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2 weeks ago | 
grunge.com | Chris Turner-Neal
Kids play battle a lot, and for a child it seems fun. It's everything children like: loud noise, competition, mild danger, and imitation of adult activities they don't really understand. And for some people, the love of playing battle persists into adulthood, as evidenced by people who dress in costumes to reenact historical conflicts. However, real-life battles are, for the vast majority of participants, not nearly so fun.
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2 weeks ago | 
grunge.com | Chris Turner-Neal
In early 2024, just over 190,000 women and girls were under some form of incarceration in the United States, including jails, state and federal prisons, immigration detention, tribal facilities, juvenile programs, and military prisons.
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3 weeks ago | 
countryroadsmagazine.com | Chris Turner-Neal
On one of my first days working in the Country Roads office, I took a walk to clear my head. It turned out I had very much bright-sided my familiarity with desktop publishing software, and I was wound a bit tight trying to get the monthly events calendar laid out. As I talked myself out of trying to thumb a ride upriver on the next barge, I saw a man casually pluck a little orange fruit off a tree in front of me and pop it into his mouth.
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1 month ago | 
grunge.com | Chris Turner-Neal
Wealth and status don't protect you from criticism; they just make people talk quieter. Ever since the first group of people decided they needed to be led by a special person, ideally wearing a fancy hat, the human experience of monarchy has been mixed at best.
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1 month ago | 
grunge.com | Chris Turner-Neal
"Sell in May, go away." "Buy the dip." "People will always drink Coke." There are a million little conventional-wisdom tidbits of stock advice floating around, all of them hoping to convince investors that the markets are something they can learn and predict rather than the world's fanciest roulette wheel.
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1 month ago | 
grunge.com | Chris Turner-Neal
The murder of JonBenét Ramsey was one of the last and most compelling of the 20th century's "crimes of the century." Six-year-old JonBenet was reported missing the morning of December 26, 1996; she was later found dead of strangulation in her home's basement.
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1 month ago | 
grunge.com | Chris Turner-Neal
In a world that often seems chaotic, it's natural to try to insulate oneself from all the bad news that's constantly available on every feed and crawl. If you could do something about the earthquake or war or product recall or space robot invasion, you would, but realistically, there's not much good that comes from simply knowing grim statistics.
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1 month ago | 
grunge.com | Chris Turner-Neal
After the past few years of unpleasantly eventful events, it's common to read comments like "I'm ready for some precedented times" or "I didn't want to live through history." These are easy emotions to sympathize with. News feeds can seem like they're working from Stephen King or David Lynch storyboards, and occasionally, there are multiple bad news live feeds tracking different fiascos vying for attention. Modern life has very little chill indeed.
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1 month ago | 
grunge.com | Chris Turner-Neal
Only 75 miles from West Virginia's state capital, Charleston, sits the village of Odd, population about 360. The town's unusual name — chosen, apparently, apparently, simply because it was unique — means it occasionally pops up on lists of West Virginia towns with funny names, alongside such gems as Big Ugly and Hurricane. But this was its sole claim to fame — Odd and its residents were otherwise pretty far outside the wider world's notice.
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1 month ago | 
grunge.com | Chris Turner-Neal
True crime has remained a popular genre for media for decades because audiences have an apparently insatiable thirst for unusual, bizarre, or downright aberrant human behavior — the wilder, the better. And on the relatively rare occasion that someone who's already famous is the victim of a crime, public interest and speculation go into overdrive, with every detail of the crime, its victim, and its perpetrator (if they're caught) pored over by armchair sleuths and looky-loos alike.
