Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

Blog posts filtered by the category: Crime

Mean Girls: Truth or Fiction?

An op-ed in today’s New York Times offers a nice reminder that girls are not in fact becoming more violent. They are becoming less so, despite the occasional horror story.

“We have examined every major index of crime on which the authorities rely. None show a recent increase in girls’ violence; in fact, every reliable measure shows that violence by girls has been plummeting for years. Major offenses like murder and robbery by girls are at their lowest levels in four decades. Fights, weapons possession, assaults and…

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Murder in America

Fascinating piece by Jill Lepore in the New Yorker about why Americans are so much more likely to murder each other than people in other comparable developed nations.

As you might imagine, the answer is: no one knows! But a couple of new books are making provocative new arguments based on actual data, not just conjecture. One thing seems clear: the answer is probably not what you think--or at least not that one thing alone. Not just the prevalence of guns, nor just the…

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