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Boston Globe
4 days ago
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Today in History: June 12, 49 people killed in Pulse nightclub shooting
Also on this day, General Thomas Gage, military governor of the Massachusetts colony, issued a proclamation that sought to undercut the growing fervor, resources, and activities of the patriots around Boston. He called on the residents of the colonies to give up their rebellion and resist the rebels, who, he said, 'with a wantonness of cruelty ever incident to lawless tumult, carry depredation and distress wherever they turn their steps.' In it, he offered amnesty -- 'to spare the effusion of blood' -- to all who lay down their guns except Samuel Adams and John Hancock. The proclamation had an opposite reaction to its intent, galvanizing instead of disarming the patriots. In 1939, the Baseball Hall of Fame was dedicated in Cooperstown, N.Y. Advertisement In 1942, Anne Frank, a German-born Jewish girl living in Amsterdam, received a diary for her 13th birthday, less than a month before she and her family went into hiding from the Nazis. Advertisement In 1963, civil rights leader Medgar Evers, 37, was shot and killed outside his home in Jackson, Miss. (In 1994, Byron De La Beckwith was convicted of murdering Evers and sentenced to life in prison, where he died in 2001.) In 1964, eight South African anti-apartheid activists, including Nelson Mandela, were sentenced to life in prison for committing acts of sabotage against South Africa' apartheid government. In 1967, the US Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, unanimously struck down state laws prohibiting interracial marriages, ruling that such laws violated the 14thAmendment. In 1978, David Berkowitz was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison for each of the six 'Son of Sam' killings committed in New York City over the previous two years. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan, during a visit to the divided German city of Berlin, exhorted Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to 'tear down this wall.' In 1991, Russians went to the polls for their first-ever presidential election, which resulted in victory for Boris Yeltsin. In 1994, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were killed outside Simpson's Los Angeles home. (O.J. Simpson, Nicole Brown Simpson's ex-husband, was later acquitted of the killings in a criminal trial, but was eventually held liable in a civil action.) In 2010, Daniel Nava hit the first pitch he saw as a big leaguer for a grand slam — only the second player to do it — leading the Boston Red Sox to a 10-2 rout of the Philadelphia Phillies. In 2016, a gunman opened fire at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., leaving 49 people dead and 53 wounded in what was then the deadliest mass shooting in US history; the gunman, Omar Mateen, pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group during a three-hour standoff before being killed in a shootout with police. Advertisement
CBS News
06-04-2025
- Entertainment
- CBS News
"Smash" on Broadway: Reimagining a backstage tale for the stage
The new musical "Smash" is everything you'd expect, and maybe more. But like most big Broadway musicals, what you're seeing up on stage is only half the story. The show is based on the 2012 NBC TV series of the same name. It was a cult hit, and a show people loved to hate – a drama within a drama about the making of a Broadway show about Marilyn Monroe, called "Bombshell," with Megan Hilty and Katharine McPhee vying for the role of a lifetime. And now, after more than a decade of fits and starts, here it is: a Broadway show based on a TV show about the making of a Broadway show. The words and music are from legendary composing team Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman. They've been working together since 1976, said Wittman: "It was the tall ships, legionnaire's disease, and Son of Sam, and that's when I met Marc." In their long partnership, Shaiman and Wittman have created music for Broadway, Hollywood, and sometimes both, like the musical "Hairspray." That show earned the pair a Tony Award, but even after all their success, taking on "Smash" gave them that feeling they get before they start anything new: the fear of failure. Before every project, they said, they sing a song, the lyrics of which are: "Paralyzed with fear. Paralyzed with fear." "That's how we start writing any song, and we sing that for days," Shaiman said. " 'Cause you're just looking at a white, blank page," said Wittman. "And it's just the most frightening thing on Earth!" To create a show within a show, it helps to have an experienced team, including renowned director Susan Stroman ("The Producers"). She's won five Tony Awards, and during her career has seen a lot . "Everything that is in 