By Lisa Black Since last month I asked ChatGPT to tell me who it thought the world’s favorite book villains were, this time I thought I’d ask for the world’s favorite detectives. Its response was singularly unsurprising. Chat GPT's Top 6 Favorite Detectives 1. Sherlock Holmes Created by Sir Arthur...
By Lisa Black As an experimental time-saver, I asked ChatGTP to write me a 500 word blog on ‘the five favorite villains from books.’ I didn’t specify whose favorites or give any other instructions. Minus its flowery prose and possibly speciesist comment on how ‘true evil is not always found in the...
By Lisa Black If you’ve ever perused my social media feed, you may know that last year I fostered four of the most impossibly adorable kittens ever. This year the animal shelter gave me a mom cat with two newborns kittens, so tiny they never moved from the carrier. I set out the litter box and...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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!!!...
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...
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...
