Keen On America

“The only reason to write history is because it helps us in the present. It’s not a vegetable. It’s not good for you.” — Katy Siegel

INTRO

It’s been three months since America’s 250th, although I’m guessing few are nostalgic for those official MAGA celebrations. That said, nostalgia is a feature rather than a bug of these types of anniversaries in America. Take, for example, What Was America? by Katy Siegel and Elise Armani, a new book about the art, culture and politics of the Bicentennial era. Siegel and Armani are nostalgic for nostalgia. We don’t do anniversaries as we used to, they worry.
What Was America? opens with the African-American artist Benny Andrews, who feared exclusion from the Bicentennial celebrations and responded with a feverish six years of monumental paintings. Then there are the Bicentennial quilts which Siegel and Armani see as a metaphor for a nation whose strength has always lain in its diversity. Both leftist women in Northern California and the Daughters of the American Revolution quilted the Bicentennial. 1976, then, was a genuinely national celebration.
So how will we look back at this year’s celebrations in 2076 when America celebrates its 300th birthday? The final chapter in What Was America? is on how people in 1976 imagined the America to come. School kids predicted no pens and lessons taught by computers. One person worried there would still be no woman president. Nobody predicted President Donald Trump.
“It’s tough to make predictions,” Yogi Berra said, “especially about the future.” Where have you gone, Yogi Berra? Now, I’m getting nostalgic for nostalgia.

FURTHER READING

•   Katy Siegel and Elise Armani, What Was America? Art, Culture, and Politics in the Bicentennial Era (Yale University Press, October 2026). Siegel’s essay in Artforum on what the bicentennial tells us about the art world that followed is the short version of the argument.
•   Benny Andrews, who opens the book — his biography and chronology. The Bicentennial Series ran 1970 to 1975, one monumental painting a year. He also founded the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition in his studio in January 1969, which protested the Metropolitan Museum’s Harlem on My Mind for planning an exhibition about Harlem without Harlem, and he served as Director of the Visual Arts Program at the NEA from 1982 to 1984 — the governmental role Armani refers to at 11:53.
•   Stanley Forman’s photograph, discussed at 29:09 — what happened that day on Boston City Hall Plaza, 5 April 1976. The man with the flag was Joseph Rakes; the man being attacked was the lawyer and later academic Ted Landsmark. The book Siegel mentions is Louis P. Masur’s The Soiling of Old Glory: The Story of a Photograph That Shocked America — published in 2008 rather than recently.
•   The Ant Farm Collective, whose attempts to imagine the future close the book — their work and chronology, including Media Burn and the Cadillac Ranch.
•   On the NEA’s growth under Nixon at 08:33: the chair who actually drove it was Nancy Hanks, who ran the agency from 1969 to 1977 across both the Nixon and Ford administrations and is generally credited with the budget increases Siegel describes.
•   The federal machinery behind all of this: the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration, created by Congress in December 1973 to coordinate locally sponsored events after the original commission concluded there should not be a single national one. Its final report counted 66,484 events and projects between March 1975 and the end of 1976.
•   Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock (1970), raised at 25:40 as the period’s instrument for measuring dread about the pace of change, and the Golden Record, launched in 1977, as the era’s largest time capsule.

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. The largest participatory arts event in American history is the one nobody writes about. Their figure is 12,566 official Bicentennial Communities, which the organizers estimated reached 85 percent of the American population. Siegel is explicit that this was the headline finding: art historians are sentimental about the 1930s and the WPA, and five years of research persuaded her that 1976 dwarfs it for scale of cultural participation. The book began not with an argument but with a coincidence — both authors kept finding the same odd reference to the bicentennial in unrelated research, not as a subject for artists so much as an occasion for exhibitions and funding.
2. Benny Andrews read the planning coverage and decided critique was patriotism. Following the preparations in The New York Times in 1969, he worked out that the bicentennial would be the largest national event of the period and that black America would be allotted a thin, stereotyped slice of it. His response was not a single polemical image but a panorama: a six-part cycle, some canvases running to forty feet, 250 works in total. Siegel is careful on the point AK pressed her on — he was a political man and also a major artist, and to him asking what it means to be an American was the most patriotic thing available.
3. A living wage bought the time to participate. Asked whether she envies the generation of 1976, Armani turns the question from temperament to conditions. The agency Siegel describes was underwritten by structural facts: a wage you could live on, the possibility of buying a house, and enough time left after a full-time job to take part in civic life. Artists could work part time and still have hours to give to their communities. She is careful to say the inroad to shaping things feels foreign to her own experience, and that this is not a failure of ambition but a matter of conditions beyond any one person’s power to change — which is a more uncomfortable answer than nostalgia.
4. Nixon built the apparatus he did not care about. The bicentennial spans three presidencies and the book tacks “era” onto its subtitle to say so. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society supplied the premise that America was finally rich enough to extend the Jeffersonian good life to working people. Nixon wanted the celebration centralized and found there was too much distrust of the federal government to allow it, so it was dispersed; he also wanted to outdo Kennedy as the world’s beacon of culture, which is where Siegel locates the contrast with Trump, who wants to undo Obama. The NEA peaked between Ford and Carter, and Reagan could not cut it in his first year because Congress was too fond of it.
5. “Very much a January 6 photo.”

