From cnn.com today: As Economy Drops, Violence And Fear Soar.

This article looked kind of familiar. I hauled out my paperback reissue copy of Wisconsin Death Trip, and flipped through it. Same stories -- bank failures, people losing jobs, killing themselves and their families out of shame and fear . . . and people worrying about their kids being sent to "the front" (in this case, the Spanish-American War) without adequate training.

History really does repeat itself. The 1890s had diptheria epidemics, and we've got bank bailouts, but still . . . some of those stories could have been written today.

Well, maybe not the one about the guy who couldn't pay his rent, so his landlady composed a magical song in the belief that if she sang it a certain number of times each day for a year, he would die. That one seems pretty firmly fixed in 1897.

But a lot of the rest of those stories seem pretty contemporary.