Sex, Crimes and Punishment Roger N. Lancaster published an opinion Piece at NYTimes, arguing that “Our sex offender laws are expansive, costly and ineffective — guided by panic, not reason.” In fact, the crimes that most spur public outrage — the abduction, rape and…
Conspiracies are U.S. : On Making Up Truthers, Birthers and Deathers, Part 2 This is Part 2 of a two part series by Prof. Joshua Reno on conspiracies in the U.S. You can read Part 1 here. In the August 2011 issue of American Ethnologist, I discuss how it is that evidence becomes inadmissible, stopping us from giving an…
Conspiracies are U.S. : On Making Up Truthers, Birthers and Deathers, Part 1 It is both disturbing and fascinating to follow the role of conspiracy theories in U.S. politics over the last decade and their apparent relationship to the Internet. One could claim that nothing has really changed, that mysterious and powerful…
Anarchy in the UK? Sean Carey writes at anthropologyworks.com about the attribution of the UK Riots to “outsiders:” But how true is the “outsider” hypothesis in accounting for riots? In the UK in the early 1980s, people often thought that “outsiders” were…
