I spent the other day reading a book my wife gave me for Christmas, Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun. It’s the report of one family’s ordeal in the wake of Katrina, the hurricane that devastated New Orleans in 2005. Although the book was written in 2009, and won awards, it escaped my radar.
There is so much to love about this book. The protagonist, Abdulrhman Zeitoun, a Syrian immigrant, is my kind of guy. He’s stubborn. He doesn’t listen. He works perhaps too hard. When his wife catches wind of a major storm’s approach, he largely ignores her and goes...
December 27, 2012
Cigarettes don’t kill people, people do. That would be the tobacco lobby lying to the world. We’d recognize the claim at once as transparent nonsense. So we tax tobacco, using the proceeds to pay for, among other things, health-care for those destroying themselves by indulging their right to smoke.
Why not use the same public policy tools to attempt to control gun violence?
I concede a hidden agenda. Were it within my power, I’d repeal the Second Amendment. It is an anachronism. We aren’t armed against foreign invaders; no militia is necessary to protect...
December 20, 2012
I am willing to bet that you’ll able to read this come Dec. 22, and thereafter, too, should you be so inclined. That’s because I don’t think the world is going to come crashing down around us, as the Mayans predict, on Dec. 21, 2012. For that matter, I don’t think any cosmic ending is about to befall humankind. Ever.
We might just well succeed in destroying ourselves, however. Civilizations — ways of life built around common myths, ideas and settled practices — come and go. The British historian, Arnold Toynbee, cataloged some 21 civilizations in his...
December 20, 2012
Enough, finally, is enough. Your right to bear arms does not yield the right to kill at random. Doesn’t last week’s killing spree at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown give you even a moment’s hesitation? Or are you still going to hide behind the facile quip that guns don’t kill people, people do? Even the tobacco lobby was not that cynical; it just lied about causation, trying to hide the consequences of smoking. You cannot hide the 20 children killed by gunfire.
Twenty little coffins will carry the bodies of the elementary school children killed by a...
December 17, 2012
December 13, 2012
There’s a new security regime in the Connecticut federal courts, so let me gripe about it a bit: You see, lawyers are now required not just to...
December 13, 2012
When I have an African-American defendant in a criminal trial, I like to ask potential jurors the following question: What do you think of race...
December 6, 2012
I suppose I should be relieved that the nation’s top cop came waltzing into New Haven the other day talking tough about gun violence, and...
December 6, 2012
When I wrote last week about seeing a jury panel in Norwich from which black males were entirely absent, I assumed there must be some reasonable...
November 29, 2012
Call me a racist, but Connecticut does not do enough to assure that criminal defendants face a jury of their peers.
I’ve just finished...
November 29, 2012
FEW THINGS TERRIFY ME AS MUCH as the thought of being kept alive, indefinitely — hooked to machines, monitored, maintained and held in the land...