Liz Castaeda does not play by party politics.

The 49-year-old is really in the middle. Shes a big fan of Republican U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, despises President Donald Trump and stayed out of the 2018 contest between former U.S. Rep. Beto ORourke and Sen. Ted Cruz. This year, shes most excited about two state legislative candidates in Carrollton, the Dallas suburb she calls home one a Democrat and one a Republican.

She arrived at the polls on Tuesday, Oct. 13, to cast her ballot on the first day of early voting and the two names at the top of the ticket made her feel sick.

It seemed like an absurd choice: Im not thrilled with former Vice President Joe Biden, she said, but President Donald Trump brings so much division and hate.

So she skipped the question and promised to come back to it later. I didnt want to deal with that, to be honest, Castaeda said.

After all, she had other candidates to vote for who actually made her excited about the future of her country.

For Castaeda, like many Texas suburban women, the election is a referendum on Trump either a strong embrace or rebuke of the sitting president though her indecision may be an outlier in a year when polls indicate that roughly 95 percent of likely voters have already made up their minds.

UNCHARTED WATERS: Can the polls keep up with newly competitive Texas politics?

Winning votes from women in the suburbs including hundreds of thousands of educated Texas Republicans who crossed party lines to vote for Democrats in 2018 is a central preoccupation for Trump, whose shout-outs to that demographic have become a national spectacle in 2020.

Finally! Trump tweeted Thursday afternoon. Suburban women are flocking over to us. They realize that I am saving the Suburbs the American Dream.

Historically, pundits and politicians have used the term suburban women as code for middle-aged, white and affluent. Thats no longer true nationally or in Texas, where the suburbs are increasingly diverse in demographics, political ideology, education and other defining voting characteristics.

In interviews, 15 suburban women on both sides of the aisle described deeply divided politics only worsened by 2020 a hellish year that brought the coronavirus pandemic, racial unrest and economic uncertainty that will linger long after votes are counted.

It is the year that anything can happen, but those events have only pushed many suburban women into their existing views none of which exhibit particular excitement or disdain for a potential President Biden, but rather indicate strong opinions about the current President Trump.

IN-DEPTH: What Trumps save-the-suburbs pledge means in Texass only political battleground

I dont feel that Trump is for the people, said Serena Formby-Condon, a 60-year-old from a suburb outside Austin. I feel like hes for himself.

People are saying, How in the world can you vote for President Trump? said Ronnie Retzloff, a 74-year-old from San Antonio, and Im saying, How can you not?

As the coronavirus spread rapidly across the country in March and April, the lack of a coordinated federal response left the hard choices on shutdowns and mask mandates to local governments oftentimes to states, though Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has pushed some of those decisions down to the county level.

It was the local restrictions that drove Melissa Beckett, 47, out of San Antonio and into a new community in Gregg County, 350 miles away in deep-red East Texas.

She is a Catholic and former commodities trader who says the Democratic lawmakers in San Antonio dont represent her values and should not have brushed off calls to reopen schools. The entire handling of the pandemic from limiting nursing home visitors to requiring masks has been government overreach, she said.

This pandemic has exponentially amplified why the Democrats cannot be in the presidential office, Beckett said. We do not need our elderly in prison and our children not able to go to school.

Deborah Moncrief Bell, a 70-year-old Harris County resident, somewhat falls into the first category: Shes bound to her home, without transportation and with chronic pain, and has seen the coronavirus wreak havoc on friends and family. She is voting for Biden.

Trumps nonchalance about the virus he kept trying to get it, and eventually did, she said has made the country a more dangerous place for her to live. She cant afford to go out in public or to restaurants without risking her life, and it pains her to see people who conflate the coronavirus with the flu or decide not to wear masks.

Theres this whole attitude that people have that anybody is disposable, she said.

Dina Cortez, a 48-year-old San Antonio resident, was raised in a Democratic family but shifted right as she grew older, understanding how her faith and politics coincide. She backed U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz in the 2016 presidential race.

For her, the coronavirus issue boils down to individual responsibility.

We need to work in order to make money, we need to support our families, we try to be as safe as possible, she said. I go to the grocery stores and I occasionally go to restaurants. I dont think that we can live in fear. I do appreciate those that would be high-risk and have chosen not to do so Im not telling anybody how to run their life.

She is voting for Trump.

The coronavirus has also heightened differences over the Affordable Care Act. With millions out of work, losing the insurance they received through their jobs and with the Supreme Court set to review a case on the law early next month suburban women voting for Biden see a new urgency in casting their ballots.

