From the one-of-kind mind of Bill James, famous for revolutionizing the way we think about baseball, comes a “thought-provoking meditation” ( Seattle Times ) and epic tour through American crime—now available in paperback. The man who revolutionized the way we think about baseball examines our cultural obsession with murder—delivering a unique, engrossing, brilliant history of tabloid crime in America. Celebrated writer and contrarian Bill James has voraciously read true crime throughout his life and has been interested in writing a book on the topic for decades. With Popular Crime, James takes readers on an epic journey from Lizzie Borden to the Lindbergh baby, from the Black Dahlia to O. J. Simpson, explaining how crimes have been committed, investigated, prosecuted and written about, and how that has profoundly influenced our culture over the last few centuries—even if we haven’t always taken notice. Exploring such phenomena as serial murder, the fluctuation of crime rates, the value of evidence, radicalism and crime, prison reform and the hidden ways in which crimes have shaped, or reflected, our society, James chronicles murder and misdeeds from the 1600s to the present day. James pays particular attention to crimes that were sensations during their time but have faded into obscurity, as well as still-famous cases, some that have never been solved, including the Lindbergh kidnapping, the Boston Strangler and JonBenet Ramsey. Satisfyingly sprawling and tremendously entertaining, Popular Crime is a professed amateur’s powerful examination of the incredible impact crime stories have on our society, culture and history.

Recommended on 1 episode:

What a More Responsible Republican Party Would Look Like

If you watched this past weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference, you heard a lot of debunked election conspiracies, dire warnings about “cancel culture” and unwavering fealty to Donald Trump. What you didn’t hear was much in the way of policy ideas to raise wages, improve health care or support families. This is the modern G.O.P.: a post-policy party obsessed with symbolic fights and curiously uninterested in the actual work of governing. But does it have to be that way? Ramesh Ponnuru is a senior editor at National Review, a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a Republican wonk who is pushing his party in a more responsible, policy-centric direction. We discuss: — Why Republicans have lost interest in policy. — Whether Trump would have won the presidency if Senate Republicans had passed a big stimulus bill before the 2020 election. — Why Ponnuru thinks the Republican Party’s 2024 hopefuls have learned the wrong lesson from Trump’s 2016 victory. — The conservative case for a universal child allowance. — Why so few Republican politicians have openly endorsed the Romney child allowance plan — and what that says about the tensions within the party’s coalition. — What it would take for Republicans to move away from being a “business owners’” party and toward being a “parents’” party. — Why Ponnuru thinks Republicans should support limiting, or outright banning, just-in-time scheduling practices. — Whether there was ever a mass constituency for Paul Ryan’s version of conservatism. — Who are the most important emerging voices on the political right today. And much more.

Books recommended:

• 📕  The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left by Yuval Levin
• 📘  The Upside-Down Constitution by Michael S. Greve
• 📗  Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence by Bill James
• 📙  Chronicles of Narnia Box Set by C. S. Lewis

Ramesh Ponnuru March 2, 2021 4 books recommended

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