OUR BLOG
Why We Need Sleep
"Enjoy the honey-heavy dew of slumber." - Shakespeare, Julius Caesar. Russell Foster is a circadian neuroscientist: He studies the sleep cycles of the brain. And he asks: What do we know about sleep? According to Foster, some areas of the brain are actually more...
Poetic Justice
Bob Dylan’s pointed and versatile lyrics are cited in judicial opinions and have earned him a Nobel Prize for literature. The late Justice Antonin Scalia loved opera, but he also had a soft spot for Bob Dylan. In a 2010 dissent, for instance, he chastised the...
Black Swan Theory
The phrase "black swan" was coined when the black swan was presumed not to exist. The Old World presumption was that all swans must be white because all historical records of swans reported that they had white feathers. In that context, a black swan was impossible...
Humor Combats Grief
David Grossman’s novel, A Horse Walks into a Bar is about a standup comic’s rambling and confessional routine in an Israeli comedy club. The book has won the Man Booker international prize for the year’s best fiction in translation. Set in small Israeli town, the...
The Many Sides of Harry Lee Coe
Judge Morison Buck wrote the "Chips Off the Old Bench" column in the Hillsborough County Bar Association's publication, Lawyer. Judge Buck passed away in 2014; however his biographies of 58 Hillsborough County judges are preserved. They make fascinating reading.1...
Who Can You Trust?
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” - Leo Tolstoy, Ann Karenina (1878) Although technology allows people to stay connected over long distances, it can interfere with family bonding. The pressure to stay connected online is...
Removing Prison Tattoos: An Investment in Change
For all 100,000 prisoners in their system, Florida has published data including their age, race, sex, what crimes they’ve committed, and — most intriguingly — what tattoos they have. The most obvious thing this data shows is just how common tattoos are. Kevin Waters,...
The Truth About Lies
Lying, it turns out, is something that most of us are very adept at. We lie with ease, in ways big and small, to strangers, co-workers, friends, and loved ones. Our capacity for dishonesty is as fundamental to us as our need to trust others, which ironically makes us...
Dual Diagnosis
Dual diagnosis is a term for when someone experiences a mental illness and a substance abuse problem simultaneously. A person experiencing a mental health condition may turn to drugs and alcohol as a form of self-medication to improve the troubling mental health...