Since the Ball's in My Court

NOTE: We'll be traveling on the day this is posted, so I'll be late in responding to any comments. In other words, the ball will probably sit there awhile before being hit back.

Do you ever wonder where we Sayers of Sleuth get the ideas for these columns? (No, mine are not from those bowls of chili I eat just before going to bed.)

The idea for this post came from an interview I watched the other night following a college football game. A coach I will leave unnamed said to the press and the TV audience, "Our team came to play tonight and gave 110%, but it was a game of two halves, and at the end of the day the other side wanted it more."

Yes, I admit I'm paraphrasing that, but the real thing wasn't much better. After a lot more talk about momentum shifts and gut-checks and physicality and athleticism, he closed by saying they're taking it one game at a time, which if I'm not mistaken is the only possible way to take it.

On the one hand, I'm used to hearing this kind of mumbojumbo, because I like college football. On the other hand, I consider myself to be a writer and to know at least something about words and word usage. So, since I needed a subject for this column anyway, I put together the following list of 100 sports-inspired cliches that have made their way, God help us, into the English language and our everyday speech.

Fasten your chin-strap; here we go:

Keep your eye on the ball

It was a slam dunk

Par for the course

Step up to the plate

Full-court press

He talks a good game

It's time to play hardball

Don't pull any punches

Monday-morning quarterback

Go for the gold

Knock it out of the park

They control their own destiny

Put on your game face

In a league of their own

Out of left field

In my wheelhouse

Batting a thousand

On the rebound

Four-down territory

Hit a home run

The ball didn't bounce our way

They've moved the goalposts

A hail-Mary pass

We got the W

A team player

They brought their A-game

He's their go-to guy

Watch from the sidelines

Snap the ball

Pass the baton

Tee it up

Rein in

Jump the gun

Run interference

Take a rain check

We're on the home stretch

They left it all on the field

Go down swinging

Hit the ground running

A whole new ballgame

We're home safe

Warm the bench

Go the distance

Hit the bulls-eye

Home-field advantage

A must-win situation

Make the cut

The gloves are off

The ball's in your court

A photo finish

On any given Sunday

He ran the table

Nothing but net

Get the ball rolling

Take it on the chin

Just under the wire

Touch base

Move the chains

A team effort

Pinch hitter

Heavyweight/lightweight

Out of the starting gate

It's a marathon, not a sprint

False start

Kick off

Go to bat for

Throw in the towel

Behind the eight-ball

Two-minute warning

Cross the finish line

Top of the ninth

Stick to the game plan

Back up and punt

Saved by the bell

They threw us a curve 

Keep the drive alive

Bring home the gold

Call the play

Goal-line stand

They dropped the ball

He drained the three

She hit a hole-in-one

A dark horse

A low blow

A chip shot

A bad call

A tight race

A gutsy play

There's no I in team

They won't play ball

Split the uprights

In the red zone

Game, set, and match

Three strikes against you

Depends on where they spot the ball

The crowd went wild

Down for the count

Third and long

Fourth and goal

Take one for the team

. . . and many more

He took one for the team

Do you recognize all these sports-related phrases? Do you use some of them? Cringe when you hear them? (I especially hate "draining" those three-pointers. Draining?) Can you think of any cliches I left out? Did I think of way too many? (My wife says YES.)

Although I try hard to avoid using cliches--sports or otherwise--in my fiction writing, I confess that I use them a lot in speech, and also as a part of story dialog. Why? Because it feels and sounds natural to do, I guess, and because they're used so often almost everyone gets the meaning.

But I'll only take it so far. I promise that you'll never again hear me say or see me write the words athleticism or physicality, or use the letter W instead of the word win. I do try to maintain at least some dignity in my life.

A closing note: I'm not criticizing all sports broadcasters or coaches or others who regularly spew these kinds of words and phrases. Some make informative observations. NFL analyst and former quarterback Joe Theismann once said, "Nobody in the game of football should be called a genius. A genius is somebody like Norman Einstein."

On the subject of writing, Norman would probably say . . . Take it one story at a time. 

  

Book DNA – is it for you?

This is my penultimate SleuthSayers post, and I hope you'll find it helpful if you have a book to promote - or if you just like to read and discuss books!

When I was seeking publicity opportunities for It's Not Even Past a year ago, Liz Zelvin steered me toward Shepherd, a "book discovery platform" similar in some ways  - but not all - to

Goodreads. In 2026, Shepherd rebranded as Book DNA, which is certainly a more informative name for a book-finding service! They've got an interesting concept. Book DNA allows readers to find curated reading lists (if you like books by Jane Doe, here's what other Jane Doe fans recommend). It categorizes books by genre, and provides "author profile pages" that let you meet an author, learn about his or her book, and explore a list of five books that author recommends.

Well, why not? At the basic level, it's free to both readers and authors, so I hit "contact" and a pleasant, enthusiastic person named Cathy got back to me quickly, inviting me to fill out a form describing my book and listing five of my own faves. I was only sixty-five percent certain she was a real person and not an AI assistant, but - she turned out to be for real.

Listing my top five books was a tough assignment, because my purpose was to steer traffic toward my book, which is gritty crime fiction, perhaps could be called noir, and is technically a story collection, though the stories are interlocked, chronological, and  - read together -  form a novel. But many of my favorite writers are entirely outside those genres:  Colson Whitehead (The Nickel Boys, The Underground Railroad), Elizabeth Strout (Olive Kittredge), Ann Patchett (Bel Canto), George Saunders (Lincoln in the Bardo), Jim Fergus (One Thousand White Women), Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex). And don't get me started on kids' books. I read the entire Little House, All of a Kind Family, and Miss Bianca series straight through every few years. I still dream about Lois Lenski's Indian Captive and Ruth Archer's A Candle in Her Room. So I narrowed my focus to the best books that had something in common with my own - a dark premise, one or more murders, an element of mystery - and I still had a very, very hard time narrowing the list.

