Making Sense of Senselessness

1. Nicholas Thompson writes at The New Yorker:

There’s something particularly devastating about an attack on a marathon. It’s an epic event in which men and women appear almost superhuman. The winning men run for hours at a pace even normal fit people can only hold in a sprint. But it’s also so ordinary. It’s not held in a stadium or on a track. It’s held in the same streets everyone drives on and walks down. An attack on a marathon is, in some ways, more devastating than an attack on a stadium; you’re hitting something special but also something very quotidian.

When we find out who did this, we may well find some fascination with the event—perhaps a foreign terrorist, or a sick American. Perhaps it was someone who spotted a terribly easy target. Or perhaps it was someone who saw a reflection of the human spirit and decided just to try to shatter it.

Read it here.

2. A Cosmic Perspective

“Tonight’s Finale: A somber Spring night in Boston,” Tweeted the Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, Commander of Expedition 35 at the International Space Station, who took this photo of Boston last night from space: