The Awl

Lawless White People Go Wilding in Vancouver

Choire Sicha — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 10:50:33 +0000

An excellent point: "The photos of the Vancouver riots look like Cardiff on a Saturday night." It's true! This fantastic collection of photos and video from Vancouver last night—you see, Boston won the Stanley Cup? Which is the big prize in hockey, don't you know?—does bear a striking resemblance to any ordinary night of the glassing capital of the world over in Wales. And here is our favorite video from Vancouver.

Mazel tov, Canada. (To be fair, as Vancouver is one of the most diverse cities on earth, there were also some ASIANS at the riots.)

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The Fantastic American Murder Rate: Do Presidents Make People Kill?

Choire Sicha — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:00:38 +0000

Why do people like to kill other people so much in America? (Which, much like Cardiff, is the stabbingest and shootingest place in the better parts of the world, except, unlike Cardiff, America is actually in one of the better places in the world.) And we mean besides the obvious reasons, such as being surrounded by bad smells and dirty looks and not enough parking spaces and hating other races and stuff. In a look this week at historian's attempts to make sense of our murder rate, some ideas are tried on and discarded: "The homicide rate appears to correlate with Presidential approval ratings. If [American Murder author Randolph] Roth is right, electing a bad President is dangerous and inciting people to hate any President, good or bad, could be deadly. But which is the cart, and which the horse? The Presidential approval rate might be a proxy for all sorts of measures of a well or poorly adjusted society. Or maybe there's another horse, somewhere, some third factor, that determines both the Presidential approval rate and the homicide rate."

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Drunk Chick Represents Everything Wrong With Britain

Alex Balk — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 13:30:09 +0000

I'm not sure why, particularly given that it happened in Cardiff, the photo of this woman stumbling about town in an advanced state of dÃƒÂ©shabillitÃƒÂ© has resulted in such horror from the British tabs, but I do know that I can't decide which gasping description I prefer, the Sun's "The knickerless girl was seen in the centre of Cardiff after a heavy session," or the Mail's "This shrieking ladette was photographed staggering through Cardiff city centre late on Friday night." If only she were holding a knife, this would be perfect.

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