I knew Elizabeth George and Ruth Rendell would make the cut. I wasn't sure which book in either case, but I finally decided by thinking, well, you love all their books, but which do you remember best?  And that gave me What Came Before He Shot Her - George's tour de force follow-up to her own With No One as Witness, in which Inspector Thomas Lynley's fiancee, Lady Helen Clyde, is murdered by a child of twelve. What Came Before He Shot Her is heartbreaking, moving, terrifying - as good as any of George's novels, but in some regards, entirely different. For Rendell, I was tempted by The Veiled One - I love Inspector Wexford - but I finally decided on a Barbara Vine title, A Dark-Adapted Eye, a masterwork of secrets and family dysfunction. (Vine is one of Rendell's pseudonyms.)

I had the same problem with Kate Atkinson, and I sort of thought I should list her twice - once for Jackson Brodie (I chose Case Histories, almost solely because it's first, but they're all great) and again for her more literary (and weird, and wonderful) Life After Life. I finally went with Jackson because it's closer to what I write - he's a semi-amateur sleuth with a predilection for trouble - and also because how do you choose Life After Life without its equally stunning companion novel, A God in Ruins? Haven't read those? Get thee to Bookshop.org. You are in for a life-changing read. I promise. 

Well, speaking of life-changing, I've listed three books and haven't gotten to Sarah Waters yet, although she's probably the best contemporary writer going. Fingersmith, remember? But I went with The Paying Guests. Oh. My. God. Just read it, if you haven't yet. It's got everything: Depression-era London, class warfare, forbidden lesbian sex, murder…

I sat up late arguing with Emma Donaghue (Room, Frog Music) and Paulette Jiles (have mercy! she has written some amazing books: Enemy Women, News of the World). Finally, I realized I cared a lot more about my list than either of them do (also, they weren't actually there) and I went with Jiles' phenomenal The Color of Lightning. It was tough because I dream about News of the World, but Lightning taught me so much about the American West and about fine, fine writing. It's the fictionalized story of Britt Johnson, a free Black cowboy who rescues his family from Comanchees during the Civil War.

When I'd turned in my list, along with a blurb about my own book, I heard back from Cathy and crew almost immediately. They'd made some small cuts for space and some edits to break up lengthy blocks of text. I didn't really notice anything missing, but I certainly appreciated being asked. 

The next step takes us to my only quibble with Book DNA - the buy button. Although readers can buy from Bookshop.org, Amazon is the default. One must click on a very small arrow on the Amazon button to see that there's an option.

I clicked through on both sales platforms to check my book, and found that there was no "preview" or "look inside" option on Amazon - something that many readers use prior to making a purchase. It turns out that Amazon doesn't post previews until a book is actually released. And once again, Book DNA came through with flying colors, offering to hold off posting until the release date - October 20.  

As Dad often reminded us, "there's no such thing as a free lunch." But no one at Book DNA had asked me for a dime. So - how do they make money? In two ways, as it turns out. One, Book DNA receives a commission on sales that accounts for about twenty percent of their revenue. The other eighty percent comes from reader and author memberships. But the "freemium" model means that the basic membership level is free for both writers and readers. Authors can - and many do - pay a bit more to get special promotion and increased visibility, but the curated lists are free for real.

There are plenty of happy writers engaging with the site, but it's always informative to know what folks don't like. So I asked Uncle Google what dissatisfied authors had to say about the platform, and the answer was revealing: authors didn't like the effort required to choose five favorite books and write a paragraph about each. These are writers.  Writers trying to promote a book. A book they have written. Go figure.  Ben Fox, co-founder of Book DNA, says that it should take authors thirty to 45 minutes to write something that will "deliver a lifetime of steady promotion. This isn't a blog where it posts and then readers never see it again; your recommendations plug into our entire platform, and every reader who visits looking for a book has a chance of bumping into your book and your book recommendations as they explore."

If you read my last SleuthSayers post, you know that I'm willing to work hard to take advantage of small promotion and publicity opportunities, and that some of these "little ponds" have really paid off for me. So I've little time for writers who claim to want to sell books but are not willing to make the effort to do so. 

I'm excited about the Book DNA opportunity, and I'm interested to see what happens on October 20th. Stay tuned.

Anna Scotti's work appears frequently in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. It's Not Even Past will be released by Crippen & Landru on October 20, followed by They Look Like Angels, a collection of stand-alone stories, early next year.  Scotti is the Chautauqua Journal's nominee for Best of the Net (fiction) this year for her story, The Intruder.

Scotti is also a poet, with recent inclusions in Chautauqua, Nimrod, The Women Artists Datebook, and in Women in a Golden State (Gunpowder Press).  You can read and hear some of her poems without a paywall on her site or at The New Yorker.

A Very Special Character Study

Reposted for reasons that will become obvious by the end of the post.
Happy Ides of October!

***

Sooooo… Character.  It's not plot. It's the only other thing aside from plot that can drive a story. And what makes for interesting characters?

Realistic (and often contradictory) personality traits.

I've been thinking about this very thing quite a bit lately, as I wrap the final draft of a long-delayed novel that will be finished and off to my agent before the end of this year!

