By Lisa Black Way back in the dark ages before personal computers on every desk and watching TV on your smartphone, in 1983, Ronald Reagan talked about starting the Strategic Defense Initiative. A bunch of satellites would float around in space and shoot down any missiles incoming from Russia and...
FINGERPRINTS AND FISH TANKS: Does that really work?
By Lisa Black Remember that scene in Beverly Hills Cop II where Eddie Murphy uses Judge Reinhold's turtle tank and some superglue to develop a fingerprint on a matchbook? It was 1987, and that was not commonly known technology to the average viewer, who probably wondered if that actually worked....
A NOT SO COZY REALITY
By Lisa Black Truth is often stranger than fiction, but sometimes fiction is truth—whether it means to be or not. Any cozy mystery worth its salt has a small town, a bickering couple, eccentric characters, and a great climate. A murder in 2013 checked all these boxes and more, but to the...
I WILL FIND YOU: THE USE OF FORENSIC GENEALOGY
By Lisa Black Forensic genetic genealogy burst into the American lexicon in 2018 with the identification of the Golden State Killer, but the methodology had been around for decades. It was developed not to find the perverse and violent, but the loved. Around the turn of the millennium, companies...
HOW TO LIVE IN THE MOMENT
By Lisa Black I forgot my phone the other night. Perhaps that should be written as: The other night, I left the house and forgot my phone!!!...
YOU CAN’T SAY THAT: A (Very) Brief History of Libel
By Lisa Black After a mild argument with my husband about the difference between free speech and libel/slander, I got curious about when actual laws prohibiting either hit the books. Both crimes come under the heading of defamation, which simply means to express something to a third party that...
HOLIDAY TRAVEL TIPS
By Lisa Black Late November and December are the nation's busiest travel periods. Here are some life hacks to smooth your journey: Dress for comfort. You’ll be seated for hours, so that means soft shirts and stretchy pants—yoga pants and leggings or your nicest set of workout clothes. But you want...
WE HAVE (ALMOST) ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE
By Lisa Black If you travel to Austria or Hungary, you’re likely to hear a lot about the vivacious “Sissi.” The beloved local celebrity embodies enough glamour and drama to fill a season of reality shows…even if she died 124 years ago. Imagine you’re a 15-year-old girl, Elizabeth, nicknamed Sissi,...
MAD (WO)MAN? GETTING YOUR BOOK TRAILER ON TV
by Lisa Black I created a television commercial for my current release, Red Flags, and aired it on local channels twenty times in five days. The cost to me? A whopping—and deductible—$289. I should add that I know nothing about film composition, video technology, or advertising. We’ve all become...
THE QUICKSAND EPISODE
by Lisa Black Young people today must have no idea why children of the 1970s had an irrational fear of quicksand—the colloidal of saturated loose sand by which one would die slowly and inexorably without hope of rescue. Even though it is impossible for a human to actually drown in quicksand, any...