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1 week 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 week 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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2 weeks 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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3 weeks 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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3 weeks 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.
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1 month ago | 
grunge.com | Chris Turner-Neal
Physical pain is a necessary evil. Our bodies have to know when they're taking damage so we can get out of the situation and learn to avoid hazards in the future. The rare people born without the ability to sense pain often suffer repeated, severe injuries throughout their life. They lack the feedback they need to tell them what's dangerous, what's a hazard, and what, put simply, will hurt. AdvertisementBut pain is also a weapon.
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1 month ago | 
grunge.com | Chris Turner-Neal
By the time of her execution on October 9, 2002, Aileen Wuornos had been the subject of intense public fascination for the 10-plus years following her 1991 capture. A drifter who murdered at least seven men in Florida in 1989 and 1990, Wuornos was a novelty as a rare female serial killer. Her lesbian relationship, choice of firearm as a weapon, courtroom outbursts, and tragic personal history all contributed to the media circus that followed Wuornos's journey through the legal system.
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1 month ago | 
grunge.com | Chris Turner-Neal
The number of Crusades and how long they lasted depends almost entirely on what you feel like counting as a crusade, but even the most conservative accounting adds up to centuries of bloodshed and countless dead.