Of all things, it was a vacuum cleaner commercial that gave me my own particular epiphany about how to write great, interesting, realistic characters. This one, to be exact:


Smoothies!

A biker who's a neat freak? Another who does needlepoint?

Interesting characters because they subvert expectations. Just like real life.

I have a cousin who is outdoorsy as hell: hunting, fishing. Sells cars for a living. A real man's man.

And for relaxation, he taught himself to crochet.

Interesting, right? Unexpected?

And even better because it's real life.

The best fictional characters mirror real life. Let's talk about one.

A woman, early eighties, married over fifty years, outgoing, friendly, caring, compassionate. A good friend, great sister, terrific mother and grandmother. Unironically loved Barry Manilow back in the '70s.

Once won enough money playing the slots on a visit to Vegas that she was able to buy herself a new floor for her kitchen (Including what it cost to have it installed). Not an isolated occurrence. This woman has a system. Every time she goes to Vegas, she wins thousands.

Enjoys gardening. LOVES Bruce Springsteen's music.

Was the queen of her high school's "Senior/Junior Ball" during her senior year.

Is strictly a social drinker. And yet, once, as a young woman, she stayed up late with her in-laws, drinking. By morning she had matched her father-in-law drink for drink, and the two of them had drunk every other adult member of the family under the table.

Slipped on the ice getting the morning paper one New Year's Day, and broke her ankle. Was able to laugh about it that same day (there's a "great pain meds" joke in there, somewhere!).

While in her thirties, once drove across the Columbia Basin from Yakima to Spokane with her eldest son, then in his teens. Drove for an hour shortly after sunset with the domelight in her car on so her son could finish a book he was reading.

Loves the color yellow. Hates surprises. Has a very close relationship with her daughter-in-law.

Started taking piano lessons last year. (That's all you get on this one. There's a ton of backstory there that the reader doesn't need to know for this tidbit to work, especially with the writer keeping it in mind while writing about it).

Possesses one of the most subversively bawdy sense of humor you'll ever encounter.

Is one of the kindliest souls I've ever known.

Okay: confession time. This character is a real person. My mother, Berniece. And it's her birthday today. Please join me in wishing her a happy one!

Love you, Mom! Hope this is pleasant surprise!

Bruce Alexander

Bruce Alexander, who died in 2003, wrote eleven period mysteries featuring the 18^th-century justice, Sir John Fielding.  (The last book in the series, Rules of Engagement, was published after his death.)  You can make a good case, that along with Ellis Peters, who wrote the Cadfael novels, they set a high bar.  Left Coast Crime, my own regional mystery con, has an award for historical fiction named in Bruce Alexander’s memory, which has been won by Jackie Winspear, Ann Parker, Catriona McPherson, and Naomi Hirahara, among others.

I thought I’d read all the Alexander books, but happily not.  It turns out I missed his next-to-last, The Price of Murder.  This is one of the more disturbing books in the series, a story about the disappearance and sexual traffic of children, along with a fair amount of GBH and literal throat-cutting.  It’s also got a road trip to Newmarket and a lively portrait of the horseracing scene, and an odd, somewhat aimless sidebar, which although it casts shade on suspected white slavery, and mob violence, doesn’t really go anywhere.  Its main purpose seems to be as an Easter egg, a real-life case involving the justice Henry Fielding, brother of Sir John, and author of Tom Jones.  Henry was appointed a magistrate first, and then John succeeded him.  The two of them, both historically, and in the novels, established the Bow Street Runners, which eventually became the Metropolitan Police.

 

One of the issues, for a reader, when you invest in a writer, and a series, and then they die on you, is that you’re left with the longer story arc unresolved: what happens with the characters beyond the books?  Philip Kerr and the Bernie Gunther novels, for example – he was only 62.  I remember being very upset when Bruce Alexander died, for the selfish reason that I’d never know how life was going to turn out for young Jeremy Proctor, the narrator of the stories.  There are hints and foreshadowings, but it’s not the same.  We do know, from the record, that Fielding himself died in 1780, five years after the story in the last book is told.  But this isn’t internal evidence.  It’s something you might look up, if you’ve a mind. 

 

The thing that’s cool, in any event, is that revisiting Georgian London with Alexander - the Blind Beak, and Jeremy, Seven Dials, and Covent Garden, and Lloyd’s coffeehouse – is so vivid.  It doesn’t smell of the lamp.  Or rather, it does, but not in the sense of being overstudied; rather, in the sense of you smelling the guttering candles and the spilled beer, gin and sweat and bad teeth.  The best historicals, Mary Renault, Patrick O’Brian, Bernard Cornwell, don’t show off.  They use detail sparingly, and let it settle, like ash.  You feel your way in.  Alexander does the same.  And there’s a trick to the language.  You can do a lot with word order.  I mentioned I was reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.  You’re very aware, at first, that you’re reading prose written in the late 1700’s – which is, of course, exactly the era Alexander is effectively reproducing in the Fielding novels – and you could do worse than imitate Gibbon.  Not self-consciously, which is only going to be brittle and artificial, but if possible, to relax into those rhythms and speech patterns.  And you can use older literary conventions, had I but known and so forth, as long as you don’t lay it on too thick. 

I’m reminded of John le Carré’s comment, which I’ve found helpful in more than one context.  It doesn’t have to be authentic, it has to be convincing.  Bruce Alexander makes it seem effortless, but we know different.  He put a lot of effort into making it look easy.

The Self-Taught Writer

Recently rereleased by
Crimson Gate Books.