“Scale” is such a loaded word. In Silicon Valley, it’s the thing-in-itself, the holy grail. So what happens if you scale up “scale”? You accelerate to Hyperscale, the title of a new book by the big tech critic Paris Marx, who has turned Silicon Valley’s holy grail against itself.
So what, exactly, does the H word mean? We say “big tech” which means everything and nothing. In his use of hyperscale, Marx means something very specific. His hyperscalers are multi-trillion-dollar conglomerates like Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Meta, who own the computation powering the AI revolution. These are the data center guys. Frontier labs like Anthropic and OpenAI aren’t.
When ChatGPT arrived, the story was that old big tech leviathans like Google were in trouble. What actually happened, Marx argues, is that these leviathans got permission to hijack the AI revolution. They had the models and data centers. What they didn’t have was cover, because the regulators were watching. Somebody else shipped first, and so the big tech hyperscaler bandwagon became legal.
Follow the money, Marx says. Seven trillion dollars invested into data centers by 2030, raised not through government bonds but mostly through corporate ones. Crypto’s collapse only hurt the people who bought crypto. This irrational exuberance will dramatically affect pensions and 401(k)s.
So I asked him the multi-trillion-dollar question. If this bet pays off, these companies become more powerful than ever. If not, we are all f&*ked. So, which is worse for a critic: hyperscale’s success, or its failure?
Marx is a man of the left. So he favors failure. Lenin wanted Russia to lose World War One to hasten the revolution; Marx, more modestly, suspects that the collapse of the hyperscale pyramid would at least give us the chance to rethink. And then what? Marx wants us to have “conversations” about the type of economy we want. Hyperconversations, more like. Very noisy ones.

FURTHER READING

•   Paris Marx, Hyperscale — published today. Note the two editions carry different subtitles: the US edition is The Ambition and Excess of Big Tech’s Data Empires (Crown), while the UK edition is Ambition, Power and the Relentless Rise of Data Empires. It is longlisted for the FT Business Book of the Year 2026. Kirkus review.
•   His podcast Tech Won’t Save Us and his newsletter Disconnect. His previous book is Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation, which he returns to at 46:26.
•   Karen Hao, whom Marx cites in the book as the origin of the imperial framing — her episode of this show, on OpenAI as a classic colonial power. Her book is Empire of AI (AK calls it AI Empires at 06:27).
•   Robin Wigglesworth on why the bond market, not the stock market, is where the real crisis comes — that episode. His book is A Fabulous Debt.
•   The $7 trillion figure AK cites at 09:03 traces to McKinsey’s data-centre forecast (about $6.7 trillion of global capital expenditure by 2030), widely reported since.
•   New York became the first state to pause hyperscale permits, under Executive Order 62 in July 2026 — what it does and does not cover. The AI Data Center Moratorium Act from Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez followed in March 2026.
•   Michael Burry’s short against Nvidia, and his warning of a “1987-type fall” — the position. Nvidia passed $5.5 trillion this month.
•   The Hugging Face intrusion AK raises at 28:29: an OpenAI agent autonomously breached the platform in July 2026 — Hugging Face’s own technical timeline. Jensen Huang’s response, that labs which cannot control their models should not ship them, came in his Ezra Klein interview.
•   The International Criminal Court example at 10:05: Microsoft cut off the chief prosecutor’s email after US sanctions in May 2025, and the court has since moved 1,800 workstations off Microsoft — how sanctions weaponise US tech. This is the case underlying the digital-sovereignty white paper Marx co-authored.
•   SpaceX absorbed xAI in early 2026 ahead of its listing, which is the transformation Marx describes at 04:23 — the deal.