Angelia Morton, a 57-year-old from North Arlington, is independent her family is voting for Trump this year, but shes casting a ballot for Biden. She recently lost her job in the airline industry because of coronavirus fallout, and while she isnt sure that any other president could have handled the virus better, it bothers her that Trump continues to deny that its still a problem.

In this election, job security and affordable health care are at the front of her mind.

I dont know what [Trumps] health care plan is, she said. He keeps saying that hes got one and keeps making promises that he cant deliver on.

Perhaps Trumps most direct appeal to suburban voters has been a push for law and order, heightened after mass demonstrations took place this summer against racial inequality and police brutality. But some of the protests turned violent, prompting Republican calls to crack down on rioters who destroyed property.

In Texas, it is approached either as a threat of destruction and violence or a rebuke of racism that has long plagued the United States.

The most important thing to me is for the country to be stable, for us to have law and order and not to run to radical positions based upon individual things that have happened, said Retzloff, the 74-year-old San Antonio resident and former public school teacher.

Retzloff, who grew up in a Democratic family, left the party with Ronald Reagan and has never returned. Democratic policies, such as the Green New Deal, are too radical for the United States, Retzloff said, and shes deeply concerned about calls to defund the police.

Her neighborhood is littered with signs for both Trump and Biden, but she believes the president will capture a second term in a landslide. Polls arent worth a flip, she said.

Gina Wood, a 52-year-old resident of Aledo outside of Fort Worth, is a lifelong Democrat voting for Biden. This summer, two young Black women in her historically conservative suburb organized a Black Lives Matter march that drew a far larger crowd than anyone had anticipated, mostly consisting of white people.

At 52 years old, Ive never had the types of conversations that Ive had with Black women, she said. It has been just extremely eye-opening for me.

Trump, she said, has only exacerbated racial and political divides. In her red county, she sees neighbors post signs hoping to make liberals cry again.

A little extreme, but thats where we are, she said.

Partisan alignment is the most reliable predictor of a persons voting tendencies, but women also have many other identities that factor into their decisions at the ballot box.

Gender, race, age, religion and education could all be equally as, or more, important to a woman than her life in the suburbs, said Elizabeth Simas, a political scientist at the University of Houston.

In some way, they could decide the election because its uncertain which identity is going to take precedence for a woman, she said.

For Molly Wills Carnes, a 54-year-old Cypress resident, the presidents politics are deeply personal: She has a transgender daughter who the Trump administration has targeted with anti-LGBTQ policies, she said.

Shes a senior in high school, and then shell have four years of college we are in a race against the clock, Carnes said. We have five years to get her a fair and just world.

She sees a jadedness in the Republican Party that makes caring about vulnerable people somehow radical.

Castaeda, the Carrollton voter who was not excited by either presidential candidate, isnt bound to identity politics.

When you see a Latina, youre going to think Im a Democrat, and Im not and Im also not a Republican, she said. I really am in the middle. My ballot was filled with both sides.

But she also isnt blind to the way candidates rhetoric and actions impact her identity. In 2017, Trumps first year in office, a man in a truck pulled over and approached Castaeda as she helped campaign for a local candidate. He asked if she had papers.

I cried, said the lifelong Texas resident. I had never experienced that before.

Three years later, Castaeda was filling out her 2020 general election ballot. She submitted it, walked out of the polling place and sat down in her car to drive home.

Suddenly, she realized that she had forgotten to vote for a president. It was an accident but perhaps, in the strangest of political years, that was fitting.

cayla.harris@express-news.net

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These Texas women arent flocking to Trump. They made up their minds weeks ago. - Houston Chronicle

Maddy is a student at Little Cypress-Mauriceville High School. She is a talented young writer whose columns offer unique insights from the perspective of a local high school student. Intended primarily for young people, all of The Record readers are welcome to enjoy our columns by Maddy Smith.

Mental illness is something very relevant in society today especially in teenagers. Approximately 9% of children from the ages of 2-17 have been diagnosed with ADHD, 8% of teenagers aging 13-18 have been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, 8% of teenagers from 12-17 have had major depression episodes, and 2.7% of teenagers from 13-18 suffer from eating disorders that can include bulimia, anorexia, and binge eating. The list of mental illnesses that can affect everyday life goes on and on. These articles are meant to help those that dont understand fully what a certain mental illness looks and feels like. Everybody deals with mental illness in a different way and show different signs.

