I was asked on Monday by a friend if I was going to write about the goings-on at Yale. I will at some point, but now's not the time.

A little more than two and a half years ago, our school spent a day on lockdown after a twenty-one-year-old shot a police officer at MIT and drove through our campus on his way to Watertown, where he would eventually be captured by police.

We stayed in our dorms, not knowing whether he was just outside the door. He probably wasn't anywhere near campus, the rumors went, but better to keep the doors locked, just to be sure. I lived just next door to my friends, but I didn't dare to step outside for the ten seconds it would have taken me to get from my door to theirs.

I've written before about the moment that we raised our voices together, after the campus had begun to open up again, but I haven't said much about the terror of that day we spent inside.

It seems illogical now, with the benefit of hindsight, but we were worried that we'd hear gunshots at any moment. Everyone tensed up when we heard another police siren go screaming passed. People offered couches to sleep on to strangers because no one wanted to go outside.

But I don't claim to know what it feels like to be black on Mizzou's campus right now. When we locked our doors in fear, we were afraid together. I don't know what it's like for a piece of my identity to be under attack, because when my school was locked down, we came together as Harvard students. I don't

A friend posted the following on Wednesday:

Dear everyone posting That Video to Facebook today:
Yes, there was another shooting. VA this time, caught on live news.

Yes, the murderer (no, he doesn't deserve to be named) filmed his victims' deaths and immediately posted them to his Facebook and Twitter.

No, you're not obligated to help him out by publicizing them. All that does is put attention on the wrong person, make the victims' friends and families miserable, inspire imitators, and give the murderer exactly what he wanted. So please, knock it off.

(...)

He was more timely than I, but I've still got a few short things to add on.

(1)

In the days since, we've learned that the killer wrote a manifesto calling for a race war. This is probably good grounds for rounding up everyone who helped to publicize the last killer who wrote a manifesto calling for a race war, and give them a stern talking-to about how, yes, their carelessness has real consequences. It is certainly good grounds for not giving his political opinions any publicity, since that's quite obviously what he wanted here.

Remember, terrorists lose when you forget about them. Killers who share videos of themselves killing and espouse political agendas that they want discussed more broadly lose when you don't give them the satisfaction of watching their videos, or paying their political agendas any mind. They're deranged and wrong; what good are you doing by enabling them?

Zeynep Tufekci, in the Atlantic:

You might not have noticed, but the mass media rarely reports on suicides, particularly teen suicides. When it does, the coverage is careful, understated, and dampened. This

"Jury Selected in Boston Marathon Bombing Trial", reports The Crimson today. I don't care.

I am so far beyond caring about where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev ends up that I'm refusing to click on that link, and won't give you a hyperlink here; feel free to search it up on your own, if you like. I am aggressively refusing to care.

Or at least, aggressively refusing to indulge in anything that would incite me to care more than I can possibly avoid.

I mean, look, you can hate the kid. You can meditate on the violence he perpetrated against the city of Boston and the fear that he and his brother struck across our city for days, plural, of 2013. You can follow the news of his trial, conviction, and imprisonment with a carefully-stoked bloodthirst, and feel a measure of closure on behalf of our city when he gets put away for life without parole, or executed.^[1] You can live a life where every time you're reminded of him or his brother, you indulge in the feeling of rising rage. I understand too well how close this thing cut to tell you not to do that, because, really, I understand.

But I won't. Quoth Pratchett:

"But we should kill him!"

"No. You've been listen to Brocando too often," said Bane.

Brocando bristled. "You know what he is! Why not kill--" he began, but he was interrupted.

"Because it doesn't matter what he is. It matters what we are."

I'm never going to see Dzhokhar, and I'll never have any sort of human interaction

A year ago, the school (and the city) was just getting off lockdown after the manhunt for the marathon bombing suspect(s). And looking backward, there's a few things I remember quite clearly:

• the spreadsheet of students offering couch space, spare beds, and sleeping bags to 'stranded' students unsure if it was safe to be crossing campus
• the Dining Services workers who crossed a city on lockdown (by bike, as I recall) to come in to work, and the students who volunteered to work the dining hall with them
• the pre-frosh who came to Visitas Weekend despite its cancellation (including mine!), and the hosts who did everything they could to make their stay worth its while (in the fall, the school would announce record yield numbers...)
• the sudden, temporary freedom from work -- afterward, a friend would recall "I've never felt so free as that day we were trapped inside!" I'm not sure what this says about Harvard.
  But there's one thing in particular about what whole bizarre half-week that I'm unlikely to forget, probably ever:

The day that the freshman dining hall, Annenberg, was reopened, someone proposed an idea which caught on pretty much immediately -- at 6pm, in Annenberg, we'd gather as a community to sing The Star-Spangled Banner. It was one of those things, I think, that a lot of us needed, and it just seemed like the right thing to do on that Tuesday night.

There's a scene in Casablanca where the a cafe of Frechmen rise together in La Marseillaise to drown out a handful of rowdy Germans singing Die Wacht am Rhein.

It's a tearjerking moment, and the first (and second, and