In the September/October 2026 issue of Poets & Writers, Uttama Kirit Patel describes herself and other writers featured in her article “The Self-Taught Writer” as being, well, self-taught. The point of the article is that an MFA is not required to establish a successful writing career, and it does support that thesis.

On the other hand, I do wonder if the writers in this piece had advantages that truly self-taught writers do not have, including high socio-economic status and advanced educations. The author, for example, “holds an MPhil in psychology from the University of Cambridge.” Another writer “came to fiction writing after a law career dedicated to social justice” and “years of education as a classical violinist.” The author “moved to New York City” and “took classes with the Gotham Writers Workshop,” and another writer “took writing workshops while pursuing a degree in political science at Yale University.” The author even “spent eight weeks disconnected from technology, writing chapters in the natural beauty of New Zealand.”

While I do not make light of anyone’s journey to publication, because all paths are valid, these experiences do not align with my experience.

I came to writing as the child of blue collar parents eking out a living somewhere in the middle class. Advanced education was not an option, and the thought of attending Cambridge or Yale was beyond the pale. Giving up everything to move to New York City or spending eight weeks writing in New Zealand was never (and still isn’t) an option.

I suspect I am much closer to being a self-taught writer than Patel or the writers in her article. Without high income, social connections, or advanced education (even if not specifically for writing), I had to build a writing career the way pulp writers of the early 1900s did: by pounding the keyboard and collecting rejection after rejection until something finally stuck.

My writing education came from reading everything I could and from Writer’s Digest and the various how-to books the company published. I attended my first writing conference—a small, regional conference—in the early 1980s. By then I was already selling professionally.

The one writing group in which I participated—made up of people I met at that conference—did not last long. We were mismatched, with poets, fiction writers, and non-fiction writers unable to help one another because our needs were so different.

In addition to a creative writing class I took in high school, I attended three college-level creative writing classes and one journalism class during my on-and-off (mostly off) college career, and I finally earned a BA in Professional Writing at the age of 48. By then I had already sold many hundreds of short stories, articles, essays, and other writing.

Throughout the years I did have periods of time—similar to Patel’s eight weeks in New Zealand—where I concentrated on writing. Those periods were called unemployment. So, even though I was writing, I was also spending time seeking steady paychecks.

For all these reasons and more, my education as a writer came primarily from reading what others had written, from pounding the keyboard, and from submitting work to every publication imaginable. I learned all that I could from rejections and from acceptances. And I continued to improve.

And that is a more accurate description of a self-taught writer.

* * *

“In-Country,” a horror story, appears in Flash of the Dead: Halloween ’26 (Wicked Shadow Press), edited by Parth Sarathi Chakraborty

Prohibition Peepers, first published by Down & Out Books, has been rereleased by Crimson Gate Books.

---

So here we are on that ambiguous holiday again

Ever since I started writing my mystery and adventure series, the Mendoza Family Saga, I've been writing about Christopher Columbus, the Genoese who led a motley crew of Spanish and Catalan soldiers and sailors across the "Ocean Sea" in 1492 (appointed Admiral by King Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, who united Spain by conquering Muslim Granada and expelling all the Spanish Jews in the same year); the indigenous Taino people Columbus and his forces encountered in the Caribbean; and Diego and Rachel Mendoza, my fictional Jewish brother and sister caught between them.

In the first story, "The Green Cross," published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and nominated for an Agatha Award for Best Short Story, the Admiral is Diego's mentor and protector. But once he plants the Green Cross banner on the first Caribbean isle, claiming it “in the names of their most Christian Majesties and the Savior” (in the first Mendoza novel, Voyage of Strangers), the lines are clearly drawn.

Wherever the Mendozas go, Christians are the bad guys. The good guys are Jews and indigenous peoples, Muslims in the Ottoman Empire where the family eventually settles, and others whom today we would call marginalized peoples, such as the Roma, whom Diego and Rachel encounter in their travels. In writing about the genocide of the Taino, I’ve learned that today, surviving descendants in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic who carry their DNA are reconstructing their cultural heritage and language. It's hard to wipe a people out completely. (Thanks to DNA matching services, I've learned that, in spite of the Holocaust in the 20th century, segments of Ashkenazic Jewish DNA identical to mine are walking around in relatives in forty-eight different countries.) In "A Matter of Perspective," a novelette published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, I enjoyed telling the story of Suleiman the Magnificent's conquest of Rhodes in 1522 as a victory. If you google the two-year-siege, you'll find it in our Eurocentric sources as the defeat of the Knights of Rhodes, which led to their becoming the Knights of Malta. This is not to say that Suleiman the Magnificent was a pussycat or that all Christians were bad guys even in the era of the Inquisition. But as survivors, the Mendozas are adaptable. As outsiders, they have a fresh perspective. And it is not surprising that, as intelligent people, they are cultural relativists.

In a few weeks, I'll be guest speaker at a lit class at the famed 92nd Street Y in New York. The professor is a guy I've known for seventy-five years (since third grade, if you must know). This time around, he's chosen the theme of "gallows humor" in Jewish mystery short stories, using examples from the anthology Jewish Noir II, edited by Ken Wishnia and Chantelle Aimée Osman, to which I contributed my Mendoza story, "The Cost of Something Priceless." It has a bit of a sixteenth-century frame story involving Rachel, a necklace she's bringing from the Ottoman Empress to the Queen of France, and bandits. But the heart of the story has my protagonist, one of Rachel's twentieth-century descendants, saying everything I always wanted to say about sexism and anti-Semitism in the 1950s, woven into a tale of theft, intrigue, and revenge.