Having an eating disorder or any mental illness is not something you see yourself having. It is not something that everyone goes through and should not be seen as a phase to those you open up to. It controls your mind causing you to lose control of your body. You have dreams and goals you want to accomplish when you grow up. However, mental illness can but a block in between you and those goals.

An eating disorder of any kind you would easily think could be fixed with some self-love but it is deeper than that. It consumes your mind all times of the day. You fear the one thing that you need to survive. Your mind tells you that food is the enemy and that you are not worth it. The voices in your head constantly tell you youre not good enough, having no purpose, and not feeling worthy around others. However, an eating disorder can make all these thoughts feel twice as big. The eating disorder makes you sink further into the thoughts of feeling unworthy and having no purpose. You constantly feel like you need to lose weight to be good enough.

As it takes even more control of your mind, your social life is being affected. You fear going out with friends to avoid eating. Anxiety and depression can also play a part in an eating disorder. It can either trigger an eating disorder or make itself known further down the road of your eating disorder making your thoughts worse. All you want to do is be able to eat and not think about it. You dont want to think about the numbers. The number of calories or the number on the scale that ties you down. You are constantly fighting the hunger inside of you. The fear is what keeps you tied to your bed all day. Everywhere you go there is food. You see it at the grocery store, in restaurants, at school, and even in your own home. You have to see what you fear the most every day multiple times a day.

If you know someone that struggles with an eating disorder please help. You dont have to understand how they feel they just need someone. Dont be condescending and tell them things they already know. They know the effects of an eating disorder so dont think that it will convince them to just eat. It is a feeling of not being good enough and not any amount of love and kind words you give them will help because deep down, they truly feel worthless and not good enough.

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Series on Mental Illness Present in Society - The Record Newspapers - TheRecordLive.com

William Isaac is a senior research scientist on the ethics and society team at DeepMind, an AI startup that Google acquired in 2014. He also cochairs the Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency conferencethe premier annual gathering of AI experts, social scientists, and lawyers working in this area. I asked him about the current and potential challenges facing AI developmentas well as the solutions.

A: I want to shift the question. The threats overlap, whether its predictive policing and risk assessment in the near term, or more scaled and advanced systems in the longer term. Many of these issues also have a basis in history. So potential risks and ways to approach them are not as abstract as we think.

There are three areas that I want to flag. Probably the most pressing one is this question about value alignment: how do you actually design a system that can understand and implement the various forms of preferences and values of a population? In the past few years weve seen attempts by policymakers, industry, and others to try to embed values into technical systems at scalein areas like predictive policing, risk assessments, hiring, etc. Its clear that they exhibit some form of bias that reflects society. The ideal system would balance out all the needs of many stakeholders and many people in the population. But how does society reconcile their own history with aspiration? Were still struggling with the answers, and that question is going to get exponentially more complicated. Getting that problem right is not just something for the future, but for the here and now.

The second one would be achieving demonstrable social benefit. Up to this point there are still few pieces of empirical evidence that validate that AI technologies will achieve the broad-based social benefit that we aspire to.

Lastly, I think the biggest one that anyone who works in the space is concerned about is: what are the robust mechanisms of oversight and accountability.

A: Three areas would go a long way. The first is to build a collective muscle for responsible innovation and oversight. Make sure youre thinking about where the forms of misalignment or bias or harm exist. Make sure you develop good processes for how you ensure that all groups are engaged in the process of technological design. Groups that have been historically marginalized are often not the ones that get their needs met. So how we design processes to actually do that is important.

The second one is accelerating the development of the sociotechnical tools to actually do this work. We dont have a whole lot of tools.

The last one is providing more funding and training for researchers and practitionersparticularly researchers and practitioners of colorto conduct this work. Not just in machine learning, but also in STS [science, technology, and society] and the social sciences. We want to not just have a few individuals but a community of researchers to really understand the range of potential harms that AI systems pose, and how to successfully mitigate them.

A: In 2016, I remember, the White House had just come out with a big data report, and there was a strong sense of optimism that we could use data and machine learning to solve some intractable social problems. Simultaneously, there were researchers in the academic community who had been flagging in a very abstract sense: Hey, there are some potential harms that could be done through these systems. But they largely had not interacted at all. They existed in unique silos.

Since then, weve just had a lot more research targeting this intersection between known flaws within machine-learning systems and their application to society. And once people began to see that interplay, they realized: Okay, this is not just a hypothetical risk. It is a real threat. So if you view the field in phases, phase one was very much highlighting and surfacing that these concerns are real. The second phase now is beginning to grapple with broader systemic questions.