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. At least the coal mine made jobs. This is the book at ground level, and the line is his. Data centres arrive expecting a tax package, and the deal communities are offered is worse than the one coal offered, because the jobs do not follow the capital — the construction ends, a skeleton staff remains, and the abatement runs for years. He thinks that bargain is starting to break, and that the opposition it has produced is the most hopeful thing in the story, precisely because it is not ideological: people on the right and the left are showing up to the same planning meetings.
2. The ICC lost its email. The cleanest illustration of what dependency actually means. After the United States sanctioned the International Criminal Court, its chief prosecutor was locked out of his Microsoft account, and the court has since moved some 1,800 workstations off Microsoft entirely. The leverage runs two ways: Washington can reach into an institution it does not control, and the companies can reach into governments that have outsourced their plumbing. This is the case underlying the digital-sovereignty work Marx has been doing outside the book.
3. Why generative AI, and not some other AI. His most original argument after the permission thesis. He says we got models that will answer any query because the people funding them are pursuing a specific end — the replication of the human mind in a machine — and that this is a science-fictional priority rather than an efficient or socially useful one. Another AI programme, aimed at narrower problems, would need a fraction of the computation. The distinction he draws between the men is sharp too: Thiel builds a network of people who move his politics for him, while Musk needs to be seen doing it.
4. Nvidia is the pure play, which is the problem. Asked whether Nvidia ...

“My whole life has been coming up with ideas myself, and now AI can do that better than me.” — Bill Gross

INTRO

Bill Gross has been Mr Ideas Man since 1996 when he founded Idealab in Pasadena and started the hand production of startups. Today, he launches Idealab AI where the hand production of startup ideas is replaced by the algorithm. He fed seventeen million documents — news stories, expired patents, SEC filings, complaints on Reddit — through a thirty-thousand-token prompt built around the thirty-one methods he has used all his life, and out popped 1.2 million business ideas. The first batch cost a thousand dollars in tokens and produced thirty-two thousand ideas in an hour. He is giving all of them away.
“Holy shit, my life is over,” he thought.
Then he decided it was a superpower instead. Mr Ideas Man had come up with his greatest (and final?) idea.
His showcase algorithm-produced idea is a five-dollar-a-month app that locks in today’s gas price by hedging the pooled subscriptions on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Bill’s own system scored it 8.9 out of 10 against 32,000 rivals.
The business model inverts the usual one. Entrepreneurs pay nothing. Corporates with large R&D budgets and fat patent portfolios license the platform to mine their own IP, and they fund the giveaway. Universities are next. Bill is talking to one that would pay students fifty thousand dollars to come and build a company, rather than charging them fifty thousand to study one. As Chris Marquis argued in yesterday’s New York Times, business school as we once imagined it is over.
So where does the hope machine come in? I asked Bill whether the MAGA crowd might object to an American giving away his best ideas to the rest of the world. He was unmoved. Idealab AI is defiantly global from day one, and he is most excited about its power in Africa, the Middle East and South America, where young people and ideas are abundant.
“Bill, this is a hope machine,” thus exclaimed Ahmed El Alfi, the founder of the Flat6Labs accelerator in Cairo, having come to Pasadena to get a sneak preview.
I asked Bill what the machine can’t do. “Judgment,” he said. Which means mentors, advisors and investors matter more now, not less. But what about questions from interviewers? Hmmm. Holy shit, my life is over. Maybe Uncle Bill can build me a question machine.

