Read Beat (...and repeat)

An upcoming story on the CrimeReads website (https://crimereads.com/) will look at the performances of movie/TV good guys who later took on bad-guy roles and vice versa. It can only be another story by Keith Roysdon, whose previous stories on CrimeReads include looks at writers Richard Matheson and Robert Bloch, a historic scan of Universal monsters, and a review of 1970s disaster movies.

Having served as a reporter and editor in Muncie, Ind. for some 40 years, Roysdon has written three novels, most recently Seven Angels. Now living in Knoxville, Tenn., Roysdon is also a partner...

 "Making Democracy Count" by Ismar Volic

Ismar Volic  is one math professor who wants to use mathematics to improve our democratic process. His book, Making Democracy Count: How Mathematics Improves Voting, Electoral Maps, and Representation, examines the mathematics that govern how our election systems work or, surprise, don’t work. Volic may be director of the Institute for Mathematics and Democracy at Wellesley College but this isn’t a math textbook. It’s a exploration on better ways to validate the voice of the majority . 

If you’ve heard about topics like ranked choice voti...

The first woman to serve in the U.S. congress didn’t come from New York or Boston but from Montana. Jeannette Rankin served two terms in Congress—not in succession but terms separated by more than 20 years.

Among her many distinctions is that she was the only legislator to cast votes against two world wars, once in 1917 and again in 1941. Lorissa Rinehart brings Rankin to life in her book, Winning the Earthquake, a reference to her stated belief you could no more win a war than win an earthquake.

She was gerrymandered out of offi...

Groundhog Day, Ed Wood, The Big Lebowski, Dark City, and 12 Monkeys. What do these movies have in common?

They were all made in the 1990s and represented a middle-level film—neither franchise nor family fare. “That’s what we’re missing at the theater nowadays,” said Thomas Doherty, the Brandeis University professor and author whose work frequently appears in the Hollywood Reporter.

“The middle-level melodrama or thriller used to be well attended at the movie house. Now it goes straight to Netflix,” said Doherty. “We’re missing the smaller films. That product is in jeopardy,” he said.

Also...

In the mid-1950s, Baltimore’s Rosemont neighborhood was alive and vibrant with smart rowhouses, a sprawling park, corner grocery stores, and doctors’ offices. By 1957, a proposed expressway threatened to gut this Black, middle-class community from stem to stern. That highway was never built, but it didn’t matter—even the failure to build it destroyed Rosemont economically, if not physically.

In Road to Nowhere: How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore, writer and historian Emily Lieb tells the history of the neighborhood and the highway that never happened. The book reveals the interwoven tragedies caused by racism in educa...

We think nothing of ordering dinner, shopping for clothes, or banking on our phones anymore. So why not vote?

That’s what Bradley Tusk has been working on. In his book, Vote with Your Phone: Why Mobile Voting Is Our Final Shot at Saving Democracy, the New York venture capitalist spells out the details and the benefits of making it easier for people to vote.

Along with the general public, Tusk wants to reach young people, folks who have grown up relying on their smartphones. 

“Typically, young people have organized around radical causes—civil r...

An exploration into the perilous world of American sports gambling, journalist Danny Funt interviews the power players of the betting boom at FanDuel, DraftKings, and beyond. 

He relates the story of ESPN Bet, a failed attempt by the sports giant to compete with the major sports gambling operation. 

As the first major investigation into America’s sports gambling industry, Everybody Loses describes how fast that professional organizations such as the National Football League and Major League Baseball went from being adamantly opposed to sports gambling spreading outside of Las Vegas to becoming sponsors.

Where are you with maps? Still digging in the glove compartment for that dog-eared map of Iowa? Gazing contentedly at a map of the world with Greenland as the dominant feature? Maybe you’ve got a pocket map of attractions in Downtown Chicago?

Wherever you are when it comes to maps, you need to know what Yale history professor Bill Rankin is preaching: all maps lie.