'Smash,' I've actually lived through," she laughed. The idea was to keep what was good from the TV show, and re-imagine the rest. The music stayed, but the TV show was kind of melodramatic. So, with the blessing of producer Steven Spielberg (yes, he does Broadway, too), they made it funny. There were also a few funny things they didn't plan. In the show, a main character was out and is replaced by an understudy at the last minute – and on the night of the very first preview, it happened for real. Not for nothing, one of the taglines for "Smash" is, "Behind every hit musical ... is a hot mess." "Yes, and that is absolutely true," said Stroman. "You go in with the best intentions, and something invariably goes wrong. And everybody's on top of it, to see how to fix it, which department can fix it." Robyn Hurder plays Ivy Lynn, an actress who plays Marilyn Monroe, and winds up assuming her character. "It's like a sandbox," she said, "and I just get to play around in it and get to do all the things: I get to be crazy, I get to be mean, I get to be sweet, I get to be funny, I get to cry, you know? And I get to sing and dance. It's everything." Hurder's personal story adds yet another layer to the oh-so-meta show. She's a Broadway veteran who made her mark not as a singer, but as a dancer. And beneath that effortless glamour is someone who's fought 20 years for this moment, even past her own personal breaking point. She said there were times when she'd wanted to give up on the stage: "Yep, the whole business, this musical theater business, was really, really getting to me," she said. "I realized that was my clock ticking. And I was like, I think I need to be a mom, and I don't know if I want to do this anymore . I said to my husband, 'I think I want to have a baby.'" She did have a baby – a son, Hudson – and then, everything changed. "Having Hudson was the best thing that ever could have happened to me," Hurder said, "because that's when everything switched and everything clicked. I'm back and I'm achieving my dreams." To watch an excerpt of Robyn Hurder performing "Let Me Be Your Star," from "Smash," click on the video player below: So, will it be a … smash? One of the ads says, "If you loved the TV series, it's exactly what you want. And if you didn't, we've changed everything." But at its heart, "Smash" is really about collaboration, warts and all – and to lifelong collaborators Shaiman and Wittman, that might be a story that works for everyone. Asked what might appeal to those who never saw the original show, Shaiman replied, "I believe it's a universal feeling of watching a group of people trying to go to work. What do we accomplish today? I think everyone can relate to that." For more info: Story produced by John D'Amelio. Editor: Steven Tyler.
Yahoo
20-03-2025
- Yahoo
Why Were There So Many Serial Killers in the 1970s?
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." America saw a spate of headline-capturing serial killers beginning in the 1970s. The captures of Edmund Kemper and the Son of Sam early in the decade were followed by the falls of Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and the Night Stalker by the time the 1980s were coming to a close. But by the '90s, you were more likely to find a mass murderer at the cinema than on the evening news. As the FBI notes, 'There is no single identifiable cause or factor that leads to the development of a serial killer.' But that hasn't stopped sociologists, criminologists, and true crime junkies of all stripes from speculating why the 1970s seemed to have so many serial killers compared to the decades before and after. Before digging into why serial killers had free reign in the '70s, it's important to understand who exactly they are. Defining what makes a serial killer is a more nuanced conversation than you might think. It was part of the conversation at a 2005 FBI symposium on serial murder precisely because multiple definitions exist and vary in manners 'such as the number of murders involved, the types of motivation, and the temporal aspects of the murders.' The definition the symposium ultimately settled on was 'The unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender(s), in separate events.' That might seem fairly broad, but that's because it needs to be. As the symposium established, 'There is no generic profile of a serial murderer.' There are, of course, commonalities that connect a large swath of serial killers. The symposium outlined that some serial murderers share personality traits such as 'sensation seeking, a lack of remorse or guilt, impulsivity, the need for control, and predatory behavior.' Experts have also noted the majority of serial killers are male, pointing to data that just 5 to 11 percent of known murderers are women. The question of why there's such a gendered disparity has no agreed upon answer.