FURTHER READING

•   Idealab AI launched on the day of recording. Bill gave the address on air as idealab.ai and his own email as bill@idealab.ai. The thirty-year parent company is at idealab.com, and his 25 Lessons from 25 Years of Idealab is the long-form version of the methodology he has now handed to a model.
•   Bill’s 2015 TED talk on timing as the single biggest predictor of startup success, which he refers to at 25:55 — watch it. He says the new platform now does this analysis automatically.
•   On the IP argument at 17:58: ProRata.ai, his venture to make AI companies pay publishers a revenue share, raised $40m and launched Gist in September 2025.
•   Matthew Botvinick of Anthropic, whom AK raises at 08:39, on the risk AI poses to democracy — listen to that episode, and his book AI and Political Freedom (Princeton, 2026).
•   Richard Socher on AI that can think for itself, raised at 41:24 — Eureka in Silicon Valley. His book is The Eureka Machine (PublicAffairs, 2026).
•   The thousand-dollar-a-month AI habit and the lens cap, from last week’s editorial with Keith Teare.
•   The premise of the gas-hedging idea: the Strait of Hormuz has been closed or severely restricted since late February 2026, Iran insists it remains closed, and shipping traffic has only partly recovered — the fuel crisis in detail.
•   Aptera, the streamlined electric car he names as his best-known failure, actually wound down in December 2011, not during the 2008–09 recession as he says at 25:55.
•   “Bill, this is a hope machine” is Ahmed El Alfi, who founded Sawari Ventures in Cairo and the Flat6Labs accelerator that has seeded several hundred startups across the Arab world. He visited Pasadena, saw the platform, and supplied the title of this episode at 22:44.
•   On the universities at 19:29: Christopher Marquis, a previous guest on this show, published “I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down” in the New York Times the day before this conversation was recorded. He argues that HBS-style case studies are corporate-approved narratives rather than research, and that business schools train students to practise being the person in charge rather than to be sceptical of them. He was last on in November 2025 — Strategic Hibernation.

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. Why this only works now, and did not a year ago. The origin is a Wall Street Journal piece on the copper shortage — data centres needing transformers faster than they can be made, electric cars needing motors — which made him notice that most articles carry a problem statement at their core. The mechanism is cross-pollination: a model holding problems, technologies and expired patents in one context at once can collide a decades-old financial instrument with a two-week-old crisis. He is emphatic that this is new. A year ago, he says, the models simply were not good enough to do it, and everything that makes the platform possible has arrived since.
2. Nobody tested the best idea the machine made. The gas-hedging app is the strongest thing in the hour and also the least examined. He is right that the cleverness is in the combination: airline hedging has existed for decades, consumer access has not. But a product that guarantees a future price in exchange for a fixed premium is insurance, and five dollars a month does not fund protection against unbounded upside — nor does selling it avoid the regulators who supervise both insurance and retail derivatives. His own system ranked it first out of 32,000 without surfacing any of that, which is a sharper illustration of his judgment argument than anything he says about judgment.
3. He insists he has no moat, and appears to mean it. Asked the standard Silicon Valley question, he refuses the premise: he wants to be copied, a...

Two straight days of murder in America. Yesterday we were in Ozark, Alabama with Matt Kessler investigating the gruesome murder of two young women. Today’s guest has spent four decades investigating homicidal crimes and continues to have the time of his life. Harold Schechter has written more than thirty true crime books, his latest being Murder by the Numbers, an account of 199 chilling tales of true crime.
When it comes to crime, I asked the Queens, NY–based Schechter, is America special? On the murder rate, yes. He was just in Iceland, where he asked a retired homicide detective whether the country had ever had a serial killer. Oh yes, the man said. Around 1325. Some Viking. The difference is firearms, Schechter argues, and a frontier that closed within living memory.
But, he says, the appetite for murder isn’t uniquely American. Martin Dumollard was guillotined in a French village in 1862 before a crowd three times the size of the town. During the Terror, tradesmen sold guillotine earrings to the women and toy guillotines to the children, who took them home and decapitated squirrels.
Schechter is unimpressed by our current media panic over violent videos. He reminds us that Jesse Pomeroy, the Boston Boy Fiend, was blamed on dime novels. The Great Train Robbery was blamed for juvenile crime. Then radio, then television, then Psycho, then American Psycho, then The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, after which there was no detectable surge in chainsaw massacres. Manson took his cue from the White Album, Lennon’s killer from Holden Caulfield, Hinckley from Taxi Driver. And if one book has inspired more killers than any other, he says, it is the Bible.
What about gender — are all serial killers male? Schechter’s argument is that we count female serial killers differently. They poison their victims, often enjoying the deaths in real time. And they tend to kill family and children rather than strangers. Women like watching too. The audience for a trial about a mother who killed her children is usually overwhelmingly female, he notes.
So what about gentle Harold Schechter? Could he kill, I asked. Or is he the kind of guy who only likes to watch?

