First things first: Murder is wrong, OK? But let's say, hypothetically, that you're considering committing one anyway: how would you do it? Practically everyone wants to murder someone. That jerk that got the job you want. That guy who gets all his books reviewed while your books don’t even get published. That handsome, horrible dude everyone loves when only you know he is a complete fraud who must be exposed. Jonathan Franzen. Maybe you want to murder novelist Jonathan Franzen. Let’s say you do. You want to stand over Jonathan Franzen's wrecked body as it bubbles over with his own blood. You’re laughing and he’s just kind of lying there, gurgling. You beat him to death with an iPad and now there won’t be any more sprawling family angst novels from Mr. Handsome Fake Genius Man. Maybe that is who you want to murder. Maybe you would really enjoy wringing his skinny Brooklyn neck. His skinny, pretentious, overrated, Brooks Brothers neck. Hypothetically. Here are some things to think about while you're totally planning the fake murder you have no intention of actually doing and by reading this sentence you hereby absolve the writer of any complicity in the crimes you will in no way go out and commit here comes the period and Jim is absolved. READ MORE

Have you caught up on the terrible story of Christopher Ryan Smith? The Internet entrepreneur was traveling in Africa all throughout the second half of last year, according to the emails he was sending his family. Unfortunately, he was dead the whole time, having been killed by his terribly secretly shady business partner. Horrible story! Also, how stupid: you buy yourself six months to get away with a murder by posing as the poor dead fellow, and you don't even flee the country? Moron. Still, gives one ideas.

“The last three years have been a contrarian’s delight—just when you expect the bananas to hit the fan." READ MORE

Wow. This is very crazy. Even by the very crazy standards of the very crazy rap game. Harlem rapper Trevell "G. Dep" Coleman, who had a sizeable hit in 2001 with a song called "Special Delivery" and released a good and under-appreciated album, Child of the Ghetto, that year for Bad Boy Records, walked into the 25th precinct on 119th Street on Wednesday and confessed to a murder he committed in October 1993, when he was 18 years old. As the New York Post reported this weekend, READ MORE

Recently a news organization published a photograph of a rather recently dead body. The former person in question photographed had been murdered and presumably the news outfit felt that a murder on its local turf had some news value. The victim's family and friends were about ten kinds of furious. Meanwhile, written coverage of the murder and its circumstances was vigorous and regular on a number of New York City-based websites, including Gothamist and the Times, in large part because it took place in the East Village. Year-to-date, there have been four murders in the East Village's Ninth Precinct, though I couldn't tell you what the other three were. It's reasonable that this is an item of news. The other publications' stories include neighbors bad-mouthing the victim and their accounts of seeing the body and also praise for the character of the alleged killer. But it's the picture that's enraged people and sent the family's friends and social networks into a campaign of furious mail. Eventually, the publication apparently reasoned it just wasn't worth the harassment and they took down the photo. READ MORE

One juror doesn't think so, though eleven did, and so there will be a retrial in the case "of a teen hustler charged with fatally stabbing WABC newsman George Weber in an S&M hookup gone bad." (via)

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."

To the frontiers of justice: "A Florida man accused of killing his son-in-law in New Jersey is arguing that he was unable to commit the crime because he was too fat." The unfortunately-or perhaps fortuitously, if you're his defense attorney-named Edward Ates will testify that his massive girth would have prevented him from running up and down a set of stairs where the murder occurred. "When the battered-wife defense was first used, it was considered abhorrent and bizarre. Jurors may be open to this in a society that talks about the infirmities that that obesity causes," says a noted trial lawyer. Okay!