What You Missed LAST Week
A recap of The Art of Explaining Crime Season 2, Episode 9
This is The Art of Explaining Crime, an independent newsletter that helps you think and write about crime.
Hello from the Canadian city of Guelph, which is built on land in the Between the Lakes Purchase, a treaty and territory of the Mississaguas of the Credit. I have the privilege of living and doing the work of this newsletter there.1
Two weeks ago, which I refer to collectively as “Episode 8”, we saw research about consent decrees and vigilantism. Last week, “Episode 9”, we research included studies about “virtuous drug use” and the Dark Triad of personality traits. (A warning: My output was lower than normal, to my endless frustration.)
Links to those posts follow below.
The Art of Explaining Crime
What I Do
The popular What I Do series used to be weekly, but will now appear on Wednesdays when I have someone to feature.
Can you think of someone in the crime content space who you’d like me to feature? They could be a journalist, academic, advocate, author, or anyone else who routinely participates in creating content about crime. Let me know in a comment or direct message.
Five Studies About
This week’s free Five Studies About tip sheets included:
How the Dark Triad traits of psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism predict cyberbullying (spoiler: one of them doesn’t) (Five Studies About: The Dark Triad)
Crime Research Updates
This week’s paid Crime Research Update tip sheets included the following posts. Remember that each post’s headline highlights a carefully selected study, the link to which appears before the paywall. Remember also that each will unlock three weeks after publication.
Why “young people” were essential to creating a drug outreach program FOR “young people” in England
How the neoliberal drive toward “happiness” paves the way for “virtuous" drug use
The Explaining Crime season so far
Back to today’s post. Did you miss any earlier episodes? I’ve got you covered:
If you’ve lost track, we’re nine episodes into a 12-week season.
The Practice of Understanding Crime
Some things I…
Read
Curing Crime’s latest interview with another crime writer on Substack:
The second part of Crime & Psychology’s series on conspiracy theories:
Crime Guy’s piece on the elusive Mary Carr:
I also read beyond crime-related content, such as Research Freedom’s piece on AI and the role of the professional researcher:
…and an Armchair Notes post on the Five-Tab Method, an approach to marking specific locations in a book:
…and:
Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt, Michael Lewis’s narrative nonfiction book about a small team that learns about flaws in the stock market.
The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (I spent most of my time reading the glossary!).
Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, another Michael Lewis book.
Watched
On Kanopy, “One Shot. One Life”, a documentary about kyudo, the Japanese art of archery. (Before going away to university, I earned a black belt in Kempo. That was a long time ago, but I’m still interested in martial arts and am fascinated by documentaries like this one. There’s a lot of wisdom in martial arts that can be applied to life.)
Thanks for reading!
I’m working on text to acknowledge the history of this land, which has a long, rich history that I hesitate to sum up in a few sentences. This is a work in progress, and it may not change much from week to week. Or at all for some time. As I do that work, I’m also reflecting on what I can do to contribute to reconciliation in my country, particularly Calls to Action #84-86 (PDF). I do this as a white, cisgender, heterosexual man who has benefited immeasurably from the historical and current state of affairs. While I consider this work important for all of us to do, I think it’s particularly relevant to a newsletter about crime. I’ll come back to why I think that in future newsletters.
Thank you again for the mention! We were excited to interview Sophie and are happy with the result. We were also a little curious about how others would respond, and we are happy that our readers have apparently liked it. So, we are looking forward to featuring one writer a month.