Genarlow Wilson’s story is pretty well-known by now: the popular 17-year-old honors student and football standout went to a New Year’s Eve party in a hotel, where he received oral sex from a 15-year-old schoolmate, a videotape surfaced, and Wilson was charged with aggravated child molestation, convicted, and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Wilson Read More
Jill Leovy is stepping down from The Homicide Report, the Los Angeles Times‘ blog that aims to catalogue every homicide in L.A. County. As you might imagine, she has a pretty singular perspective on the reality of all that carnage.
New York City’s record low murder rate in 2007 should help bolster its rep as the safest big city in the country — something that would have been imaginable in 1990, when the city caught over 2,200 (!) bodies. Chris Mitchell of New York magazine poses a provocative theoretical question: what would it take to Read More
My dear, sweet slope: you’ve never been so slippery!
Resolved: “The low-slung style was inspired by the beltless pants worn by prison inmates. It spread through the hip-hop music community to urban neighborhoods and then to the suburbs. The style is predominantly worn by black youth.” Somehow, this has become an irrefutable black truth. Just ask David Bositis, a senior political analyst for the Read More
New Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter has a lot of stuff on his plate: a looming crisis with city pensions, rampant poverty, and out-of-control gun violence. But on Monday, the day he took over the helm of my beloved hometown, he decided to rock the mike with The Roots. Or, um, try to. (Hat-tip to Kaya Read More
In 1990, New York City tallied 2,245 murders. That number was the prism through which David Dinkins‘s mayoralty was viewed and the foundation on which Rudolph Giuliani based his bid for mayor (and a big part of his bid for the presidency). The boss gets all the blame in bad times and all the credit Read More
