Cold War; a product of the Madison Avenue of M&M’s and toothpaste ads; a casualty of mid-century American liberalism. The Simulations Enterprises of[…]
Where early generations of Babylonian Amoraim employed a system of strict liability in deciding civil cases, sages of the third generation began to employ subjective considerations, but in an inconsistent manner. It was not until[…]
The fourth century was a period of great innovation in the history of Talmudic jurisprudence and legal conceptualization. Much of this may be attributed to the great fourth generation sage Rava, arguably the most creative[…]
Half a century ago, before “Sesame Street,” and long before the age of quarantine, kids under the age of six spent a crazy amount of time indoors, watching television, a bleary-eyed average of fifty-four hours[…]
In the nineteenth century, they arrived, before anyone else, at an understanding that, in the new world of modernity, competitive advancement—doing well on exams—would provide an alternative to advancement through bloodlines. Why the Jews did[…]
White mob violence against black people and their homes and businesses was the far more common variety of race riot, from the first rising of the K.K.K., after the Civil War, through the second, in[…]
I, like many who enjoy an adult beverage then and again, have to ask myself fairly regularly about my relationship with it. Is it healthy? Is it proper? Some people use alcohol as an escape,[…]
There is no such thing as a disciplined person and, even if there were, why would you want to be one? The concept of a disciplined person is a myth. No one is disciplined in[…]