Maybe he wouldn’t actually say that but Rankin’s new book, Radical Cartography: How Changing Our Maps Can Change Our World makes the case that no one map can ge...

When Kristin Hoganson came from the East to the Midwest 25 years ago to teach at the University of Illinois, she realized she had entered the heartland, that safe sanctuary that lies between the American coasts. But was it? Her book, The Heartland: An American History, delves into heartland characteristics that have portrayed the rural communities of the Midwest as local, insular, isolationist – “the ultimate national safe space, walled off from the rest of the world."

What Hoganson found in her research was that all this heartland talk is a myth.

The region has been globally conn...

If you’re weary of being bombarded by claims and concerns over AI, you need to hear David Eliot talk about the subject. The author of Artificially Intelligent: The Very Human Story of AI is “the story of how artificial intelligence was born from human longing, grief, and ambition. It’s the story of the humans at the forefront of this field, from Hinton to Lovelace, Turing to Altman,” he said.

As a researcher at the University of Ottawa, Eliot has been working on AI since 2019, while acknowledging that research on the subject began earnestly in 2012. When asked wh...

When you review the life of Jessica Mitford, the activist muckraking journalist who died in 1996, you’re following someone who not only lived through world events but put her body on the line and wrote about them. That list includes the Spanish Civil War (she went to Spain as a 17-year-old adamantly opposed to fascism), World War II, the Red Scare of the early 1950s, the fight for civil rights in the 1960s, and the Vietnam War.

Carla Kaplan, a professor at Northeastern University, digs into Mitford’s colorful life in Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jess...

Science fiction has long contemplated the possibility that machines could rise up against their human creators. Movies such as 2001, Terminator, Matrix, and I, Robot are part of our cultural history. But James Barrat, author of The Intelligence Explosion, suggests that it’s not out of line to worry about just where technology is leading us--for real. 

Barrat, a documentary filmmaker, has been on the AI beat for some time now. His earlier book, Our Final Invention, was published in 2013. That book had a message: dangers inherent in artificial intelligence are legitimate concerns.

“Intelligence isn’t unpredi...

The 15th in the Gray Man series is out this February. That means it’s time to talk with author Mark Greaney about the latest Court Gentry entry. Entitled The Hard Line, action takes place in Bulgaria, Nicaragua, Boston, and Washington, D.C., to list just a few of the action-packed locations involved.

If you’re not familiar with the series, it’s a spy thriller. We’re talking espionage and international intrigue with weapons wielded by extremely dangerous individuals. It’s a formula familiar to readers.

Greaney credits collaborating with the late Tom Clancy, legendary...

You get a sense of The Killing Age by Clifton Crais, a history professor at Emory University, when you read “killing became the West’s most profound contribution to world history" in the author's preface.

“The violence that created our present world of global warming is too often forgotten in the now vast literature on the Anthropocene, including and especially the violence that was the Industrial Revolution. We forget—or don’t want to remember—that the Industrial Revolution emerged out of a century and a half of untold predation, made singularly possible by the modern manufacturing and global s...

When you think about the early days of motion pictures, you might recall the New York/New Jersey area where Thomas Edison set up shop in 1893. Maybe you reflect on those very early days when producers in search of sunshine ventured to shooting locations in Florida and pre-Hollywood California. 

But you probably don’t think of Texas.

Yet that’s where Gaston Melies went to make movies in 1910 at the Star Film Ranch outside of San Antonio. Gaston was the older brother of Georges Melies, the famous French filmmaker whose 1902 epic, A Trip to the Moon...

There’s probably no brighter star in the Hollywood heavens than Marilyn Monroe. The blonde bombshell who died at the age of 35 in 1962 has been the focus of hundreds of accounts, linking her with the leading celebrities of the day—John F. Kennedy, Frank Sinatra, Joe DiMaggio, and Arthur Miller, to name a few. 

While linked to numerous conspiracy theories that resound more than 60 years after her death, Marilyn Monroe remains both a fixation and a mystery .

