Supervision · John DeLorean · Jennings 8
Plus: The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty and Alice Louise Uden
the true crime that's worth your time
Talking-Head Expert Alert! Taken with Duke behavioral-economics prof Dan Ariely’s segments in Elizabeth Holmes/Theranos docu The Inventor, I grabbed one of his books off Amazon: The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie To Everyone -- Especially Ourselves. Despite a title so lengthy that it threatens to become a parody of the overly long and post-colon-splainy titles of many academic theses turned mass-market books (and a blurb from Dr. Oz that I suspect Ariely didn’t argue for), The Truth About Dishonesty is a pleasant read that does a good job capturing Ariely’s flavorful locutions. Its overviews of psychological experiments are direct and not too arcane, and it isn’t thick with footnotes. (And imagine my delight when a guest lecturer Ariely brought into his class turned out to be a guy I knew in college! G’head, Kreisler.) If I were Ariely’s HarperCollins editor, I’d be delighted at how the book turned out...and yeah, that title’s unwieldy, but it’s also only got more pertinent to the times in which we live since it came out in 2012.
As a reader...I don’t know. As I said, it’s an agreeable read that chugs right along; you can finish it in a plane ride and still have time for a power nap. The Truth About Dishonesty does what it sets out to do, and does it well, but what it sets out to do isn’t necessarily worth $17 to me. Ariely’s strength as an interviewee in The Inventor is how he speaks to specifics, how he’s reacting to the particular case of Elizabeth Holmes and the culture of bullshittery at Theranos. Here, predictably, he’s working more in abstractions, exploring general ideas of situations that create -- or discourage -- dishonest behavior and experimenting from there, and it’s just not quite as compelling to read “we thought X might inhibit Y behavior, here’s how we set up the control, and here’s what we found in the test group” over and over again, no matter how conversationally it’s written. I mean, behavior-econ books gonna...behavioral-econ book (?), so I’m not slagging it for being (a high-quality exemplar of) what it is. I am saying “mildly interesting” is more of a library-list prospect than a spending-real-money prospect.
Ariely is great; the book is merely good, and as it apparently became a documentary its own self, watching that is perhaps a more efficient way to get the same information -- with the added bonus of Ariely’s delightful on-camera presence. -- SDB
Fans of Ear Hustle might want to check out Supervision. While the former podcast covers life inside prison, Supervision is a four-part series on life once you’re out -- specifically, while on parole. The podcast comes from New Hampshire Public Radio, which, as the folks behind Bear Brook, suggests that they have a pretty high standard for their editorial product.
According to NHPR, former staffer Emily Corwin (she’s since taken a gig at Vermont Public Radio) began reporting out the show back in 2017, interviewing the podcast’s subject, 39-year-old Josh Lavenets, while he was still locked up at the Northern New Hampshire Correctional Facility. What follows is something “neither of us could have anticipated,” Corwin says. All four episodes of the show dropped on June 5 and are available here. -- EB
Before “DeLorean” was a name synonymous with time travel, it belonged to John DeLorean, a man so consumed with the creation of the ultimate sports car that he got wrapped up in a scheme that allegedly involved cocaine distribution and fraud, eventually seeing his remaining cash disappear into legal and attorney fees. (If you’re down for a longread, check out this great piece by Alex Pappademas on the late automaker’s travails.)
Other than Back To The Future, however, DeLorean hasn’t made much of an impact on the big or small screen -- something that seems nuts after you start reading about the guy. I mean, come on, guy who gets into coke dealing to make his fancy car seems like the kind of thing many a #MeToo-fearing power player would have loved to sink his teeth into.
Instead, we get a weird little vehicle (heh) called Framing John DeLorean, a movie that calls itself a documentary even as it casts stars like Alec Baldwin as reenactors in the tale. (More casting: There’s Morena Baccarin playing DeLorean’s wife, Cristina Ferrare; and Josh Charles and Dean Winters are also there to act out events.) Oddly, a significant portion of the film takes us “behind the scenes” of the reenactments, because who doesn’t want their doc blocked by chat about the craft?
The movie was distributed to theaters last weekend, and dropped on Prime and other streaming platforms for rental earlier this month. If you have $7 and a desire to see Will from The Good Wife pretend to be this guy, you might get a kick out of this one. -- EB
Investigation Discovery’s Death In The Bayou: The Jennings 8 aired all four of its episodes last weekend. The four episode docuseries dropped on Saturday and Sunday (on ID’s site, the entire show is packaged as two 85-minute eps), and is an exploration of the death of eight women between 2005 and 2009, a set of cases that reportedly inspired the most recent season of True Detective. For what that’s worth.
The show has already spurred headlines claiming the police made errors in their investigation, with the family of one victim saying that police tried to claim the deaths were the work of a serial killer because that might be easier than investigating individual crimes. If you watch the show and are curious for more, this New York Times report from 2010 and Ethan Brown’s book Murder In The Bayou: Who Killed The Women Known As The Jeff Davis 8? are great places to start. -- EB
Alice Louise Uden, who went to jail for killing her husband nearly 40 years after she admittedly killed him and threw his body down a mine shaft, has died at age 80. Uden was the subject of Alice & Gerald: A Homicidal Love Story, a book by crime writer Ron Franscell that was published this past April. The details of her life following the slaying and eventual conviction are fascinating, as her next husband was a guy who confessed to killing his ex-wife and two young sons. Officials say that Uden, who was sentenced to life at age 75, had suffered from persistent health problems. “I remember a lot of really great things about my mom,” one of her children told the Casper Star-Tribune. “And I know all the bad.” -- EB
Wednesday, on Best Evidence: Omar L. Gallaga joins Sarah on The Blotter Presents to discuss Robert Redford’s The Old Man And The Gun, Cameron Todd Willingham, and much, much more.
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