$11.59 at One possible explanation for the (mostly) men who grew up to become America's most infamous serial killers might be the men who came home from fighting in Europe to raise them (and those who didn't come home at all). Investigative historian Peter Vronsky posits in his book Sons of Cain: A History of Serial Killers from the Stone Age to the Present that the glut of psychologically damaged men who killed innocent citizens could have been impacted by their fathers being psychologically damaged by the killing they had to do during World War II. During that global conflict, soldiers witnessed new and horrific forms of carnage and cruelty. The post-war America of the 1950s, when these men would have been acting as parents, didn't offer them many outlets to properly grapple with the mental toll these horror took on them. Whether through abuse, neglect, or misguided attempts at 'making their son a man,' these WWII veterans passed residual trauma onto their children, which might have twisted them into killers. Environmental factors could also be to blame. It might seem outlandish, but it's entirely possible that the switch to unleaded gasoline (which began in the 1970s and was completed in 1996) could have had a massive impact on the reduction of not just murders but all crimes within the United States. Crime of virtually all kinds statistically decreased starting in the 1990s, and proponents of what is called the 'lead-crime hypothesis' note that this correlates with the removal of lead from things like gasoline and paint. Many studies suggest lead exposure can have negative impacts on a child's developing brain, and the lead-crime theory posits that the problems children acquired from this exposure turned some into serial killers. It's tricky to confirm, given other environmental factors like poverty coinciding with many incidents of lead exposure. However, a recent paper from Jennifer Doleac, an expert in the economics of crime, pulls together a number of studies which have attempted to hone in on the lead-crime hypothesis. Her comprehensive analysis makes the case stronger. A hot-button hypothesis from scholars Steven Levitt and John Donohue, made popular by the best-selling book Freakonomics, instead connects the reduction in crime in the 1990s with the expansion of abortion access in the United States in the aftermath of Roe v. Wade (1973). It posits that the reduction in 'unwanted children' (meaning kids born to parents who didn't plan for or want a child) reduced the number of children raised in situations that could influence their future criminal behavior. This association caused controversy, as it seemed to some readers to echo the idea of eugenics posited at the turn of the American century by figures like birth control activist Margaret Sanger. In 2019, Levitt and Donohue revisited the study on NPR's Freakonomics Radio. While distancing themselves from the eugenics implications, they reaffirmed their conclusions on their abortion theory by bringing updated data to their study. Although not tied directly to the 1970s nor serial killers, criminologist Robert Agnew's general strain theory identifies what causes crime in the first place. He posits: 'strains or stressors increase the likelihood of negative emotions like anger and frustration. These emotions create pressure for corrective action, and crime is one possible response.' Strains can be economic or social, such as 'relationships in which others are not treating the individual as he or she would like to be treated.' In either case, the strain represents a loss of control and a drive to 'survive' amidst tumult. The 1970s were a time of great social upheaval on racial and gender grounds. Paired with a recession and inflation that led President Gerald Ford to say 'The State of the Union is not good,' you have a recipe for the disaffected who lack the societal status they are supposedly owed to lash out. The societal shifts of the 1970s might have contributed to the rise of serial killers in a different way. In 1979, criminologists Lawrence E. Cohen and Marcus Felson proposed the 'routine activity approach' that suggests simple structural changes in society's routine activities 'can influence crime rates by affecting the convergence in space and time of the three minimal elements of direct-contact predatory violations: (1) motivated offenders, (2) suitable targets, and (3) the absence of capable guardians against a violation.' To put the approach in more concrete terms, consider this example from Cohen and Felson: As more women enter the labor force and college, there is a greater market for automobiles and, therefore, more opportunities for grand theft auto. Extrapolating this framework further, the criminologists suggest that as more women and younger adults were taking more opportunities outside the home, it created more opportunities for them to be victims of violent crime given that society's older routines hadn't yet adjusted to better defend against new threats. We can see evidence of this in a serial killer from a different era: H.H. Holmes. Inside his infamous Chicago murder house, he preyed upon young unmarried women who had come to the 'white city' to pursue financial independence in ways never before offered to them. As Northeastern Global News paraphrased a comment from criminologist James Alan Fox: 'With widespread social and cultural changes in the 60s and 70s—drug use, hitchhiking, the hippie movement, anti-establishment sentiment—conditions were prime for predators to go on the prowl.' Investigative conditions also favored the array of serial killers in the 1970s and '80s. 