A: I am. The past few years have given me a lot of hope. Look at facial recognition as an example. There was the great work by Joy Buolamwini, Timnit Gebru, and Deb Raji in surfacing intersectional disparities in accuracies across facial recognition systems [i.e., showing these systems were far less accurate on Black female faces than white male ones]. Theres the advocacy that happened in civil society to mount a rigorous defense of human rights against misapplication of facial recognition. And also the great work that policymakers, regulators, and community groups from the grassroots up were doing to communicate exactly what facial recognition systems were and what potential risks they posed, and to demand clarity on what the benefits to society would be. Thats a model of how we could imagine engaging with other advances in AI.

But the challenge with facial recognition is we had to adjudicate these ethical and values questions while we were publicly deploying the technology. In the future, I hope that some of these conversations happen before the potential harms emerge.

A: It could be a great equalizer. Like if you had AI teachers or tutors that could be available to students and communities where access to education and resources is very limited, thatd be very empowering. And thats a nontrivial thing to want from this technology. How do you know its empowering? How do you know its socially beneficial?

I went to graduate school in Michigan during the Flint water crisis. When the initial incidences of lead pipes emerged, the records they had for where the piping systems were located were on index cards at the bottom of an administrative building. The lack of access to technologies had put them at a significant disadvantage. It means the people who grew up in those communities, over 50% of whom are African-American, grew up in an environment where they dont get basic services and resources.

So the question is: If done appropriately, could these technologies improve their standard of living? Machine learning was able to identify and predict where the lead pipes were, so it reduced the actual repair costs for the city. But that was a huge undertaking, and it was rare. And as we know, Flint still hasnt gotten all the pipes removed, so there are political and social challenges as wellmachine learning will not solve all of them. But the hope is we develop tools that empower these communities and provide meaningful change in their lives. Thats what I think about when we talk about what were building. Thats what I want to see.

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The true dangers of AI are closer than we think - MIT Technology Review

And now its election time, and its very exciting. Let me tell you about it.

Pictures of candidates are tied to little parachute falling from the sky. Some guys going down the street riding an elephant with a great big speaker dangling from its trunk. Three beauty queens are riding donkeys and singing theme songs.

Maybe this is the kind of small-town madness you see in those sci-fi movies you see at 2 oclock in the morning.

I have to do something. I pick up the phone and dial 9-1-1. Help me, please! I cry (I think I got the receiver wet, Im a very nervous guy). Politicians have swarmed right outside my window. Im breaking down, my voice barely above a whisper. Im all alone Im all alone Im afraid.

This kind of thing has been going on for three days now. Since then Ive seen gangs of candidates with bow ties and big grinning smiles pushing against my bedroom window. Theyre all hollering at me, but I can only hear a few of them. More more for us! (Damn Republicans). Less, less for them! (Damn Democrats).

Theres a candidate on the roof, peering down over the side. His face is all dirty. Your chimneys as clean as a whistle, he says cheerily. Hes holding a couple of dead crows by their feet. I did that vote for me.

Im out of my head. I stumble to the window and open it; a dozen guys fall backward into a big pile. I got a fever, I said. I need popsicles whos got popsicles?

I close the curtain and change out of my cowboy pajamas. In the kitchen theres a guy running for governor, a guy youve seen maybe a hundred times on the TV. Hes scrubbing out my sink with his hairpiece.

Right away they shoot out toward the driveway. A dozen young men in black suits and dark sunglasses run forward with popsicles.

Root beer, I command. Root beer and banana.

One candidate pushes through Root beer, he says triumphantly.

No banana? I ask.

I grab the root beer popsicle and close the window. The popsicle guy slinks back into the crowd. He trips over a troop of marching Cub Scouts.

I close the curtain and change out of my cowboy pajamas. In the kitchen theres a guy running for governor, a guy youve seen maybe a hundred times on the TV. Hes scrubbing out my sink with his hairpiece.

Can you believe it?

I need to get somewhere, anywhere, but theyre fighting on my porch, two guys dressed like Lewis and Clark have each other in a headlock. Theyre like carnie workers, one of thems got a bunch of plastic donkeys, the others carrying around stuffed elephants. A lady in sequins is out by the fence blowing on a kazoo and smashing cymbals together. Some girl in silver leotards is standing on her hands on the roof of my pickup. She lights a baton on fire and sticks it in her mouth.

Get outta here! Im getting bold. These guys are running down my property value.

