Television is full of fictional and real violence that's turned into entertainment. It's an interesting phenomena and I tried to put it in perspective and tried to think through a few of the real questions that this sometimes unseemly business raises.

I like to feel that I understand little things about sports.

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

I tried not to write about the O.J. Simpson case too much because so much has already been said about it, but there are a lot of questions left worth asking. However, the case is very useful to illustrate other points. The case is a common reference point because everybody knows the ins and outs of it, more than any other case in this generation, so it becomes useful to reference other points. In itself, there aren't that many questions about it that remain unanswered.

When people disagree with you, what you ultimately have to do is persuade people to agree with you - period.

Famous crime stories almost always lead to the passing of new laws. There's a great many intersections between this unseemly tabloid phenomena and serious social issues and we never get to that intersection because serious people don't like to talk about that unattractive stuff.

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.