Lynn Cullen, a writer whose past historical fiction has included books involving Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe, recal...

Rural America faces serious problems. That record has been playing for decades: the lack of jobs, healthcare, housing, and internet access are just some of the low notes.

Who hasn’t driven through a small town to observe empty buildings that once housed banks, hotels, or theaters and wondered about the place’s future?

Former farm towns that once bustled on Saturday nights, and distinct villages that prided themselves on self-sufficiency, are among the casualties as more and more Americans, who long left the farm, have moved to opportunities in the city.

So what...

Writing in the Sept. 20, 2025 issue of the Korea Times, Park Jin-hai noted that “Jenny Chan grew up in America caught between clashing versions of history — her school textbooks skipped over the cruelties of World War II in Hong Kong, while her grandmother's stories painted a harrowing picture of life in Hong Kong under Japanese occupation.”

The co-founder of Pacific Atrocities Education, a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco dedicated to recalling WWII history in Asia, Chan recalled being initially confused by the different versions. “I thought she was just probably making this up because I never learned about th...

AI will change democracy. The only question is how, say the authors of a new book described as "surprisingly optimistic" when it comes to regarding how artificial intelligence will impact the world.

Bruce Schneier, a lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School, and data scientist Nathan Sanders see AI enabling positive change when it comes to politics. Their book, Rewiring Democracy, challenges readers reeling from AI overload to pay attention to the good that AI can do when it comes to governing.

But powerful players in private industry and public life are already using AI to...

Kyle Paoletta’s American Oasis comes with a subtitle: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest.

Born in Santa Fe, Paoletta grew up in Albuquerque. The native Southwesterner said he had to leave the region, to live in Boston and New York to find an appreciation for his old stomping grounds. 

After more than 10 years in the East, he discovered not only general ignorance about the Southwest but an indifferent attitude about a part of the country that he feels has an important story to tell.

“It took wildfire smoke from Canad...

Ben Goldfarb’s new book, Crossings—How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of Our Planet, is a reminder that we need to consider the impact of a highway network--not just on the drivers--but on the animals that share the planet.

We tend to take that impact for granted, he said. Drivers don’t realize the barrier effect, the noise pollution (“hugely disruptive to migratory songbirds”), or chemical pollution that our roads can create.

But Goldfarb charts what he calls a movement: states across the country that now set up wildlife crossings in the form of bridges...

“AI is technology that lets computers do things that normally require human intelligence—like understanding language, recognizing pictures, solving problems, or making decisions. It’s like teaching a computer to ‘think’ in specific ways by giving it patterns to learn from.”

That’s one of the responses you get when you ask AI to describe AI.

The whole world is either talking about AI, using AI, worrying about AI, celebrating AI, or trying to ignore AI. It’s kind of a big deal, as they say. 

The concept of artificial intelligence has likely had its greatest...

You don’t have to worry that U.S. baseball fans could be overlooking Japanese baseball. Not after the Los Angeles Dodgers won the World Series for the second year in a row, led by Japanese stars Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and Roki Sasaki.

Rob Fitts offers a glimpse into the Japanese game that developed these stars in his 11th book on Japanese baseball, In the Japanese Ballpark. Fitts dissects the Japanese game from every angle, from the perspective of players, umpires, owners, fans, and media. He even includes the beer girls that patrol the stands, hefting 40-p...

Keith Roysdon is a media marvel. He spent 40 years as a newspaperman in Muncie, Ind., not just writing about what went on in Muncie but absorbing the movies, TV shows, and critical articles on the arts.

Now living in Tennessee, Roysdon had a big year in 2025, publishing That October, his first book, a high-school crime novel set in 1984. 

But Roysdon has done plenty of writing besides that--and not just for the Muncie press. He has more than 70 stories on the CrimeReads website covering a wild variety of topics sure to please anyone who enjoys media h...

