Nobody Knows What Makes Something a Copycat Crime

On July 31st, five women robbed a bank in Olympia, Washington. While one stood watch outside, four of them entered the bank wearing hoodies and dark stocking caps and wielding handguns. Inside, one stood guard, another called out the time in in five second intervals, while the remaining two leapt over the counter and stole […]

Guest Post: After the Crash

  Around 2 AM on July 16, 2005, graduate students Benjamin Boussert, Giulia Adesso, and Jason Choy left a dance party in San Francisco and started driving home to Berkeley, where they were studying chemistry. Boussert spent his days experimenting with tiny crystals, while Adesso investigated the properties of nanoparticles and Choy used lasers to […]

Is Organized Crime Cashing In at Pompeii?

The Italian press recently had a field day in its coverage of the sad decline of one of Italy’s greatest tourist draws: Pompeii. In early October, a prominent Italian newspaper ran a front-page editorial on the subject, calling the crumbling Roman ruins a “symbol of all the sloppiness and inefficiencies of a country that has lost […]