Christopher Hitchens, published in Lapham’s Quarterly:
To be in the company of Iran and China and Sudan as a leader among states conducting execution—and to have pioneered the medicalized or euthanized form of it that is now added to the panoply of gassing, hanging, shooting, and electrocution and known as “lethal injection”—is to have invited the question why. Why is the United States so wedded to the infliction of the death penalty?
An interesting historical perspective on capital punishment and its place in society today. (via: kottke.org)