IN 2021, Texas lawmakers, feeling themselves under attack, launched a counteroffensive. The 1619 Project, a series of magazine articles that became a phenomenon (and an educational curriculum), presented slavery and racism as central to American history—and Texas, whose 1836 independence from Mexico was partly driven by the desire to allow slavery, was very much implicated. […]
In 1954, two dozen people, most of them black, gathered in a small storefront church in Indianapolis. The preacher, a tall, black-haired white man, didn’t launch into a sermon; he asked his congregants a question: “What’s bothering you?”
For all its blind spots and moral squickiness, true crime is a genre in which crimes against women, particularly middle-class white women, have merited sustained attention. The nuclear family is no guarantee of safety in the world of true crime—often quite the opposite, in fact. The home is a site of potential violence, and heterosexual domesticity is frequently laced with manipulation and abuse.
In retrospect, the show was destined to be a hit. My Favorite Murder. It’s all right there in the title: the chatty familiarity, the dark humor, the self-conscious voyeurism. The true-crime comedy podcast, started by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark on a lark in January 2016, was fortuitously timed to coincide with the podcast and true-crime booms.
