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Lately, I have found myself unable to resist true crime.

It is everywhere, which does not help: in the news, on social media, in the Netflix queue, in podcasts, waiting for me with the immediate appeal of a fresh, hot slice of Domino’s™ pizza. I am rarely not in the mood for it. I will watch Bailey Sarian tell a story while doing her makeup, then immediately follow it with a long podcast about a case I had not known existed fifteen minutes earlier. This is not a complaint exactly. It is more of a confession about an appetite I find slightly strange.

You would think true crime would make me afraid. You would think it would repel me.

And sometimes it does. I have been a victim of crime. I am also a mother, which means my imagination has become a much less private place than it used to be. The world has sharp edges; I know that in more than one way. A story about harm can land differently when you have had to think about safety not as an abstract subject, but as a practical matter.

Still: there I am, eating it up.

Maybe the first honest answer is that fear and fascination are not opposites. They are often roommates.

The agenbite of outwit

The more exact phrase is McLuhan’s: agenbite of outwit. In his 1963 essay of that name, he riffs on the old agenbite of inwit—the “again-biting” of conscience, later revived by Joyce—and turns it outward. McLuhan writes: “A special property of all social extensions of the body is that they return to plague the inventors in a kind of agenbite of outwit.”

The outwit is not, in other words, my clever plan to outsmart danger. It is the more unnerving feedback loop in which something we build to extend ourselves—our attention, our curiosity, our instinct to keep watch—comes back to organize our attention for us. We put our nerves outside ourselves, then wonder why they seem to belong to the internet.

True crime offers a version of danger with an edge around it. The story has a beginning, middle and end. There are timelines, clues, maps, witnesses, red flags we are invited to notice. Real life is rarely so obliging. In real life, bad things can happen without a clean narrative or a person we can point to and say: there. That was the moment. That was the reason.

A case, however, gives us the feeling that the world might be studied. If we pay close enough attention, perhaps we will know how people become dangerous. Perhaps we will recognize the sign. Perhaps we will keep ourselves and the people we love safe.

That is not foolishness. Recent research on true-crime audiences suggests that curiosity about dangerous minds, a desire to feel prepared, and fear of crime can all be part of the draw. The same research is careful about cause and effect: consuming crime stories may help someone feel more prepared in the moment, but it can also make the world feel more dangerous than it is. Both things can be true. The human mind is annoyingly capable of making a safety plan and a problem at the same time.

Trying to understand without making it ordinary

Erich Fromm would probably object to the easy answer that violent people are simply animals. In The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, he distinguished between defensive aggression—the kind connected to survival—and a more purposeless, malignant destructiveness that he saw as distinctly human and shaped by social and cultural conditions. That is a sobering thought. It suggests that the question is not only, “How could someone do this?” but also, “What happens when the human need for connection, meaning, power, recognition, or control goes wrong?”

That question is not an excuse. It is the opposite of one. It asks us not to turn evil into a spooky species of person that bears no relation to the rest of us. It asks us to take human destructiveness seriously enough to understand that it is made inside the human world.

Sartre might make this even less comfortable. In Existentialism Is a Humanism, he writes that “man is condemned to be free” and, once in the world, “responsible for everything he does.” He was not much interested in letting people hide behind a fixed essence—I was born this way; I had no choice; this is just who I am. He did not mean that we float above circumstance. We are shaped by history, bodies, losses, money, fear, other people, and the plain fact of being alive. But he was equally unwilling to make passion, character or circumstance into an excuse. That is not a cheerful philosophy, especially when you are reading about a person who used their freedom terribly. Yet it may explain part of the pull. True crime confronts us with the fact that people are not only vulnerable; they are agents. They act. They choose. Sometimes they choose cruelty.

We want to understand that without making it ordinary. Or perhaps without realizing how ordinary some of its ingredients can be: jealousy, resentment, entitlement, the wish to control another person, the refusal to let someone else have a life separate from ours.

A feed asks to be checked again

McLuhan gives us a way to describe this without pretending the screen is neutral. He writes that television and radio are “immense extensions of ourselves” and that “the modes of participation are already built into the technology; these new languages have their own grammars.” The same is true of the true-crime stream on a phone. Its grammar is the cliffhanger, the “part two,” the ten-second recap, the comment asking who else has heard of this case, the almost irresistible invitation to become an amateur witness. A court report asks to be read. A feed asks to be checked again.

That is where the agenbite lives for me. I may arrive looking for orientation: what happened, what was missed, how might a person protect herself or her family? But the form can keep the question open forever. It rewards vigilance with another story. It makes a reasonable wish to understand feel like a job for the nervous system that never ends. McLuhan’s point is not that the technology is wicked. It is that we are most susceptible to a medium when we mistake it for a neutral tool and forget that it is also shaping us.

Bailey Sarian’s appeal makes sense to me in that light. Her Murder, Mystery & Makeup series is not pretending that horror belongs in a sealed, solemn room. She tells stories in a conversational register, with disbelief, humour, detail and a recognizable human presence. The format may seem strange from the outside, but it also creates a form of distance. It lets the viewer approach difficult material with someone who sounds like a person rather than an authority figure. For some of us, that makes the unbearable slightly more speakable.

Not without a conscience

There is an ethical line, of course. Victims are not content. A good true-crime story should not make us feel clever at the expense of someone else’s life. The useful question may be: does this account leave me with more care for the people involved, or less? Does it make me more alert to the real structures that allow harm to happen? Would I be able to live with this tone if the story were mine, or my child’s, or someone I love?

I do not think my true-crime appetite means I want violence. I think it means I want orientation. I want to understand what people are capable of, including the good things, without looking away from the bad ones. I want the world to make sense, even though it keeps declining to cooperate.

So yes, I will probably keep watching. Not endlessly. Not without a conscience. But with the same complicated attention I bring to everything else: a little fear, a little curiosity, a mother’s practical imagination, a survivor’s memory, and a very human wish to know what is going on.

Then I will turn it off, make a cup of tea, and look at something ordinary and alive.

Reading / viewing notes

A few sources I kept close.

• Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973).
• Marshall McLuhan, “The Agenbite of Outwit” (1963), with a publisher excerpt.
• James Joyce, Ulysses; the Joyce Project traces agenbite of inwit to the Middle English Ayenbite of Inwyt.
• Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946); see also the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Perchtold-Stefan et al., “Out of the dark – Psychological perspectives on people’s fascination with true crime” (2025).
• Bailey Sarian, Murder, Mystery & Makeup.