Christopher Orlet

He passed away earlier this year, the old man. We spent a number of Christmases with him and his wife, in their crowded, crumbling apartment in a village called Mysliborz near the German border. It was on one such Christmas…

The West Memphis Three are free today not because of any new evidence, or, as is so often the case, a legal technicality; rather they owe their freedom to the power and influence of America’s celebrity culture and our shallow…

I came to the big city relatively late in life. Cities seems to me places suited entirely for the young. Their so-called charms — quirkiness, edginess, anonymity, diversity — are in the main young people’s delights. Older folks don’t want…

Americans, generally speaking, tend to go in for easy explanations of why crime rates rise and fall. Chief among them is the Poverty Theory of Crime. This explanation popped up again at a dinner party the other night. We were…

Ever since I moved to the inner city one thing has puzzled me more than any other, and that is how my low-income neighbors get by. Assuming they aren’t doing anything illegal, how do they afford their homes, their meals,…

I’ve been called a lot of things in my day, but never a colonialist. That is, until now. Our neighborhood anarchists — grubby twenty-somethings who squat in abandoned buildings and wage war on local business owners’ surveillance cameras — have…

My wife and I have different perspectives on the youth violence epidemic that currently plagues our urban neighborhood. She thinks some of the miscreants could be helped by more targeted after-school programs staffed by caring adults. I think there are…

I was for drug screening welfare recipients before I was against it. Test ’em all, was my motto. Millions for defense, but not a cent for tributane. Or psilocybin. Or any other controlled substance, for that matter. These days most…

One of the few coherent demands of the Occupy Wall Street mob is free college education. Perhaps the college-age protesters do not realize we are just coming out of America’s worst recession in 50 years. That wouldn’t surprise me. Maybe…

In normal situations embracing the latest technology is a no-brainer. The telephone was an obvious step up from smoke signals and African drums. The personal computer left the typewriter eating dust. But when it comes to the switch from paper…