Kieran Healy

Janice Rogers Brown revisited

Judge Janice Rogers Brown is back in the news, with Mark Schmitt and various members of the Volokhs discussing her promotion prospects. Henry has already noted her fondness for self-help guru Sam Beckett. Below the fold I reproduce a post of mine from 2003 about Brown’s rant—there’s really no other word for it—to the Federalist […]

Violent Societies

While thinking about the deterrent effect of the death penalty I wondered about cross-national variation in rates of violent death. Comparative data on homicide rates undoubtedly exist, but I don’t have them to hand. I do have OECD data on death rates due to assault, though, so here’s a nice picture of this trend for […]

Hot in the City

Draft review of Heat Wave: A social autopsy of disaster in Chicago, by Eric Klinenberg. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

In the middle of July of 1995, temperatures in Chicago rose to record heights as a mass of hot, humid air settled over the city. On Thursday the 16th, the high temperature was 106 degrees Fahrenheit, […]

Comic Disaster Relief

Today my University is carrying out a Disaster Preparedness Exercise, simulating “campus and community crisis responses” in the face, I think, of a series of imaginary industrial explosions. The Physical and Atmospheric Sciences building was evacuated, but so, unfortunately, was Social Sciences. They didn’t do that one on purpose, though. Industrial accidents, even imaginary ones, […]

Historians of the world, Unite

A group of well-known history bloggers—including Timothy Burke, Robert ‘KC’ Johnson, and Ralph Luker—have banded together to form Cliopatria. Proof if proof were needed that group blogs are continuing their irresistable rise to global dominance. Or, as a historian would put it, proof if proof were needed that at least one (probably quite atypical) group […]

No-one can be told what the Meatrix is

You have to see it for yourself.