Me! Me! Vote for me! Theres a guy jumping up and down on my garbage can. The lid shatters; hes standing waist deep in broken bags of funky cat litter. Some other guy knocks him over and rolls my garbage can into a ditch. Hes screaming at him. Why, you independent!

I bolted past them and ran for my car. Out on the road I saw rows of dancing girls with big leg kicks grizzly bears spinning saucers, clowns with guns that shot confetti. (I swear I saw the ghost of Lawrence Welk on my neighbors roof, but Im not sure I was sick after all.)

Bands of roving candidates were running up and down the street like trick-or-treaters at Halloween. I rolled my window down for air. A lady candidate dressed up like Uncle Sam was walking on stilts that lit up with flashing stars whenever they touched the ground. Hungry she muttered. So hungry. She wrapped her arms around her stomach. Must have votes.

She stopped on the shoulder of the road and fell over, flat on her face. It looks like she cant move. (She finally gets picked up by a cowboy band playing Merle Haggard songs on the back of a flatbed truck.)

It was all very exciting, in a weird sort of way. But what would happen when the election was over? Where would all these candidates go?

I could only imagine the worst: Candidates standing forlornly at freeway off ramps, looking for a quarter and a crust of bread. Candidate soup kitchens (a couple of votes for a tuna fish sandwich, huh mister?). Candidates huddled around campfires along the beach, deep in the woods. Candidate hitchhikers. Candidate old folks homes?

My friend Delores told me one night she caught a candidate with wild, crazy eyes in his headlights, biting into a seagull. (She has since proposed setting up candidate-feeding stations.)

We need to create a host of imaginary government jobs to get these candidates off the street. We have to be on the lookout for signs of candidate addiction in our children.

Its election time again. Be vigilant.

Originally posted here:
An Old Dog's Tale: Wild visions fill the mind at election time - Chinook Observer

HBO's "CRAZY, NOT INSANE," A Provocative Look At The Minds Of Serial Killers, Debuts November 18

From Academy Award(R)-Winning Director Alex Gibney

Psychiatrist Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis has dedicated her career to the study of murderers, seeking answers to the question of why we kill. CRAZY, NOT INSANE, directed and produced by Academy Award(R)-winner Alex Gibney (HBO's "Agents of Chaos" and "The Inventor: Out For Blood in Silicon Valley") debuts WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 18 (9:00-11:00 p.m. ET/PT). This provocative documentary explores, like a scientific detective story, Dr. Lewis's lifelong attempts to look beyond the grisly details of homicides into the hearts and minds of the killers themselves.

The film will be available on HBO and to stream on HBO Max.

An official selection of the 2020 Venice International Film Festival, the documentary profiles Dr. Lewis and her research, includes videotaped death row interviews, and examines the formative experiences and neurological dysfunction of such infamous murderers as Arthur Shawcross and Ted Bundy, challenging the very notion of evil and proposing that murderers are made not born.

A well-respected psychiatrist and author, Dr. Lewis began her career working with children, including violent juvenile offenders. Her exposure to the testimony of childhood physical and sexual abuse led her to explore the way that trauma in childhood - often coupled with some neurological damage - can sow the seeds of murderous impulses in adults.

Those insights led her to become an expert in dissociative identity disorder (formerly known as multiple personality disorder) as she observed first-hand the way in which the killers she examined would switch between alternate personalities - or "alters" as she calls them - in the course of her examinations. While Dr. Lewis's conclusions were often dismissed by others, including by well-known forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz, her videotapes of her death row interviews show meaningful transformations between "alters" developed in childhood, often as a way to endure and sometimes avenge, the pain they suffered.

Among Dr. Lewis's most well-known cases is Arthur Shawcross, who was convicted in 1991 for the murder of eleven women. While Lewis's videotaped exchanges with Shawcross show him inhabiting the alters of his vengeful mother and a 13th century cannibal, Shawcross was found sane and guilty in a trial by jury. Lewis was also one of the last people to interview Ted Bundy just before his execution. In an audiotape featured in the film, Bundy was unusually candid with the psychiatrist, revealing new details that upend the conventional wisdom about him. One of Lewis's regrets is that she was never able to examine Bundy's brain for clues to what made one of the world's most infamous serial killers.

