Writing
Excerpts from Choice Articles
"IT is not true that women love outlaws. They may go for a guy with a few misdemeanors and a bad haircut, but that’s about the extent of their interest in the proverbial Bad Boy. When it comes to real criminals with actual felonies and prison tattoos, many will settle for the nearest mechanic with dirty fingernails and a Japanese motorcycle."
The New York Times, 2009
“Here’s your death penalty, son. We’re gonna accidentally (wink, wink) put you in the same prison with this dirt bag, where you can stab him in his sleep with a homemade shank. Slash him to ribbons with a razor blade in the shower. Bash his brains out on the ball field with a baseball bat.”
The New York Times, 2012
I've never known a hedge-funder to tag a subway car or urinate in an alley. White collar crime is, as its name implies, clean crime. Prisons aren't built for the perpetrators of these crimes. Hell, most of them wouldn't survive a month, and there's no money in warehousing dead convicts. That's simple economics.
The Columbia Spectator, 2009
My question is, if we can liquidate these men because they were terrorists, then why not Putin, Jong un, or even that little shit Maduro in Venezuela? The answer is that the world recognizes their aristocracy. Their eminence matters more, much more, than the literally millions of human beings who they have collectively murdered, tortured, incarcerated, and/or uprooted.
Political Writing for the Rational,
Substack, 2025
I challenge any pro-gun lobbyist and/or pundit to pocket a few thousand dollars and head out alone into the streets of any major city, find a shady character, and purchase a firearm illegally in the same manner that a psychotic and/or criminal would have to do if we had effective background checks in place.
The Daily Beast, 2013
... a simple twisting of linguistics make it much more acceptable to sentence a poor person to prison for abusing the evil-sounding heroin than it is to incarcerate a wealthy one for being addicted to the oh-so-innocuous “pain medication.”
Guernica, 2013
Imagine, our president talking policy with an actual person who has made contact with bona fide felons! Bridges are being forged before our very eyes — not real bridges, of course. America really doesn’t erect structures like that anymore, although it will build you a prison at the drop of a leg iron. Or how about a shiny new tank?
The Baltimore Sun, 2015
Dylan winning the Nobel Prize is a perfect counterweight to Donald Trump winning the presidency. Quite suddenly, we are reminded of the former’s Homeric recitations ’neath the hard rains of reality. And reminded, too, to leave our own tracks in the earth as best we can. And just as the depths of our particular Hells are proportional to the heights of our empathy, so too the flights of our flaws can only be grounded in our striving toward progress, both personal and political.
Those of us who’ve been to prison know how to deal with lockdowns. Prison is, after all, our most extreme form of quarantine. Indeed, many ex-cons find your struggles to cope amusing. There’s no Internet in prison. No smartphones. No cars. No premium channels or streaming. No kitchens. No alcohol.
The Washington Post, 2020
Note the word elimination, which is ludicrous coming from the mouths of supposed wildlife conservationists – the notion that you can have a balance in nature under the complete annihilation of an entire species is typical of Republican misinformation, in which collective whining is often misrepresented as rugged individualism.
Vox Populi, 2023
I like judges, even those who had sent me to prison. I respect them, for one, but it’s more a love of both country and law – the former envisioned in the Declaration of Independence, the latter codified in the Constitution – even if the two don’t exactly mesh. Country is tangible. Concrete beneath the tread of oxfords. Or work boots. Law an abstraction – arguable and even malleable, like molten metal hammered into classrooms. Or cages.
Vox Populi, 2024