This newsletter has spent too much time lately on the state of Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign. Topical though it may be, it’s relentlessly dreary fare for a fun summer month like August. We should spend Friday discussing a subject that isn’t as grim.

Let’s talk about serial murder.

I’m a true crime junkie, a habit to which I was driven by the professional demands of my last job. I wrote twice as many words daily in that gig as I write for The Dispatch, if you can imagine it, and on six or seven topics each day instead of one. By the end of a 12-hour shift, I felt like an overheated CPU. There was no mental energy left to engage with television programming that was the least bit challenging.

Thank heaven for true crime TV, which isn’t the least bit challenging.