All of my Mendoza Family Saga stories can be found in Rachel in the Harem. Voyage of Strangers is available for Kindle. Journey of Strangers is available in both paperback and e-book editions.

Part One: Might Makes Right?

Anyone who enjoys mysteries and crime novels has a passion for justice and, when laws are broken, we want to know whodunit, know they have been stopped from committing further crimes and even got their comeuppance. The backbone of justice is our laws and the courts that enforce those laws.

Lately, there have been articles, conversations around tables with coffee and croissants, in articles and online about justice. It's top of everyone's mind these days and, inserted in these conversations, is the question about human nature and whether humans are naturally lawless, ruled by might makes right, or whether humans gravitate to creating laws because we are driven by altruism and cooperation. 

A uniquely 2026 thing is the how loud the debate has become about international laws, many brought in after world war two to prevent the rise of countries hell bent on taking over other countries by using force that, eventually, start wider wars and even world wars. Some are arguing international laws and the courts that enforce them should be eliminated because only might makes right.

Just last week, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended the imposition of sanctions against the International Criminal Court, by a singularly shocking statement:  "The United States and the American people are not subject to the jurisdiction of this fake ICC."

This week, the International Criminal Court responded to sweeping U.S. sanctions by stating, "It is an assault on the rule of law and on the very foundations of the international legal order which strikes at the simple principle that no one stands above the law."

These sanctions are the tip of the iceberg; what is being attacked, debated, argued about is the very nature of international justice and underneath that, human nature itself.

In January, 2026, Stephen Miller, a top aide to President Trump, took upon himself to describe his vision of human nature that defines his country's foreign policy:

“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world...that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”

The beginning of time? That's one heck of a statement; how does Miller know what humans have been since the beginning of time? Has he been around that long?  No, he's referring to the belief that humans are designed to claw at each other to climb the evolutionary ladder.

Evolution - explained by those who don't understand it - is seen as the survival of the fittest and the fittest are strong and aggressive so, we are governed by the iron fisted rule that might rules. Evolution has never been that - it is the survival of some genes and the elimination of others, forging the nature of species. Some babies lived long enough to have their own babies, those who didn't survive haven't contributed to the nature of our species. It's a numbers game – those who survive in larger numbers and have more offspring – shape the nature of humanity.

Modern humans have been around for about 300,000 years and our written history is about 5,000 years old, so to understand much of our history we rely on fossil evidence. Given how long humans existed without written history, those early years have weighed heavily on how our genes were crafted and they are studied by Prehistoric Archaeologists and Paleoanthropologists, using bones, ours and the animals we ate, artifacts like tools, clothing, and decorations to piece together who we were. What these scientists don't do is pick a theory out of thin air and pretend it's true. The narrative that the strong survive by aggression and dominance is absolute -  you know where I'm going with this - two words, begin the first one with a B and end the last one with a T. It's made up by people who have never studied or understood our prehistoric past, the lengthy past that forged our genes. 

In his groundbreaking book The Makings of Mankind, Richard Leaky, the famous paleoanthropologist (the son of famous paleoanthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey) presents evidence that cooperation and sharing were crucial for human evolution and not an cute accident. Through carefully documented human remains, he showed that, as our cooperation and altruism increased, so did the numbers of early humans, as evidenced by bones of those who had been injured or disabled even from birth, and who survived because of the care of others. This is when our human numbers increased, skewing our genes to altruism.

Anthropolgist, Sarah blaffer Hrdy, in Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, shows how cooperation and empathy were necessary for human survival because human babies are immature, requiring long periods of care and those who survive rely on attentive mothers and a bevy of helpers. With scarce resources and threats to their safety; it is not the aggressive that survive but the cooperative - the ones who work together and this is how natural selection sorted us out - those who survived passed on their genes, crafting the human race. She doesn't do all this by making up stuff, she uses evidence and numbers to back up what she posits. 

What about the raging strong man beating up others? His survival is neither here not there in the evolutionary scheme of gene survival -  he only matters if he has offspring that survive. Some have argued that fighting off animals that threatened his babies ensured their survival, and eating those animals have fed his babies so yeah, might makes genes survive. A great deal of research has shown that prehistoric humans were sorely lacking in the ability to fend off large animals by themselves and even hunt them successfully by themselves. Picture hand to large paw combat. Picture the same hands trying to strangle an animal. 

Evidence shows that what allowed success in hunting and in defence were tools like spears, created cooperatively, and groups of prehistoric humans hunting together. Evidence also shows that only 20% of early human diet was meat and the rest was from gathered plants, gathered collectively because of the time-consuming nature of the task. And let's not forget the baby who, left on their own, would die and take their genes with them. So the baby needed people who cared enough, to altruistically watch over them while others gather and hunt for food and collectively defended said baby so its genes could survive. It all boils down to altruism and cooperation. The raging guy who refused to cooperate and work with others? His baby was unlikely to survive, making his genes irrelevant. When we see the modern version of this guy, he is an outlier and often destined for jail. 

What about the "the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time”?

Humans haven't been there since the beginning of time and the earliest humans died before telling us much about their existence, so we rely on what they did tell us with their bones and the other evidence of them that remains. All the evidence  points to an increase in survival through cooperation and altruism. If we argue international laws are just the organic outgrowth of human nature, it's best to listen to evidence about how our nature was created rather than make up stuff. Are we a completely altruist cooperative species? Obviously not. Are we a species driven by aggressive genes? Obviously not. Rewriting our history, misunderstanding our evolution, is being used to prop up political actions. 

