This film will upset you. This film will follow you home and haunt you. This film takes courage to face. You will not forget We Need To Talk About Kevin.

This article is filed under Best Movies, Books, Crime Fiction, Horror, Movies, Psychology, Sociology, The Fourth Wall, Thrillers.

In this profound and spirited work, Pinker champions the civilizing process that, according to his detailed research, has enhanced the cause of peace, decreased the scale of violence and enabled peoples of widely separated nations and ethnic groups to realize their common humanity. Using a mass of scientific data and an intensive reading of history and current events, Pinker makes the case that Planet Earth is becoming a more Peaceable Kingdom.

This article is filed under Books, History, Non-Fiction Reviews, Sociology.

But wherever it originated, the word conjures up an instant picture of young people in cheap sportswear, swigging alcopops, brandishing knives and selling each other drugs whilst getting their fifteen-year-old girlfriends pregnant. They are a favourite subject for the right-wing tabloids, and where the term “chav” is found, the words “feral”, “benefits” and “underclass” will often be somewhere in the vicinity, not to mention “lifestyles funded by your taxes!”

This article is filed under Books, Economics, Great Britain, Non-Fiction Reviews, Politics, Sociology.

One element of the gaming industry that will surprise some readers is the billions of dollars made by “gold farmers,” people who play online games such as World of Warcraft, and then sell the loot acquired in the game for real-world dollars to other gamers. China alone is estimated to have over a million of these gold farmer players working right now.

This article is filed under Non-Fiction Reviews, Sociology.

Voodoo Histories isn’t an attempt to tell everyone to chill out and stop worrying about what people in authority are up to. Rather, it attempts the trickier task of explaining why a set of conspiracy theories do not hold water on close examination, and accounting for how they differ from traditional historical explanations – what is specifically “conspiracist” about them.

This article is filed under History, Non-Fiction Reviews, Sociology.

And those names: JenniferBlowdryer, Sinnamon Love. Sebastian Horsely, a male prostitute, of course. Horsely advocates the trade as follows; “The difference between sex for money and sex for free is that sex money always costs less.”

This article is filed under Biography, Non-Fiction Reviews, Sex, Sociology.

The shooter had convinced himself that killing was gutsy and masculine. Based on his misreadings of Nietzsche and from repeated viewings of the Oliver Stone film, Natural Born Killers, he had convinced himself that the killer was a kind of superior being, and that killing constituted a form of “Natural Selection.”

This article is filed under Non-Fiction Reviews, Psychology, Sociology, True Crime.

By the 1700s the “correctional” metaphor prevails and most of them are placed in moral and physical restraints in order to correct their aberrant attitudes or behaviors. Many of these souls were chained as animals in appalling conditions which would get us convicted if we treated our dogs similarly today. Such unfortunates included those convicted of debauchery, crime, and sexual license “where reason was the slave of desire and a servant of the heart.” (I suppose all of us would require sequestration under those criteria).

This article is filed under Classics, History, Non-Fiction Reviews, Psychology, Sociology.

Like the disappearance of the well-mannered and respectful adolescent, the imminent (or, for some commentators, already accomplished) collapse of the institution of marriage has been a popular lament, at least since the mid 1960s.

This article is filed under Non-Fiction Reviews, Sociology.

There was a time, not many decades ago, that most of America’s population labored on family farms. Then, the primary objective of the American farmer was to be debt free, to be independent. I was made aware of this “independence” many years ago when my mother-in-law, Jessie Hobbs, the daughter of a West Virginia farmer, once commented about her childhood, “We didn’t know there was a depression.”

This article is filed under Agriculture, Fiction Reviews, Sociology.