Peter Lanza, father of Sandy Hook killer, Adam, sought out author Andrew Solomon to tell his story because, he said, “I want people to be afraid of the fact that this could happen to them.” Solomon, who wrote the book Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, about families and children with different needs, writes in the 7,600-word New Yorker article that we look for motive to understand that which can’t be understood.
As Solomon wrote: “Interview subjects usually have a story they want to tell, but Peter Lanza came to these conversations as much to ask questions as to answer them. It’s strange to live in a state of sustained incomprehension about what has become the most important fact about you. ‘I want people to be afraid of the fact that this could happen to them,’ he said. It took six months after the shootings for a sense of reality to settle on Peter. ‘But it’s real,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t have to be understood to be real.’ ” Via the New Yorker.
A new health-science study states the obvious: A warming climate and housing developments encroaching on the wild combine to mean ever-worsening wildfires in the West. Via the Washington Post.
We can write all we want about the Republican presidential race in 2016, but no one knows who’s going to win because there’s no front-runner. Via Ross Douthat and the New York Times.
School administrators around Colorado are mad as hell and they won’t take it anymore, via the Durango Herald. “The statewide cumulative total of negative factor cuts since the recession started in 2008 is now around $1 billion… ‘At some point, a bunch of people have to make a big noise on the steps of the state Capitol” to get news coverage…’ The governor is terrified of a mass gathering of school buses there.”
Andrew Cohen writes that Sunday was the 50th anniversary of the (re)birth of the 1st Amendment, via the Atlantic.
E.J. Dionne says conservatives haven’t changed their views on the 47 percent – just the stories that they tell about them. Via the Washington Post.
Reaching his autistic son through the magic of Disney and the world of sidekicks. Via Ron Suskind in the New York Times magazine.
“True Detective” finale recap (full of spoilers, so don’t read unless you’ve seen it): The flat circle finally does what flat circles do. The ending makes perfect sense, which is not exactly what we were expecting. Via Rolling Stone.
