This book review contains spoilers about The 57 Bus by Dashka Slater. The 57 Bus by Dashka Slater is a nonfiction book about a crime in Oakland in 2013. One annoying teenager set another annoying teenager on fire on a bus for no good reason or any reason at all. The crime was like the […]
Category: Crime
Compelled Restitution is Busy Benefiting No One
So there’s this idea called restitution that you may have heard of, but don’t care that much about. The dictionary definition has to do with restoring something to its original state. People don’t really use the word that way, though. They don’t say things like “I’m so glad the new owners are enacting restitution of […]
Police or Pollution Control?
It seems like safe and healthy cities are a human right, ya know? A right in the sense that anyone with any sense at all can agree it is preferable to live in a city that is safe and healthy as opposed to living in a city that is unsafe and unhealthy. The desires for […]
Wall Street
Wall Street – the history According to Wikipedia, in 1711, the city of New York made “a market at the foot of Wall Street the city’s first official slave market for the sale and rental of enslaved Black people and Indians.” That little factoid kind of sets the tone for the relationship between Wall Street (the financial […]
Not the Land of the Free – Why Does the United States Put So Many People in Prisons?
The US national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” proclaims that the stars and stripes wave over the ‘land of the free.’ Nope. Not even close. The United States has never really been the land of the free given the significant number of people held in slavery, which, you know, is kind of the opposite of freedom. […]
