I agree , poor choice of words on my part. She too should be held accountable

Also, New Yorker readers can easily picture an Adam Lanza in their kids' Underwater Basketweaving Magnet School for the Apologetically White, so these stories tend to pique their interest.

No, because this phenomenon — looking deeply into the family/history/psyche of a criminal — isn't just limited to mass murderers. From comments in the initial reporting of crimes to longform journalism years after the fact, our society looks for deep root causes of crimes committed by white people, because we trust…

YES. When has anyone on this thread ever read an article in a mainstream news outlet that profiled a murderer who was a person of color, asking WHY WHY HOW HOW he could have done such a thing? No one, because no one writes that, because we believe white people are better than violence and people of color - especially…

The thing is, that's not necessarily true. We pay attention when white people are murdered. Not as much when it's anyone else. Most violent criminals kill within their own race.

A discussion of this through the lens you suggest would be wonderful and welcome.

And, sometimes, just because you're a victim doesn't been you've been absolved from all responsibility.

You and I are largely in agreement vis a vis Lanza (IIRC, you were one of like one and a half people who didn't diagnose me as an inhuman, unthinking monster when I used the term evil on one of the earlier accounts of the crime here). And I completely understand the impulse to dig deeper into this guy's psyche, but…

You're getting a lot of blowback, but I get where you're coming from. We only move on to armchair psychology because he's white, so we have to dig for the problem because we can't just write it off as more evidence of how "they" are all subtly scary and threatening. If Adam Lanza were black we'd get a piece about…

You have got a point. I've never thought about this before, but you are right. We very rarely see kids of a different race - that have commit crimes -being analyzed to such an extent. "There must be something psychologically wrong with him! Why would he do such thing?"

Oh good, more thinkpieces on a white murderer so that we can understand how someone can be a 'default person' and still commit a crime.

Not even close to true.

I love both the books and the tv show, but I'm really tired of other fans getting defensive the moment someone criticizes GRRM or ASOIAF. The books are better at portraying women than a lot of other fantasy series, but GRRM still writes a lot of problematic things in regards to anyone who isn't a straight white man.…

Uh, okay.

He's amazing at writing women? Really? From the stereotypical tomboy to the bitchy prissy pretty girl to all the whores and one-note characters you coulda fooled me. He sucks at writing anybody but Tyrion.

Have you? It's Cersei.

Okay, for someone claiming to be a book fan, the names are spelled Daenerys and Cersei, and Ros isn't even a character GRRM created. She was created for the show. She never appears in the books. Ygritte is a great character in the books, but she's very one dimensional. The show actually gave the character much more…

My biggest gripe with GoT is that Martin gets to write about sex with underage girls with much lip-smacking relish because he's savvy enough to put humans in a setting not fully like our own.

Thurston Moore: The elder statesman of the "guitar guy at the party" crowd. Still substituting condescension and words he learned in high school philosophy class for actual argument. If only we could understand the complexity and depth of his love.