We are not a lawless species. We are a species who created laws because of our genes and our laws restrict those among us who try to play the might makes right card over the cooperation, altruism and fairness that allowed humans to survive in large numbers. The restriction of those who think might makes right is the very core of our national and international laws. The guy who thinks he can beat you up in the street and grab your valuables using his might, is the guy who our local laws send to jail. The country that uses force to take over other countries is the country that our international laws seek to restrain because, without that restraint, our history tells us a world war is in the making. 

The Great Halloween Specials Gap

It starts each November, the relentless march of Christmas specials. It'll march all the way to January. To be clear, I don't mean movie classics or theme episodes. I mean variety show or cartoon specials done just for the holiday: How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, A Year Without Santa Claus, Frosty the Snowman, and so forth, and so forth. And so forth. We still get new specials each year. Most fade quickly, but the hits stick forever, and the big studios won't stop trying. There's too much money to be made. 

Contrast that with Halloween. It isn't like Halloween is unpopular. I'm writing this before Labor Day, and the stores are already loaded up with decorations and candy. And yet, the years have given Halloween almost nothing by way of enduring TV specials. And franchises have tried: Disney, Bugs and Daffy, Garfield, and yes, the Grinch. 

Of course, one Halloween special has lasted, the one with plenty of merch online and on those aisle shelves: It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966). It's the exception that proves the specials gap rule. 

And yes, I think about these things sometimes. 

My theory: Christmas comes from a story. A rather famous story, as it happens, and the base themes and characters are baked in and widely known. Centuries of folklore expanded Christmas into a season, with ever-deeper narratives and recurring characters. A team writing a Christmas special need not explain flying reindeer. That team can threaten Santa's workshop or the family gathering from limitless angles. If the script has snow at the end, it's a viable pitch.

Not so with Halloween. Now, we've been scaring each other about ghosts and ghouls since oral storytelling first began, and we've threatened to come back and haunt our families for even longer. The origin themes of Halloween are the coming of winter and the thinning veil between our world and the next. What unites Halloween as a narrative engine are common experiences and common symbols. We've all passed a murky cemetery or felt the unexplained shiver down our spine. These are powerful appeals to our inner fears and primal instincts, not broadcast television-bankable TV specials.

At Christmas, we're all supposed to gather together as a family. Sooner or later, probably sooner, the family will need something to do, usually something to watch together, something warm or at least neutral enough to pause the squabbling. Something that Grandma can't argue is born of the devil.

Something with commercial breaks to sell you stuff. 

This is the exact point A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) tried to drive home, that commercialization ruins the spirit of Christmas. It's my single favorite Christmas special, probably because it nailed this message with humor and innocence. Between sponsor acknowledgements, that is. Coca-Cola bankrolled the whole thing. 

Charlie Brown might have hated it, but Christmas specials are a racket, one that can hawk more than soft drinks. Consumer brands can flog the latest toys, gift ideas for that special someone, and reminders that your neighborhood retailer has your essential this-and-that. And they can do it again next year. 

Halloween is more an event and experience. A popular event, and a lucrative one for many a business, but the customers are buying specific things: fun-size candy, Power Ranger costumes, animatronic hobgoblins, Count Chocula. Even with Halloween's retail boom, the Christmas market operates on a scale geometrically larger in terms of annual U.S. sales. Gifts, travel, decoration, office parties, and the money keeps flowing.

The Great Pumpkin was the third Peanuts special, commissioned only after the franchise scored big with A Charlie Brown Christmas and Charlie Brown's All-Stars. The Great Pumpkin would deliver another hit if it stuck to the formula and made Halloween playfully safe for family hour, a Christmas special in a costume. 

It had to be thus. A ghost story delivers an unsettling lesson, if it delivers a lesson at all. Put in Charlie Brown terms, a proper ghost story wouldn't have a beagle rising up out of the pumpkin patch. It would've been a ghost, and Linus would've either learned to dread the Great Pumpkin and never return, or it would've dragged him down into the vines forever, leaving poor Sally in utter dread. This too cometh your way, home viewers.

That is a flat-out terrible Charlie Brown special, but it has the bones of a solid horror tale. The Halloween spirit never made the jump to broadcast specials, but the time-honored horror story is hardly in ill health. Haunts and monsters continue to thrive in movies, in series television and October bingeathons, in theme parks and around campfires.

Okay, so Halloween specials may not have caught on as with Christmas. We can enjoy the experiences and movies and the ghost hunting shows. And maybe another seasonal classic like The Great Pumpkin might come along some day. As Linus said, there is always next year. Just you wait.

Happy Halloween, everybody!

Before Las Vegas, There Was… Newport, Kentucky?

Ah! Prohibition. Fortunes were made on both sides of the law. It gave rise to Elliot Ness and J. Edgar Hoover. Every large American city had pockets of Mafia and Mafia-adjacent activity. And it put one Cincinnati suburb on the map. Across the river lies Newport, Kentucky, reachable today by a freeway, the Taylor-Southgate Bridge, and the Purple People Bridge, which formerly carried US 27 and the Louisville &Nashville Railroad. It's now a pedestrian and bike bridge and frequently hosts events.

[Photos sourced from The Northerner to the best of my knowledge.]

But during prohibition, a man named George Remus, called the King of the Bootleggers, ran his criminal empire in Cincinnati from Newport. But a funny thing happened to George. Just as Prohibition came to an end, he got arrested for… Well… Bootlegging.

