Well, stealing bases adds some runs but very few, and you lose most of the runs that you gain by having runners caught stealing.

How easy it is for a fantasy to grab hold of your foot like a rope, and dangle your life upside down while brigands go through your pockets. Deal with the life you've got. Solve the problems you have, rather than fantasizing about a life without them.

Because crime stories reveal an aspect of our personality that everybody has, but which we normally keep very deeply hidden. We like to talk about the good sides of ourselves. We don't like to talk about our hatreds, our distrusts of one another, our secrets, but crime stories drag those things to the surface and consequently they fascinate people and always have throughout all history.

In a crime story, the details become tremendously important - where the staircase was in relation to the bed, for example.

On the other hand, if you suggest to a person who has been a victim of a serious crime that we take the issue too seriously, they'll look at you like you're crazy. So that's a really tough issue, whether we're doing more harm than good by paying so much attention to a few cases that honestly don't normally intersect with our lives.

Professionalism in medicine has given us medial miracles for the affluent but hospitals that will charge $35 for aspirin.

The business of popularizing crime is how we expose the faults in our justice system. It's how we expose police misconduct.