What You Missed LAST Week (And Why This is This Week's Only Post)
A recap of The Art of Explaining Crime Season 2, Episode 10
This is The Art of Explaining Crime, an independent newsletter that helps you think and write about crime.
Hello from the Canadian city of Guelph1, where it snowed overnight after a week of mild weather melted everything.
In “Episode 9”, we saw research about “virtuous drug use” and the Dark Triad of personality traits. Last week, Episode 10, some of the research we saw explored mass shooters, salon professionals, and intimate partner violence among people with Dark Triad characteristics.
Links to those posts and more are 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:
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.
What influences whether fraud victims report the crime to police
How salon professionals can address sex trafficking and intimate partner violence
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 ten episodes into a 12-week season. We’re also taking a one-week hiatus between episodes 10 and 11 so that I can catch my breath before the final two episodes of the season.
Uncited Sources
Stuff I’ve consumed in the last week (or so) that is doing one of two things (sometimes both):
Occupying my thoughts in a way that makes me think you might want to consume it too.
Influencing my thoughts and decisions in the newsletter, either now or in the near future. Keeping track of it here helps me digest it, gives you a peak at the future, and keeps me honest. I’ll cite things more directly as they become relevant.
Articles, books, etc.
’s series of reviews of this year’s Edgar Awards “Fact Crime” nominees continues with her great piece on The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective…
Also,
has become a nonprofit corporation. You should check out their post about it:
In nonfiction books, I started (and will continue) The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis. When it came out 15 years ago, The Guardian called The Big Short a “magnificent account” of “the greatest financial fraud since the 18th century.”
I read fiction too, some of which might interest you.
Last week, I read Looking for Rachel Wallace, Robert B. Parker’s sixth Spenser novel. I grew up on Parker and Spenser and had read this one at least twice before. For some reason it just jumped off the shelf into my hand. This may have been the first time the major tension of the novel (a feminist author’s male publisher hiring a male private investigator as a bodyguard to protect her from threats… in the early 1980s…) hit quite this way. It’s also the first time in about 20 years that I’ve read it, so there’s that.
In non-crime-related content, I started and will continue Slow News: A Manifesto for the Critical News Consumer. Yes, I watched a documentary called Slow News a week or two back. Yes, they’re related. No, I haven’t finished the book yet. Yes, I’ll have more to say here when I do.
AI
Mostly as experimentation, I’ve spent some time chatting with ChatGPT about a number of topics, including the past continuous tense, business models for writers, and hard-boiled detectives over the last 100 years. Yes, I could have spent time with Google instead (and did when I wanted to fact check what ChatGPT was saying), but I’m endlessly curious about AI’s capabilities. I’m aware I can share links to specific chats, but I’m not yet comfortable with that.
Reminder: This week is a break for the newsletter
I’ll be back next Monday, March 31. If you haven’t done it yet, subscribe so you don’t miss it.
Guelph 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. I’m working on text to acknowledge the history of this land, which is long and rich and that I hesitate to try 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 periods. 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 where I hope to teach journalists, among other writers, how to write about crime better. I’ll come back to why I think that in future newsletters.
Thanks for the shoutout! And I’ve never read a Spenser novel before. I really should!