The death penalty has been in the news a lot lately, and thus has been a lot on my mind. This morning I was lucky to find a pointer to Garry Wills’ New York Review of Books article: The Dramaturgy of Death. Wills deconstructs ancient and modern rationales for the application of the death penalty, demonstrating just how absurd they are. It’s clear upon reading it that people support the death penalty for visceral reasons, and only later come up with “rational” reasons in an attempt to justify their primal urges.