On April 1, 2019, news broke that Awkwafina and Ike Barinholtz are producing and starring in a movie named Crime […]
Louis “The Laughing Eel” Ross and the Road of No Return: Incarcerating the “Criminally Insane”
In 1921 a burglar called the “Laughing Eel” began serving a ten-year prison term, but it was 33 years before […]
Armchair Detectives and the Allure of Death in Miniature at the Smithsonian
It was one of the coldest January days in recent memory, but that didn’t seem to deter the crowds inside […]
The Disappearance of Juliet Stuart Poyntz
Throughout the spring and early summer of 1937, telephone operators at the American Woman’s Association Clubhouse in Manhattan noted that […]
Who Was the Original “Welfare Queen?”: Review of Josh Levin’s The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth
How do you tell a story about a real-life, embodied individual who inspired a stereotype, without reducing her life to […]
“The Inflamed Egotism of Women:” Emma Simpson and the Limits of the Unwritten Law
Let me just admit it now—I’ve never listened to Serial.Or, rather, I never finished listening. Sure, I started it—after all, […]
Murder and Motherhood in 1950s Ireland: The Trial of Abortionist Mamie Cadden
On the evening of April 17, 1956, thirty-three-year-old Helen O. visited nurse Mamie Cadden at 17 Hume Street, Dublin, for […]
Care Gone Wrong: Bad Moms, Fake Disabilities, and Imagined Illnesses
At first, it seemed impossible that Gypsy Rose Blancharde had murdered her mother. Dee Dee appeared to be her daughter’s […]