At the same time, Cincinnati was as mobbed up as any city in Ohio. The city fought back by creating Charter government, run by a city manager. What's a poor mobster to do? They packed up their casinos and dens of ill repute and moved over to Newport, now open territory. Soon, two types of joints opened: knock-out joints, your typical hole in the wall with some rooms upstairs where "hostesses" would entertain gentleman clients, and carpet joints, illegal casinos and, sometimes, brothels that operated in the open and would not be out of place in Las Vegas of the 1950s through the 1970s. One such carpet joint, located between York and Monmouth Streets near what is now the Newport Aquarium, later became a Jeff Ruby restaurant and now a mob-themed event center called The Syndicate. Since Ruby's days as owner, the Syndicate has kept its carpet joint motif. Many celebrities from Frank Sinatra to Marilyn Monroe frequented the more glamorous establishments. On the other hand, a young blackjack dealer and singer from Steubenville, Ohio, named Dean Martin, dealt at a knockout joint later occupied by a bar owned by Reds legend Tom Browning.

There was no Cincinnati mob to speak of. Newport wiseguys answered to the Cleveland mob, who in turn answered to what's now the Genovese crime family in New York. But others had a hand in the boom times, specifically Bugsey Siegel and Meyer Lansky had money in Newport. It became a proof-of-concept for what they would build in Las Vegas.

But the good times ended in the 1960s. A man named George Ratterman ran for Campbell County sheriff as a reform candidate. At the same time, Robert Kennedy received a mandate from his brother Jack to crack down on organized crime. So RFK (Sr.) set his sites on Newport. The mob, afraid Ratterman would mean the end of the mob in Newport, drugged him and tried to frame him by having a stripper named April Flowers (not her real name) pose with the unconscious candidate in an effort to derail his candidacy. Everyone saw the picture as a fake. By 1970, the operation was in tatters.

A few remnants lingered on after that. Larry Flynt bought a famous strip joint on Monmouth known as the Brass Ass. Flynt later sold it. The Brass Ass became a local tourist trap and only closed last month. The Syndicate, of course, exists as a mob-themed event center after hosting the Rat Pack and the like back in Newport's sin-and-vice heyday. But it's a, like, a respectable joint.

But if you want to know what drove the final nail in the coffin, look no further than the Bevery Hills Supper Club in neighboring Southgate.  The Club was the areas most famous carpet joint, still open long after gambling operations had been run out of Northern Kentucky. If the police raided, the gambling gear would be shoved into another room until the police did their business. And again, celebrities frequented the place as both performers and guests. But one night in 1977, a fire swept through the club, killing 165 people and injuring 200 more. The club was never rebuilt, and a memorial now stands on the site.

And I would be remiss if I didn't mention one of the most infamous post-mob vice incidents in Newport. A Cincinnati City Council member drove over the late, lamented Central Avenue Bridge to Newport for a massage. As in one with a "happy ending." He wrote a check. It bounced. It became a running joke in Cincinnati for years. But...The councilman returned to Council next term, got elected mayor, and later became a well-respected anchorman on WLWT. Then he had his own talkshow.

The Jerry Springer Show.

 But his most infamous episode came about because the vice of Newport outlived the mob.

Seriously, Trigger Warnings

In 1989, I started graduate school at a university that I'll call The U because three decades have passed.  Maybe things have changed.  Anyway, there was a serial rapist working the campus, striking at night in certain parking lots and various locations around town where students and teachers lived.  

And quite a few of the graduate level history classes took place at night, including one in a professor's home.  In fact, once a rape occurred less than a block away from that house while we were in class.  So that worked out quite well for the professor, but it made for disturbing walks to and from the car for the rest of us.  

Yes, we female students including me always asked one of the guys in the class to escort us to our cars, and they always cooperated, so leaving class wasn't a problem.  The tough part was parking at night, when you got out of the car with your books and notebooks, trying to breathe normally, keep walking, while looking around like your eyes were on swivels...  One of the parking lots had had four assaults, and that's where I had to park for one class because it was  the closest to the building, and anywhere else would have meant that I'd have to walk through two other parking lots which were just as dangerous, because the rapist struck randomly.  

The administration never admitted that the rapes were going on. They did send out a "safety memo" that women should seek escorts at night, just as a matter of common safety.  No mention of the rapist.  And the campus police (more on them later) were never around at night.  A huge number of students signed a petition asking for campus police to monitor the parking lots - but the university said there simply weren't the resources to do that.  Just seek someone to escort you and stay out of dark spaces.  Ignoring the night classes.  The dark parking lots, where sometimes a light went out and wasn't replaced for a few weeks.  The dark street where the professor lived.  And back then, no cell phones…

Hell, I'm getting triggered just writing this.  Because that was a long stretch to live under constant tension and fear, and even after two years on the streets of L.A. as a teenager.  I guess I'd hoped life would get safer, especially at the posh university I'd been lucky enough to get accepted by.  Wrong.  

So I have a few comments about the Cornell 7 and the handling of Jane Doe's case.

Especially after reading what's been made available of the group text among the guys that started off with “Free p---y” in the house, continued with a discussion where one fraternity brother responded to that piece of information by writing “I f---ing love Chi Phi”; and another either sought or provided clarification, “Like you can walk in and whip it out,” and yet another, “Shop still open?” at 1:42 AM on Oct. 19, 2024.

As Monica Hesse said on WaPo:  

“Shop still open?” is a kind of wordplay that requires a little brainpower, especially when made at 1:42 a.m. Your mind may be fuzzy with alcohol or ketamine, but not so fuzzy that you cannot dig out your phone and add a question mark.

