Michael Kaplan's Blog

What forces drive a race riot?

Seeing ought to be believing - so what are we to believe, watching this videotape: eleven police officers standing around while three kick and beat, for nearly two minutes, a man struggling on the ground? Are we to believe, as Sgt. Stacey Koon insisted, that this was the controlled application of "power strokes" to subdue a violent, possibly drugged suspect who was resisting arrest? Are we to believe, with Jerome Skolnick, professor of sociology, that this is "the defining incident in police ...

Give to charity, you feel pleasure; give to the government, you feel pain.  Why?

By now you should probably have swept up the litter of broken pencils and replaced the keyboard pounded into shards. The scribbled-over "handy worksheets" have been sent to the shredder or the compost heap. The red haze lifts and the buzzing in the ears has diminished to a low roar: tax season is over. It seems cruelly perverse to choose spring, a time of hope and renewal, as the best moment to tot up the all-too-small rewards of last year's labor and hand over all too large a lump of them -...

What the trial of the Holocaust's logistics man teaches us about conformity.

It was like some German Expressionist play: the white room, the three men in robes on this high dais; men (in black suits and narrow ties, with heavy-framed glasses, often balding) rushing back and forth with papers; and the man - in black suit, heavy-framed glasses, balding - sitting in a glass box, plugged into his headphones. Like an Expressionist play, too, the trial of Adolph Eichmann - which began today in 1961 - veered giddily between extreme formality and raw emotion, between...

There's real evidence for reincarnation; so why does science ignore it? The answer lies in the Cabinet of Dr. Stevenson.

Why, in their past lives, was everybody a princess or mighty warrior? Didn't anybody dig ditches in the ancient world? Who took out the garbage? Who fed the elephants? Despite these quibbles, reincarnation has many attractions as an idea: it offers us another spin of the wheel; it puts punishment or reward for our deeds into a more credible landscape than the flames or the clouds; it simplifies the question of where all this consciousness goes to or comes from. It's tidy and sensible, like r...

Madoff, Son of Ponzi: the frauds we always fall for.

His website said: "The owner's name is on the door. Clients know that Bernard Madoff has a personal interest in maintaining the unblemished record of value, fair-dealing, and high ethical standards that has always been the firm's hallmark."

Can it have been only a year ago? The story still sounds as unlikely as every other part of the operation: Madoff called in his two sons to explain why he wanted to pay out staff bonuses early, despite having problems meeting a $7 billion call for investor ...