Sunday e-mail
What to expect this week. Five bullet points.
Thank you for subscribing to Crime & Psychology!
Welcome to the first Sunday e-mail. I hope you’ll enjoy all the material that’s to come. I’m passionate about it and want to make you feel the same way.
On Wednesday you should receive my first newsletters: two of them. One will be an informal overview of what’s waiting. The other, appropriately, will be about the very first textbook in Criminology: why it was written, what it meant, and all the reasons it was such a bad start.
That will be our regular schedule: a short e-mail on Sunday and a proper newsletter on Wednesday. Each one will deal with a different topic in Crime & Psychology - offender profiling, executions, the causes of crime, the psychology of intergroup hostility, lots of other topics. If there’s anything you’d particularly like to read about, let me know. I’ll do my best.
The first edition of our Dictionary of Crime will be available soon.
Thanks again for subscribing. I hope you’ll read many more of these Sunday e-mails.
Jason
Five bullet points this week:
NEWS: Just one psychological observation about events in Gaza: The worst news bulletins are always about people prioritising nationality, race, religion, etc., over individual identity. To do so means reducing oneself, and others, to nothing more than representatives of groups. Any psychologist interested in Social Identity Theory can tell you what inevitably happens next.
TELEVISION: On a lighter note, I just finished watching The Deuce. It’s all about Manhattan’s most notorious street, as it was in the 1970s and 80s. Series like this simply cry out to be called ‘gritty’. Every episode brought back memories of wandering down 42nd Street myself, decades ago, naively wide-eyed and agog, surprised that this was allowed (turned out it wasn’t). Scripts by Richard Price (Clockers), David Simon (Homicide) and Megan Abbott (Dare Me); acting by James Franco and Maggie Gyllenhall; music by Blondie. What could be better? You can catch it on Amazon Prime.
Photo by Pascal Bernardon on Unsplash FILM: My wife and I planned to see Martin Scorsese’s new film. We’d nearly left the house when we noticed the running time. Include the drive to the cinema and back, plus thirty minutes of ads before the film starts – who’s got that kind of time? We stayed home. Coincidentally, The Economist ran an article on why modern movies are so long – but it was behind a paywall, I never found out. If you read it, please let me know!
KENNEDY: I’m late with this one, but of course last week marked the sixtieth anniversary of the assassination. The London Times claimed that his death was ‘the definitive loss of American innocence’ and that ‘we are living in Lee Harvey Oswald’s world today’. One wonders whose world it would be if Kennedy had lived to see his forty-seventh birthday. More on this another time.
MUSIC: We went to hear the outrageously-talented Scottish jazz pianist, Fergus MacReadie (do yourself a favour and check him out). The bartender recognised me from a Forensic Psychology course I taught last decade, and was polite enough to say she enjoyed it. I signed her up to Crime & Psychology, of course. Welcome, Laura!