FURTHER READING

•   Harold Schechter, Murder by the Numbers: 199 Chilling Tales of True Crime (Workman, 6 October 2026).
•   Matt Kessler on the murders of JB Beasley and Tracie Hawlett, the episode AK opens on: listen or watch.
•   The failed execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee on 30 September 2026, which AK raises at 39:07 — what happened. Schechter’s reply supplies the context: by Austin Sarat’s count in Gruesome Spectacles, there were 276 botched executions in the United States between 1890 and 2010.
•   The Hegseth proposal to broadcast the execution of the Fort Hood gunman, and Pope Leo’s condemnation of the death penalty — the live news behind the public-execution discussion at 10:58.
•   Schechter’s Savage Pastimes: A Cultural History of Violent Entertainment makes the dime-novel argument at length, and Deviant, Deranged and Fiend are the Ed Gein, Albert Fish and Jesse Pomeroy books he mentions.

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. He splits the question in two, and gives opposite answers. Is America exceptional in its murder rate? Yes, flatly, and he puts it down to firearms and to how recently the frontier closed — Wyatt Earp was still alive when Ford reached Hollywood. Is America exceptional in its appetite for murder stories? No, and he is firm about that too. Iceland has almost no homicide and a flourishing market in gory crime fiction, to the point that its novelists struggle to find plausible killings to write about. The guns are American. The fascination is human.
2. The taste for watching people die is not a modern decline. When Martin Dumollard, often called France’s first serial killer, was guillotined in 1862, three times the population of the village turned out. During the Terror, tradesmen worked the crowds selling guillotine earrings to women and toy guillotines to children, who took them home to decapitate squirrels. Schechter’s reading of this is unexpectedly optimistic: that we now settle for virtual representations of violence rather than the real thing is, he thinks, evidence of civilisation rather than its collapse.
3. True crime has always sold titillation as moral instruction. The genre begins in America with the gallows sermon, printed after a public hanging and carrying the condemned prisoner’s supposed last words, his repentance and his discovery of God. It also carried, invariably, a very detailed account of what he had done. Schechter traces the same bargain through three centuries of the form and declines to make it himself: he says he does not try to draw moral lessons from the cases he writes about.
4. No new medium has ever been shown to raise the murder rate. Dime novels were blamed for Jesse Pomeroy, the Boston Boy Fiend. Newspapers blamed juvenile crime on The Great Train Robbery. Then radio, television, Psycho, American Psycho — and no wave of chainsaw massacres followed The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. What actually sets people off, he says, is unpredictable and usually benign: Manson had the White Album, Lennon’s killer had Holden Caulfield, Hinckley had Taxi Driver. His own candidate for the book that has inspired the most killers is the Bible, and he means it literally — he has written about many who believed they were following the Old Testament.
5. Female serial killers were never rare, only counted differently. Because the term was coined to describe a kind of sexual homicide, the canonical killers are all men. Women kill by poison, which carries an Arsenic and Old Lace quaintness that Schechter thinks badly misleading. Jack the Ripper killed quickly and mutilated the corpses afterwards; a poisoner can stretch a death over weeks and watch it happen. Jane Toppan, whom he has written about, confessed to thirty-one murders and held the Guinness record until Gacy. The other difference is the victims: women overwhelmingly kill family, children and acquaintances rather than strangers.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Harold Schechter is Professor Emeritus at Queens College, CUNY, where he taught American literature, myth and folklore for more than forty years. A two-time Edgar nominee, he has written over thirty books on true crime, among them Deviant (Ed Gein), Deranged (Albert Fish), Fiend (Jesse Pomeroy), Savage Pastimes, Murderabilia and 50 States of Murder. He lives in Queens, New York. Murder by the Numbers is published by Workman.

ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA
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Ah, the American South. So romantic. A few days ago we were in Clayton, Georgia, hearing about the dissident Lillian Smith, whose house was burned down for telling the truth about Jim Crow. Today we go south-west into Alabama, to Ozark, in the Wiregrass, the boondocks of the boondocks — a region named for a scrub that grows where nothing else will. Except for murder.
The Wiregrass, as the Birmingham, Alabama–based journalist Matt Kessler explains, has poor soil, no cotton, almost no plantations, and therefore, none of the southern decorum either. He has spent nine years there researching The Wiregrass, a new true-crime investigation into a case nobody has satisfactorily explained.
On 31 July 1999, JB Beasley turned seventeen. She and her friend Tracie Hawlett set out from the Alabama town of Dothan (peanut capital of the world) to go party-hopping in the Wiregrass. Searching for a field party with a keg, the two young women got lost. They stopped at a closed filling station in Ozark to use the payphone, and someone gave them directions that didn’t sound suspicious.
“Right out of the lot, left at the McDonald’s.”
The surveillance tape shows them leaving in the right direction. Their car was found by the roadside the next morning. At two in the afternoon somebody finally opened the trunk. Both girls were inside, shot in the head. Southern gothic murders most foul.
So what happened? The bodies sat in that trunk for five hours in a steaming Alabama summer, before an officer from out of town had the smart idea to open it. Trained officers then searched the car without gloves. A lead investigator tried to tow it back to Dothan, which would have destroyed the crime scene. Years later the car was quietly released and resold, with no paperwork stating who authorised it. A man named Johnny Barrentine confessed and was let go when the DNA did not match. And when Kessler rang the Ozark police for the file, he was told that everything before 2000 had been “accidentally” destroyed. Oops.
Twenty years on, a genetic genealogy search matched semen from the scene to Coley McCraney, a married preacher with no criminal record. He was convicted on four counts of capital murder in 2023 and is now serving life without parole. McCraney admitted to the sex, but denied the killing. The DNA is the only material evidence since nobody found a weapon. Kessler believes in his innocence, and suspects the police are implicated, though the officer he calls a person of interest will stay unnamed until you buy the book. Ah, the South.

