This is a short, though wide-ranging opinion piece. One pull quote does not really give a sense of what the rest of it is about, but here’s one to think about:
“Waking up at six-thirty on Friday morning and hearing what had happened in the night, I followed my own generational instincts, honed on Vietnam and Watergate and the Gulf War, and turned on the television to see the usual stern-jawed “terrorism experts” being stern, scary, and obviously not knowing what the hell they were talking about. Within an hour, with the help of my eighteen-year-old, who insisted on turning from television toward the Web, we had the Tsarnaev brothers’ names, school history, wrestling involvement, vKontakte (Russian Facebook) pages, YouTube videos, and boxing photos.”
The piece goes on to discuss the changing role of journalism and the potential value of imaginative literature in the cause of understanding this event and events like these. The link is here.