You are so right! Hipster snowflake superiority trumps common sense to not read an article about people you don't like and say that you don't want anymore articles about said subject. What was I thinking?

Maybe but they're doing a better job of coming across as more genuine and humble so I think they're winning.

Then why are you reading an article about them?

I'm kind of confused with why people are so huffy and puffy about them releasing more intimate footage and looks into their lives. All these comments like "who cares" - Well, the people who are going to the concert are probably pretty excited about it, and that's who Jay and Bey are performing/catering to. If you…

I'm totally a belly truther, and I fucking love Bey. That gif is a big "U MAD?" at me, and I deserve it.

Adam Lanza lived in a world where he was literally told every day through countless media outlets that his life was the default experience and he was of the default type of human being. That world literally told him, countless times, that his viewpoint was more important and centered than the viewpoints of others…

Honestly, I think there are several layers of false distinctions that go into thinking this disparity in empathy and humanization is reasonable. The distinction between mass shootings and drive-bys. Between crime and terrorism. Between what the readers of the New Yorker would find "extraordinary" (a/k/a care about…

You may not remember them, but the Briley brothers were black. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Briley_Br…

Yes. You're right. These "madman with a gun" things that often happen at schools are predominately white on white crimes which make them newsworthy. The murders of people of colour are simply rarely reported.

And the African-American Navy Yard shooter a few months ago. And the South Korean kid who shot up Virginia Tech... This is the first I've seen this interpretation of this kind of psychological analysis. I give "Turing" credit for having the nerve to put it out there, but it's super duper wrong.

That's because the only time we even hear about crime is when it is committed by a white person or the victim is a white person.

Yet attitudes like yours close off nuanced discussions of race. Adam Lanza was a privileged white man. Race, gender and class are a huge part of who we are, and our place on the social totem pole does a lot to shape our world view. Nobody gets to opt out, which sucks a lot more for pretty much everyone than it does…

You are 100% right. Our need to consider, deeply, the reasons for this violence stems from the intrinsic value we afforded Adam Lanza as a White man. On a related note, all of the deep thinking that was done after the Virginia Tech massacre was done because the Asian perpetrator was a member of a model minority. It…

How could people of privilege being told that they're the default people in society lead to them feeling entitled to take the lives of others?

You're right. It would be ridiculously stupid and irresponsible to have long, thoughtful articles that were all about what shaped the killer and didn't even mention his race as a factor. Thank God we don't live in that world.

Oh, would I?

When a non-white person does a mass shooting, it's called a "drive by" or "gang violence."

For me, the DC snipers are a great example. Everyone's bringing them up as a counter ("we all speculated on what their motives could be!"), but that speculation was going on when they were unknown and unseen. As soon as they were arrested they fell off the news and I don't even know what sentences they got. And I…

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…