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In 1994, James Howard Kunstler's The Geography of Nowhere was published. It remains the best critique of suburbia out there and I highly recommend it. But something Kunstler didn't touch on was the psychological effects of the isolation and thinning out of America in car-dependent subdivisions.

I thought about this when I read the horrific story of 13 siblings held captive and tortured by their parents in Perris, Calif., a piece of sprawl in Riverside County. Look at a photo of the house and it could be anywhere in metropolitan Phoenix outside of the real historic neighborhoods.

The 1999 Columbine High School massacre happened not in downtown Denver, or the city at all. Instead, the shooting that killed 12 students occurred in unincorporated Jefferson County. It is an upper-middle-class area, but filled with lookalike single-family houses, walls, totally dependent on the automobile. Same landscape with the murder of 12 and wounding of 58 at an Aurora, Colo., movie theater in 2012.

When 58 were shot to death last year at a concert on the Las Vegas strip, the shooter lived in Mesquite, Nev., a spread of lookalike tract houses off Interstate 15 near the Arizona line. Newtown, Conn, site of the Sandy Hook shooting, was founded in 1705 but is mostly sprawl residential pods. Dylann Roof grew up in suburban Lexington County, outside Columbia.

On and on. Many reasons drive America's increasing pathologies, but the spatial element shouldn't be ignored.

* Please read below the jump for important new information.

With a hard September deadline for my next David Mapstone Mystery and the demands of my Seattle Times job, I must take a break from Rogue. I regret that I can't sustain the old 16-hour workdays any longer.

You may use this as an open thread to discuss the issues of the day in the comments section. If something major happens, I may try to write. Otherwise, I will also try to update the daily Front Page, as well as Arizona's Continuing Crisis.

As always, the site's archives offer plenty, especially the Phoenix 101 history section. See you in mid-September, God willing.