The Deadly "Wedgie"

     Police in Oklahoma say that a 33-year-old man allegedly killed his stepfather after a fight last month [December 2013] by yanking the older man's underwear up his back and over his head so that the waistband was around his neck. Brad Davis, of McLoud, was arrested [on January 7, 2014] and booked into the Pottawatomie County Jail on a first-degree murder complaint…

     An argument that escalated into a fight that broke out on the evening of December 21, 2013 between Davis and Denver St. Clair. St. Clair had made disparaging comments about the younger man's mother related to the couple's pending divorce… Davis tackled St. Clair in the kitchen then punched him in the face several times before he could make it back to his feet…Davis told police that he pulled St. Clair's underwear up over St. Clair's head, and later noticed that St. Clair was unconscious and called the police…When detectives arrived, Davis was standing over St. Clair smoking a cigarette.

     The state's medical examiner said that St. Clair's cause of death was either blunt force trauma to the head or asphyxia. [Both men had been drinking that night. Davis was a former Marine. In July 2015, a judge sentenced Brad Davis to 30 years in prison.]

Fox News and the Associated Press, January 9, 2014 

Benjamin Franklin on Autobiography

If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing. [Franklin, in his autobiography, one of the best ever written, did both.]

Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, 1791 

What Children and Young Adults Want in a Novel

Novels for children and young adults are soothing and reaffirm the young reader's sense of worthiness. The child, who may have few friends, gathers around himself or herself an array of characters who are entertaining and forgiving and enlightening.

Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at The Novel, 2005

Alien Societies in Science Fiction

Stephen H. Doyle, in Habitable Planets for Man, attempted to estimate the abundance of planets in which human beings could live without life-support systems such as domes or spacesuits. He estimated that there were something like 600 million human-habitable planets in our galaxy alone. Other galaxies should have comparable numbers.

Stanley Schmidt, Aliens and Alien Societies, 1995 

Factors Affecting The Accuracy Of An Eyewitness Account

When a witness sees a serious event such as a crime or traffic accident and then must recall it later, three major stages can be identified: the acquisition state, the retention stage, and the retrieval stage. In the acquisition stage, there are numerous factors that will affect the accuracy of the initial perception. Some of these factors, such as the amount of time the witness had to look at whatever is going to be remembered, are inherent in the situation itself. Other factors, such as the amount of stress a witness is experiencing, are inherent in the witness. Both event factors and witness factors can dramatically affect a witness's ability to perceive accurately.

Elizabeth Loftus, Eyewitness Testimony, 1979 

The Privacy of Murder

I had never before thought about the terrible privacy of murder--how something so awful could be done to you and the only person who would ever know what had happened was the person who did it. How you couldn't tell anyone what you'd been through because you'd be dead...How it was a kind of evil intimacy. It seemed unbearable.

Rachel Monroe, Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession, 2019

The Smiling Liar

A liar often smiles subtly while telling a lie; it's an unconscious expression of his delight in getting away with a whopper.

Pamela Meyer, Liespotting, 2010

Kleptomania: Illness Or Theft?

Shoplifting is…misunderstood because the line between crime and disease has blurred. Although most estimates put the number of kleptomaniacs among shoplifters at between 0 and 8 percent, some experts believe that the disease is far more prevalent. Others contend that so-called shopping addiction has replaced kleptomania altogether.

Rachel Shteir, The Steal, 2011

The Redundant Writer

For some writers, once is not enough. They don't beat a dead horse; they beat a totally dead horse. They use modifiers that say the same thing as the words they modify. For them, every fact is a true fact. They don't expedite; they speedily expedite. They don't smell a stench; they smell a malodorous stench. In other words, they're redundant. Or as they might put it, superfluously redundant. [This is a meaningfully profound quote.]

Patricia T. O'Conner, Words Fail Me, 1999

E.B. White's Journals

My journals date from about 1917 to about 1930, with a few entries of more recent date. They occupy two-thirds of a whiskey carton. How many words that would be I have no idea, but it would be an awful lot. The journals are callow, sententious, moralistic, and full of rubbish. They are also hard to ignore. They were written sometimes in longhand, sometimes typed (single typed). They contain many clippings. Extensive is the word for them. I do not hope to publish them, but I would like to get a little mileage out of them. After so many years, they tend to hold my attention even though they do not excite my admiration. I have already dipped into them on a couple of occasions, to help out on a couple of pieces.

E. B. White, The Second Tree From the Corner, 1954