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Sunday, January 07, 2007
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Prisoner's Dilemma Why is it so intriguing to everyone -- UD included -- when a professor murders? And why does it jump from intriguing to absorbing when the professor's at an Ivy League university? This blog has very selectively covered cases of professors who murder . Every case I thought worth mentioning involved a husband killing his wife, usually because she wanted a divorce, or had recently divorced him. And here - perhaps - is another one, just like that, at the University of Pennsylvania. The man has been named a "strong suspect," and is expected, soon, to be charged. He's been taken off the teaching roster for the coming semester. He's an expert in in game theory , a formal way of analyzing human motive and action; and almost certainly, if this man did the deed, commentators will talk about the irony of a highly-placed academic, specializing in strategy, messing up so badly when it came to strategizing his wife's death.... But then, this was, like O.J.'s, a crime of volcanic rage. Whoever did it bashed her head so horribly that he obliterated her face. The police point out that the robbers the faked break-in scene intended to conjure would be peculiar indeed to bother pulverizing this random woman... Anyway. Maybe our fascination involves the way events like this remind us of the visceral passions that rule many people, regardless of intellectual advancement... Something like that. |