John Ikerd, professor emeritus of agricultural economics at the University of Missouri, has a message regarding the present state of agriculture in this country: it's not sustainable.

Ikerd doesn't see a future for industrial agriculture with its emphasis on monocrops, fertilizer, and pesticides. It's a system that's expanded since the 1960s when a shift in national policy promoted increased productivity over all else.

Ikerd preaches sustainable agriculture, calling for policy changes to make farmland accessible and affordable for farmers.

This won't happen overnight, Ikerd notes. "It takes time to learn how to manage...

The attack on Pearl Harbor did more than plunge the United States into a two-front war, it turned over 120,000 Japanese-Americans into prisoners of war--in their own country.

Almost as soon as the bombs had dropped in Hawaii, Japanese-Americans were being rounded up in California. 

“Swept up in the first wave of arrests were nearly all the Japanese fishermen on Terminal Island—an area just five miles long and largely manmade in Los Angeles harbor. These fishermen were part of a thriving, close-knit community of approximately 3,500 Japanese residents whose fathers and grandfathers had built a prosperous indus...

The debate lingers: why didn’t Hollywood’s studios produce anti-Nazi pictures before war was all but imminent in the 1930s?

Plenty has been written about the lack of films that might have alerted the American public to what was happening in Europe at the time.

But Laura Rosenzweig, the author of Hollywood’s Spies, says attention also needs to be focused on the political activity going on around Hollywood in Southern California in the 1930s, activity that was being orchestrated from Berlin. 

The author points out that, since most of the Hollywood studios...

If you want to find a relaxed approach to planning your finances, Carl Richards has it for you, complete with 101 simple sketches: Your Money.

It's an approach Richards employed as a financial writer for the New York Times for 10 years: using boxes, circles, and squiggly lines to illustrate basic messages about money.

Two circles, one marked "things that matter," the other, "things I can control." The part where they intersect is darkened in with the message: "what I try to focus on."

Richards said this is the first book on financial planning he's...

The arrival of the nuclear age ushered in yet another chapter in America’s horror history. Jeremy Dauber, the Columbia University professor who previously wrote a history of comics in this country, now digs a little deeper for American Scary.

When John Hersey’s Hiroshima filled an entire issue of the August 31, 1946, issue of The New Yorker, the public learned what it was like to be incinerated by an atomic bomb. Other horrors were to come. 

Dauber starts in the American Republic’s early days when the Devil might have been walking in the forests that fl...

Bruce Pollock has been around. He’s covered a lot of ground. Best known as a rock critic, he's the author of 17 books on popular music, the founding editor of Guitar (for the Practicing Musician), a former record producer, and he’s been published in Playboy, Saturday Review, TV Guide, New York Times, Crawdaddy, and many others. You can find him online at brucepollockthewriter.com.

His latest book, They’re Playing My Song, is a collection of articles based on interviews he’s done over the years with most of the great songwriters of our time: John Lee Hook...

The Kokoro Clinic for the Soul is back in business. That's the mental health clinic that appears for those who need it. We’ll Prescribe You Another Cat is a follow-up to We'll Prescribe You a Cat, a bestselling Japanese novel. Both books have been translated into English by E. Madison Shimoda.

The clinic--with its unconventional doctor and forceful nurse--uses a prescribed cat to heal the emotional wounds of its patients. The sequel introduces a new cast of healing cats, from Kotetsu, a four-month-old Bengal who unleashes his boundless energy by demolishing bed linens and cu...

Mars is held in high esteem on Earth. It’s a neighboring planet but, unlike Venus, our neighbor closest to the Sun, the planet stands as the closest thing to Earth in our solar system.

It’s not inhabited, but robots now roving the planet continue to search for evidence that there might have been life there once. But when H.G. Wells wrote War of the Worlds in 1897, a tale about an attack from beyond, it came at a time when Mars had become a hot topic. You had songs, dances, and advertisements all focused on the...

Moses Jacob Ezekiel may be a 19th-century sculptor who’s been largely forgotten, but his work hasn’t been.

