JUDAS: A Modern Journal

There have been six dramatisations of Jeffery Dahmer's murders since 1993: The Secret Life: Jeffery Dahmer  (1993), Dahmer (2002), Raising Jeffery Dahmer (2006)(2008), The Jeffery Dahmer Files (2008), My Friend Dahmer (2017), and finally Netflix's Dahmer - Monster: The Jeffery Dahmer Story  (2022). They could be better at coming up with original titles, couldn't they? Or original concepts, come to think of it. It's almost like they're not adding anything, just recycling content to profit off death. True crime dominates the media market, polluting each corner of the internet with the depraved need for gory and gruesome details of actual crimes, involving real people. Where has this need come from? Is true crime as a genre ethical? How can true crime content normalise and even romanticise deviance?  On the 21st of September, 2022, Netflix released their self-produced Dahmer - Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story  which is a biographical crime 'thriller' that docu...

My father owns a small cabin in the woods near our house. It's small, wooden, nestled in a small valley with a rippling stream. The cabin is stilted, sitting just up a small embankment facing the stream, which my father has reinforced with a small drystone wall on either side. On the other side of the bank is a steep hill, crawling with verdant trees and ferns. Sitting on the balcony that my father build all by himself, I can be one with the natural world, allowing all my superficial stresses and anxieties to melt away as the sound of rippling water, whistling birds, cracking logs on the fire, and the light patter of rain on the tin roof fills my ears. My dad built this whole oasis by himself, using only materials from the valley and unused items from the outside world. Inside the cabin, a rusty old furnace sits in the corner, and a tin chimney passes through the corrugated roof above. A small coffee maker sits on the shelf, its bottom blackened by soot from the fire. It sits next ...