FURTHER READING

•   Matt Kessler, The Wiregrass: A Tale of Murder and Retribution in the Deep South (Grand Central, 6 October 2026). Kirkus calls it “a meticulous, urgent account of a case officially closed, but far from settled.”
•   The official record, against which his account should be read: the Alabama Attorney General’s statement on McCraney’s sentencing in June 2023, following conviction on four counts of capital murder.
•   In September 2024 the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the conviction. The defence had argued that Rena Crumb should have been allowed to testify that an Ozark officer, not McCraney, killed the girls — the same account Kessler describes here. Crumb subsequently recanted, and the judge ruled her evidence hearsay. The case is now before the Alabama Supreme Court.
•   Keri Leigh Merritt on Lillian Smith and the Georgia side of the same story, the episode AK opens on: listen or watch.

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. The reporting is far stronger than the theory it is marshalled behind. The most valuable hour of this conversation is the texture, and it is first-hand: a Klansman soliciting donations on the town square in the eighties like the Salvation Army; black families teaching their children to carry what they called driving around money for the inevitable bogus stop; locals pressing handguns and window-shattering hammers on a reporter they thought was in danger for asking questions. None of this requires anyone to accept his conclusion. It establishes something narrower and more damning, which is that this was not a department capable of investigating anything.
2. The investigation failed at almost every point where it could fail. The bodies lay in a closed trunk for five hours in high summer before an officer from Dothan, there on his own initiative, opened it — several whistleblowers told Kessler that any experienced investigator would have known what he was smelling. Local officers then searched the vehicle without gloves. One tried to tow it to another jurisdiction. The heat destroyed the evidence so thoroughly that no time of death could be established. Some years later the car itself was released and sold, and no document records who authorised that. Kessler says he cannot tell whether this is incompetence or concealment, which is the honest answer.
3. A pattern of police sexual coercion runs underneath the case. A Police Explorers programme at the local high school, nominally training juniors and seniors for the job, was shut down by an incoming deputy chief because officers had been sleeping with the students. A school administrator told Kessler of pupils arriving in his office in tears after officers traded bogus speeding tickets for sexual favours. During the reporting, the police chief and a supervisor were forced out over coercing the wives of officers on parole. AK’s question is the sharp one: whether two girls from the bigger town simply refused to play along.
4. The conviction rests on DNA and almost nothing else. A genetic genealogy search of the kind that caught the Golden State Killer led police to Coley McCraney, who gave a sample voluntarily and was arrested for double murder and rape. There is no weapon and no other material evidence. Put on the stand by his own lawyer against his wishes, he placed himself in the girls’ car and could not satisfactorily account for the evening seventeen years earlier. Kessler accepts the DNA is his and argues the encounter was consensual, which is where his real intellectual claim sits: that DNA at a scene is accepted prima facie as guilt without anyone asking what it actually shows.
5. He accuses the police, and is candid that he cannot finish the sentence. Asked directly what happened, he says he believes a local officer was involved, names one as a person of interest, and then declines to identify him on air — you will have to read the book. He is scrupulous about the rival theory, having found nothing in a quarter of a million files to support the rumour that the girls stumbled onto a drug flight. Listeners should know what the hour does not mention: Rena Crumb, whose secondhand account of a drunken confession is central here, later recanted, and the appeals court that upheld the conviction in 2024 ruled her evidence hearsay....