A member of the Jewish faith who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War, Ezekiel is described as a complex figure. Samantha Baskind, an art historian at Cleveland State University, examines some of that complexity in her book, Moses Jacob Ezekiel: Jewish, Confederate, Expatriate Sculptor.

As the first Jewish American artist to win international acclaim, Ezekiel (1844-1917) was a proud American yet lived in Rome for 40 years, said Baskind. Ezekiel never gave up his U.S. c...

David Obst wants to end America’s love affair with the car.

Saving Ourselves from Big Car defines “Big Car” as that complex of companies in the automobile, oil, insurance, media, and concrete industries that promote and entrench auto dependence. Author David Obst (pronounced “oops-t”), the former literary agent for Woodward and Bernstein, is still on the case. Instead of Watergate, he’s exposing how these companies have pursued profit at the expense of the common good.

He details how the industry has covered up the dangers of lead additives, fought against seatbelts, and continues to fund oppo...

When it comes to World War II, you often hear about "the arsenal of democracy," a characterization of U.S. factories that produced all the food, medical supplies, tanks, planes, and tractors that helped win the war.

In Launching Liberty, Doug Most writes about the U.S. effort required to build the ships needed to transport those goods overseas.

The Liberty Ships were 440-foot cargo ships built to the same exact specifications. Over 2,700 were built between 1941 and 1945. When packed full of cargo, one ship could hold the equivalent of 300 railroad boxcars. That might be 2,800 jeeps...

If draining the swamp strikes you as a good idea, you're not listening to Clare Howard and David Zalaznik.

The pair, former journalists with the Peoria Journal Star, have just written their second book extolling the benefits of wetlands.

Their first, In the Spirit of Wetlands (2022), captured the beauty and importance of wetlands in Illinois. This time, Wisdom of the Marsh (Syracuse University Press) focuses on the Montezuma Wetlands Complex in central New York.

"Wetlands are much more than swamps, bogs, fens, marshes, and moors," noted Howard in the book's introduction. "Wetlands help...

Hollywood came under scrutiny after World War II as the fear of Communism gripped the country.

The Cold War came to Hollywood in 1947 when the House Un-American Activities Committee held a notorious round of hearings over possible Communist infiltration in the movie industry.

Films were analyzed for messages that might be interpreted as promoting Communist views, such as Song of Russia, a wartime musical released when the Soviet Union was a U.S. ally.

No pre-war congressional investigation ever called film executives on the carpet for failing to identify the threat to this...

Tiffany Jenkins takes a look at privacy in her new book, Strangers and Intimates. As Jenkins points out, the whole concept of privacy is a relatively recent development. She points to an article published in 1890 by Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren, who finished one-two in their graduating class from Harvard Law School in 1875. Brandeis went on to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.

The two legal scholars asserted that people without a public role had “a right to be left alone,” embracing the public’s right “to control how their thoughts, sentiments, and emotions were published.”

When...

T. Lindsay Baker’s Eating Up Route 66 is not your typical Mother Road guidebook. It’s a history—with business notes, photographs, and recipes.

Baker, a retired history professor from Texas has written plenty about the American West. Twelve years of research went into his latest effort, and not just in libraries and museums. An antique-car enthusiast, Baker traveled the road in a 1930 Ford station wagon in 2017. Not just a day trip, mind you, but the length of the route--and back. 

In a few weeks, he’ll leave Chicago to be part of a nine-car convoy of...

If you haven’t read an oral history before, it’s like flashing through comments that sometimes follow an online article. Only with a difference: you don’t see those back-and-forth arguments that always seem to break out among those commenting.

For Garrett Graff, it’s his third oral history effort. After 9-11 (The Only Plane in the Sky) and D-Day (When the Sea Came Alive), this time it’s the creation and delivery of the atomic bomb during World War II.

The Devil Reached Toward the Sky follows the first conceptualization by European physicists to the des...