The question mark is needed because you do not know whether the woman — a student, just like you — is still there. You are not there, after all. You are in a different room. You are making a premeditated inquiry as to whether you should bother traveling to another part of the house in order to have sex with a woman you have identified as a shop. You have to think about it. You have to press send.

You do not know whether she is conscious or consenting. You are not texting her to find out. She could probably be a better judge of whether she was conscious or consenting, but you have instead decided to group-text your fraternity brothers, entrusting them to be the judge of whether the shop should be open. If you text the shop, you might learn that maybe it never wanted to be open in the first place.

The presence of a group text is both gobsmacking and banal. It conveys that whatever was happening in that room — however drunk or drugged everyone was in that room — several people still thought to document the evening in real time. To make it a bonding experience. To make it a party. To make sure everyone got to the shop before the shop woke up or tried to hide under covers or started crying or wished to get out of that room or did whatever else it is that shops do.

“Shop still open?” wrote one young man, and another wrote back, “Yeah.” (LINK)

Now let's get to the Tompkins County DA, Matthew Van Houten, who said that his decision not to bring charges was based on the contents of Jane Doe's signed 2024 statement. But he told CBS News New York's Saeidi on Tuesday that he had never seen the transcript of what Jane Doe told campus police before his office decided not to bring charges.

NOTE:  This transcript included the direct statements:

“I can say with 100% percent confidence I was raped.”

"And then, of course, I was being hit at the same time. Physically hit very, very hard."*

Anyway, Van Houten said,

"I'm going to follow up on this because this is news to me," he said.

When told Jane Doe had said she was confident she was raped, Van Houten said, "That wasn't information that I had, first of all. Second of all, that is a legal conclusion."

"If she had said those words, we certainly would want to have explored that more," Van Houten continued. "Like I said, that wasn't provided to me." (LINK)

 Now the Cornell Police Department reports ONLY to the Cornell CFO (Chief Financial Officer). And the victim only talked to the Cornell Police Department (remember what I said about university "police departments"?), who condensed 100+ pages of interview to 6 pages that "omitted some of the more forceful and definitive language she used. And it was missing her unequivocal statement that she had been raped." (LINK) The Cornell Police Department sent the condensed version to the CFO of Cornell University, and then it was sent to DA Van Houten, who did what is the standard thing you do for the university that keeps the city in business. Bury it.

“I can say with 100% percent confidence I was raped.”

"And then, of course, I was being hit at the same time. Physically hit very, very hard."*

Anyway, the Ithaca Police Department NEVER SAW THE STATEMENT, NEVER WAS TOLD ABOUT THE CRIME, AND SO NEVER INVESTIGATED, even though Jane Doe and her family thought they were involved in the investigation.  

PLUS

The night before she was gangraped, a student had overdosed from ketamine at that very Cornell frat house.
A recent campus climate survey at Cornell University found that 35% of undergraduate women reported experiencing nonconsensual sexual contact.

Guess what?  Nothing was done about any of these!  Wow!  What a surprise!  

OK. A couple of suggestions:

(1) Do not let universities and colleges handle their own sexual assault investigations ever again. Ever. Anywhere.  Campus police are basically there to break up street fights and keep things quiet. They ignore the rich frat houses and mop up bad situations. Bury things. They may be called "police departments" but they're not qualified. They certainly weren't back at The U and they apparently weren't at Cornell. 

(2) Ban fraternities.  I don't care how much money they have, or how they're conduits to "good futures".  There's too much bad shit that goes on, from hazings that end up killing students to alcohol and drug overdoses to sexual assaults.  And even though I realize doing this is like closing the barn door after the cattle escape, I really am sick of rapists, alcoholics, and drug addicts reaching high levels of power and influence.  At least the geyser might turn into a trickle.  

"Records show that from 2018 through 2024, more than 1,200 incidents of sexual assault, dating and domestic violence and stalking were reported to Cornell University’s Title IX office, USA TODAY has reported."  Read more at:   (LINK) I'm sure that NONE of them were publicized.  

(3) Quit the rhetoric that it's the woman's fault.  (I know, that's a dream...)  Young men can do stupid things, commit crimes, brag about it online, and the general rap is still, "Do we really want to ruin a young man's life over 20 minutes of action?"   

(Quote from the father of Brock Turner - at the time in a frat at Stanford - who violently raped an unconscious woman and got six months in jail.)  BTW, fun fact - the two men who stopped Brock Turner in mid-rape, chased him down, and held him until the police arrived were Two Swedish graduate students, Peter Lars Jonsson and Carl-Fredrik Arndt, may praise be to their names forever. So immigrants saved her. None of the frat brothers.  

ANSWER:  Yes, we do want to destroy a young man's life over 20 minutes "of action".  Because certain kinds "of action" destroy a young girl's life forever. 

(4) Recognize that in an authoritarian world, the real definition of power - unprettied, unsoftened - is the ability to do whatever you want and get away with it. And one of the absolute proofs of power, to sociopaths, psychopaths, and pack mobs, is the ability to do anything you want to someone subordinate/inferior to you and get away with it. Especially sexual dominance. That's why rape is a standard weapon in war, gangs, prisons or anywhere else where someone has to prove they're the ones calling all the shots.  

*BTW, when Jane Doe said “I can say with 100% percent confidence I was raped.” "And then, of course, I was being hit at the same time. Physically hit very, very hard."

This is exactly what Andrew Tate & his scumbag brother, and every other pimp has been doing since the dawn of time: get the woman back to the pad; drug her; rape her; beat her; share her around; humiliate her; repeat.

Drug, rape, beat, abuse, humiliate. That’s the pattern.  Time for that shit to STOP.