Category Archives: True Crime

Disrupting Prostitution

By 2008, Melissa had switched almost entirely to Craigslist. She wasn’t the only one. Kritzia had another friend, Fabulous, who did it, too. In the few years since the website had caught on, Craigslist had done more to delegitimize the age-old … Continue reading

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Broadband: Make it a Commodity like…uh…a Pork Belly

I just finished watching the 2005 documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and it reinforces David Simon’s theory of America as Horror Show. What’s more, it was just a small taste of things to come in 2008 with … Continue reading

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True Crime: Some Final Thoughts and Videos

I’m sad to say the True Crime Freshman Seminar Paul Bond and I taught this semester has come to an end. We watched the final vidoes last night, and they’re working on posting their final reflections to the course blog … Continue reading

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GIF it Up for the 80s

A Goodfellas GIF to snort about!

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Locations from Goodfellas and Wiseguy Mapped

Every time I’ve watched Martin Scorsese’s Goodefellas (1991) (which is more than a few) one of the things that always strikes me is how familiar I am with the built environment of the film. I grew up on the South Shore … Continue reading

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Wall Street, the Other Mob

I loved the passage in Nicholas Pileggi’s Wiseguy where Henry Hill talks about how the Wall Street bankers took the mob to the cleaners. When stolen securities got big, we used to have Wall Street types all over the place buying … Continue reading

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Goodfellas: I’m Here to Amuse You

I’ve written before about love of Tumblr before on this blog, and one of the most consistently brilliant Tumblr blogs I follow is the all-things-film tumblr Cinephilia and Beyond. If you love movies, this is an amazing resource. Anyway, over … Continue reading

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Lists of Serial Killers on Wikipedia

The writing of my last post led me to some pretty crazy lists on Wikipedia that freaked me out a bit. Serial Killer lists! A list of serial killers by number of victims. A list of serial killers by country. A … Continue reading

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Serial Killers to Spree Killers: a Cultural Shift?

We finished up Ann Rule’s The Stranger Beside Me last week in the True Crime course. And while we read the graphic novel Torso which dealt with a series of related murders in Cleveland during the 1930s, the figure of … Continue reading

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A True Crime Book List

Thanks to this tweet from Mary Kayler, I found this list of the nine most disturbing True Crime books. I was happy to see that three of which are part of the True Crime course syllabus Paul Bond and I came … Continue reading

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