Policing the Open Road

In 1998, the recording industry was thriving. But the company pressing more compact discs than anyone else in America wasn't a record label…it was an internet company: America Online. The AOL Disc was a marketing coup—hugely successful. It’s not an overstatement to say that it’s ...  Show more

Esperanto is what linguists call a “constructed language.” It isn’t attached to a nation or a region, and it didn’t evolve from another language over time. Instead, nearly 150 years ago, someone decided to sit down and design the whole thing from scratch. That someone was L. L. Z ...  Show more

The Fourth Amendment is the part of the Bill of Rights that prohibits "unreasonable searches and seizures." But — what's unreasonable? That question has fueled a century's worth of court rulings that have dramatically expanded the power of individual police officers in the U.S. T ...  Show more

The U.S. is an outlier when it comes to policing, as evidenced by more than 1,000 fatal shootings by police each year. But we’re an outlier in other ways too: a heavily-armed populace, a fragile mental-health system, and the fact that we spend so much time in our cars. Add in ...

When U.S. police departments didn't evolve out of slave patrols, they tended to form out of a desire to protect the property of the wealthy. In practice, this meant beating, murdering and arresting people who didn't want to work 12 hour days until they died.FOOTNOTES: Krypteia: A ...  Show more