Twenty years after Myrdal published his report, and five years after King travelled to India, the dream of seeing aggressive anti-discrimination legislation in America was realized: President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act.[…]
The crisis in policing is the culmination of a thousand other failures—failures of education, social services, public health, gun regulation, criminal justice, and economic development. Police have a lot in common with firefighters, E.M.T.s, and[…]
Today’s police officers are disproportionately veterans of U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, many suffering from post-traumatic stress. The Marshall Project, analyzing data from the Albuquerque police, found that officers who are veterans are more[…]
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[…]