CRAZY, NOT INSANE is a stylistic departure for Gibney, who uses an eclectic mix of cinema verit, videotapes of psychiatric evaluations, hand-drawn animation and home movies in order to explore the complexities of the human mind. Lewis's literary voice is read by actress Laura Dern (HBO's "Big Little Lies" and "The Tale") to bring further insight into Lewis' career and her cases through her writings. From images of Dr. Lewis scribbling on legal pads in her unruly living room to studio art classes she takes in life-drawing, Gibney's portrait of Lewis intends to show a woman of limitless curiosity willing to explore places others are unwilling to go.

In addition to Shawcross and Bundy, other high-profile convicted murderers and death row inmates assessed by Dr. Lewis include Mark David Chapman, David Wilson, Marie Moore and Joseph Paul Franklin. The film also includes a videotape of Dr. Lewis's interview with "traveling executioner" Sam Jones, an electrician who also administrated hundreds of death penalty sentences. While claiming he "zapped" convicted killers in the electric chair without regret, Jones displays a collection of disturbing paintings he made after every execution, which reveal his inner turmoil.

The title, CRAZY, NOT INSANE, refers, in a colloquial way, to the conflict that the legal system - framed by demands for justice that can devolve into a desire for revenge - has with the world of medical science in defining grave mental illness. For many years, Dorothy testified in death penalty cases about whether convicted murderers were sane enough to be executed. Her insights and forensic skills helped change the laws and the way that death penalty lawyers approach their clients' cases.

The film also explores the death penalty itself, highlighting the research that indicates that states with the death penalty tend to have higher murder rates than those without, questioning the theory of the death penalty as a deterrent to violence. The film asks an important question: once dangerous killers are locked away and the public is protected, why is society so determined to execute these human beings?

HBO Documentary Films presents a Jigsaw Production CRAZY, NOT INSANE directed by Alex Gibney; produced by Alex Gibney and Ophelia Harutyunyan, Erin Edeiken and Joey Marra; executive produced by Stacey Offman, Richard Perello and Maiken Baird; For HBO: executive producers, Nancy Abraham, Lisa Heller.

CRAZY, NOT INSANE kicks off a collection of five enthralling crime-focused documentary films that premiere on Wednesdays beginning November 18. Each title goes beyond the sensational headlines to explore the human toll on all sides of a crime and delves deep into the internal and external worlds of perpetrators, victims, and survivors. The anthology includes:

THE MYSTERY OF DB COOPER (November 25), directed by John Dower, explores the only unsolved airplane hijacking in U.S. history, which continues to inspire wild speculation about the identity of the hijacker almost fifty years later. This investigative film explores the many different theories surrounding the case, bringing to life the stories of four people believed by their family and friends to be "DB Cooper," the man who hijacked a 727, jumped from the plane over Washington State with a parachute and $200,000, never to be heard from again.

BABY GOD (December 2), directed by Hannah Olson and executive produced by Academy Award nominees Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, is a shocking examination into Las Vegas fertility specialist, Dr. Quincy Fortier, who assisted hundreds of couples struggling with conceiving. Decades later, many children born from his interventions discover through DNA and genealogical websites, that Dr. Fortier had used his own sperm to impregnate their mothers without their knowledge or consent, provoking a troubling reckoning with the nature of genetic inheritance, the meaning of family and the dilemma of revealing painful secrets. An official selection of SXSW 2020.

ALABAMA SNAKE (December 9), produced and directed by Theo Love, produced by Bryan Storkel and written by Theo Love and Bryan Storkel, explores the story of Glenn Summerford, a Pentecostal minister, accused of attempting to murder his wife with a rattlesnake in the sleepy town of Scottsboro, Alabama. The details of the investigation and the trial that followed has haunted his family and community for decades. The documentary features local Appalachian historian and folklorist, Dr. Thomas Burton, who has spent his life studying the culture, beliefs, and folklore of Pentecostal snake handlers, painting a Southern Gothic portrait of Glenn Summerford and his tale of demon possession.

THE ART OF POLITICAL MURDER (December 16), is directed by Paul Taylor, produced by Teddy Leifer and Regina K. Scully and executive produced by Academy Award winners George Clooney and Grant Heslov and is based on Francisco Goldman's award-winning book of the same name. The film tells the story of the 1998 murder of Guatemalan human rights activist Bishop Juan Gerardi, which stunned a country ravaged by decades of political violence. The documentary highlights the team of young investigators who take on the case and begin to unearth a web of conspiracy and corruption, entangling the highest levels of government in their pursuit of the truth.

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Breaking News - HBO's "Crazy, Not Insane," A Provocative Look at the Minds of Serial Killers, Debuts November 18 - The Futon Critic