All across America public libraries were, and are, being shut down, while prisons-with libraries-were, and are, being built. This has been a choice the American public has been making for over thirty years.

Yet for quixotic reasons–namely, that I enjoyed writing obits–I had decided to scale back on articles about city life in order to write exclusively about the city’s dead. For even less money. It was a...

I don’t need no Smith and Wesson, man, I got Merriam and Webster.