• I mention Florence + the Machine. It’s the music you hear after the first interlude. You can download the album from iTunes here.

• Later Girl Talk is mentioned. His music is heard in the second interlude. You can download his latest album here.

One day this spring, a psychiatrist named Dorothy Lewis got a call from her friend Betty, who works in New York City. Betty had just seen a Broadway play called “Frozen,” written by the British playwright Bryony Lavery. “She said, ‘Somehow it reminded me of you. You really ought to see it,’” Lewis recalled. Lewis asked Betty what the play was about, and Betty said that one of the characters was a psychiatrist who studied serial killers. “And I told her, ‘I need to see that as much as I need to go to the moon.’”

Lewis has studied serial killers for the past twenty-five years. With her collaborator, the neurologist Jonathan Pincus, she has published a great many research papers, showing that serial killers tend to suffer from predictable patterns of psychological, physical, and neurological dysfunction: that they were almost all the victims of harrowing physical and sexual abuse as children, and that almost all of them have suffered some kind of brain injury or mental illness. In 1998, she published a memoir of her life and work entitled “Guilty by Reason of Insanity.” She was the last person to visit Ted Bundy before he went to the electric chair. Few people in the world have spent as much time thinking about serial killers as Dorothy Lewis, so when her friend Betty told her that she needed to see “Frozen” it struck her as a busman’s holiday … [Continue Reading Something Borrowed]

One

Here is a man. Barely a man; he just ran out of adolescence. He stands alone, 2,000 miles from home, beside a swimming pool, in a stucco-walled apartment complex, in a city built on an American desert.

Seton Hall chancellor Thomas R. Peterson buckled under to intense pressure from media and alumni yesterday when he denied admission to star basketball recruit and admitted sex felon Richie Parker. NEW YORK POST Jan. 24, 1995

It’s too hot to run. But he must run. He strips to his trunks. He steps into the pool. His body leans forward.

Continue Reading

Once you’ve read the piece you can listen to the podcast by using the player below, right clicking here or subscribing through iTunes.

Show notes:
• Toronto had a garbage strike. Because Toronto is the centre of the universe® this is talked about at length.
• 3D printing is really nifty.

Show notes:

• We talk about a lot of videogames on this podcast including PixelJunk Monsters.
• Here is some of the fiction from The Atlantic Marit was talking about.
• This is a map of downtown Vancouver highlighting Commercial Drive.

Next week be sure to join us when Marit Mitchell guest hosts.

There, I fixed it

Howdy! On today’s podcast we talk about “What Makes Us Happy?” by Joshua Wolf Shenk. You can access the podcast by using the embedded player below, downloading it directly or by subscribing on iTunes.

Show Notes:

• The blog I talked about is There, I Fixed It. That’s where the post image is from too.
• The article Carolyn talked about is “The Case Against Breast Feeding.”
• With all the talk of Harry Potter, here is a link to the Harry Potter Wiki.
• The novels John read where “Counting Heads” and “Mind Over Ship,” a pair of SF novels by David Marusek.

• Here is the latest on the visa changes Carolyn mentions.
• This is about the press release for the robots.
• A story about Chinese growth.
• A Sports Illustrated story on the NFL case.

• Yes, this is the second week in a row where we needed an explicit tag.
• Here is a preview of the Heath Ledger story Andrew talked about.

Next week we aren’t quite sure what we’re talking about yet. Stay tuned for the article.

Show Notes:

• Here is the December 2007 feature that Andrew loved so very much: The Scarborough Curse.

• The Calgary Stampede has a robust agricultural output including farm tours.

• The article about stem cell research that Marit mentioned.

Join us next week when we discuss The Lynching of Louie Sam by John Vaillant.

Howdy! On this week’s episode of the Saloon we talk about “A Deadly Crossing” by David Leach. You can listen to the podcast below (either using the player or right clicking to download) or you can subscribe via iTunes.

Show notes:

• Here is the surprisingly hard to navigate webpage of Clay Shirky.

• The female tennis player who is thinking of getting a breast reduction is 17-year-old Simona Halep. I won’t link to an image here, but a google image search of her name shows that she’s getting a lot of attention for a relatively low-ranked junior player.

Next week we’re discussing “Take in the State Fair” by Garrison Keillor. See you then!

Show notes:

• Early on I mention that I couldn’t get into The Big Bang Theory because the main characters had Asperger syndrome. I want to clarify that my problem isn’t the portrayal of those with Asperger’s on televison, nor even the portrayal of those with Asperger’s on The Big Bang Theory (which, as far as I can tell is about as accurate as can be in a sitcom), but simply because playing out Asperger’s as a comedy device is a) somewhat mocking of those afflicted with the disease, and b) really limiting to how you can develop characters within a sitcom framework.

• Obviously, the podcast was recorded before Mark Sanford admitted that “Hiking the Appalachian Trail” was in fact a euphemism for “Going to Argentina to be with my mistress.”

• The Search Engine episode I mentioned wasn’t from summer of 2008, but January of 2009. You can find it here in CBC’s archive. Search Engine is currently hosted by TVO.

• The type of pie that we ate was strawberry rhubarb. It came out of a box.

Next week our topic is David Leach’s “A Deadly Crossing“

Show Notes:

• The Julia Solis photo slide show of Detroit that Marit talked about.

• “The Case for Working With Your Hands” by Matthew Crawford which Carolyn mentions.

• I was in error during the podcast: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance came out in 1974, not in the 1960s.

• The two photo galleries on Alan Taylor’s Big Picture Blog about Iran: Here and Here.

• The book Jonah Lehrer was working on was How We Decide.

Join us next week when we discuss “How David Beats Goliath” by Malcolm Gladwell.