'The offenders certainly had a head start,' criminologist Michael Arntfield told the BBC, suggesting that the police at the time 'were out of their depth.' He notes that prior to the early 1980s, law enforcement simply wasn't compiling data in a way to even identify the patterns of a serial killing. Take, for example, the case of Rodney Alcala, who was convicted in 1980 of seven murders but was possibly responsible for many more. In 1978, Alcala applied to appear on the popular television program The Dating Game despite his criminal record that included being a registered sex offender. As Biography has previously reported, 'There was no national crime database, and the technology needed for complete background checks on contestants didn't exist.' Because of this, Alcala actually made it all the way onto the show. It's possible the seemingly sudden burst of serial killers in the 1970s was more because the police and the media had suddenly started to take notice. Who knows how many unsolved murders of previous decades were at the hands of a single serial killer, but no one ever noticed the pattern? The ability to recognize those patterns now, and even create profiles of possible killers (as popularized by the Netflix show Mindhunter), could also have contributed to why America saw far fewer prolific serial killers in the final years of the 20th century. The theory goes that we simply got better at catching killers early on. To this end, what began in 1972 as the FBI's fledgling Behavioral Science Unit grew in the decades since, with the 1985 formations of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime at the FBI Academy and the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, as well as the 1996 creation of the Child Abduction and Serial Killer Unit. These programs and others like them not only provide crime analysis data and products to other law enforcement agencies, but also serve to 'link seemingly unrelated crime investigations and share investigative data from violent crimes across the country.' This could explain why serial killers aren't as prolific as they once were; law enforcement has purportedly gotten much better at identifying potential serial killings and collaborating to stop them. Modern technology has also played a role, given that everyone leaves behind a greater digital footprint than they realize. Consider how the BTK Killer was ultimately undone in 2005 by a floppy disk, or how the Golden State Killer was finally caught in 2018 after a family member had done an online DNA genealogy analysis. Our loss of anonymity in the digital age, in theory, makes it far harder for serial killers to operate unnoticed. Whether 'constant digital surveillance keeps serial killers at bay' is a comforting thought is debatable (since constant digital surveillance in and of itself presents problems), but it's more comforting than the final major theory: that the decline in known serial killers from the 1970s isn't because we've gotten better at catching killers but actually because we've gotten far worse. The Murder Accountability Project offers a chart which depicts the homicide clearance rates, meaning the number of murders solved, in the United States from 1965 to 2023. In 1965, the clearance rate was 91 percent, leaving only 9 percent of murders unsolved. Jump ahead to 1983, and while the estimated homicides total had more than doubled from that of 1965, the clearance percentage decreased to 76 percent. Jump ahead again to the most recent data from 2023, and the statistics look more troubling. The nonprofit tallied roughly 1,000 fewer estimated homicides compared to 40 years ago yet the clearance rate was down to just 57.8 percent. Worse yet, that stat is actually an improvement on 2022, which hit an all-time low for clearance rate, at 52.3 percent. In other words, it's possible that the reason we aren't seeing as many serial killers in the newspapers as we did in the 1970s isn't because there aren't as many out there; it's simply that we just don't see them. You Might Also Like Nicole Richie's Surprising Adoption Story The Story of Gypsy Rose Blanchard and Her Mother Queen Camilla's Life in Photos
