What surprised me wasn’t what he had said, or how unequivocally he had said it, but the self-assurance with which he had shared this detail about himself. I wondered at the kind of confidence or its opposite that one must possess to be comfortable and, evidently, a little proud of a fear of silence.

It’s when I come up most strongly against the architectures of violence that structure my life that I fall back most gratefully on a lifelong desire for solitude. Those moments are increasingly rare these days. What has taken over my life instead is an ever-growing thrum of everyday noise. It has become easy, with all that noise to keep one company, to shrink back a bit from the thought of aloneness.

But every so often I am shocked back into a clarifying hunger for stillness, for quiet, for an internally-generated reserve. It feels a bit like a superpower, something so anonymous and so seemingly foreign to that world crushes in. It feels like the exertion of a power, the careful and considered and wilful demarcation of a border, a limit, a resolve. It is my favourite rebellion, sometimes laced a little with guilt. What could be more decadent.

Other kinds of flaws and every other gender, sure. But if literature is meant to be break from or to illuminate the every day, why spend my time immersed in the most mundane and the most pervasive and the most stifling of all my daily tribulations.

Consulting firm PwC recently published its outlook for work in 2022, based on interviews with 500 human resources experts and 10,000 others in the United States and several other countries. You probably won’t be surprised to hear that big companies could end up so powerful and influential they morph into “ministates” that fill the void when government is unable to provide essential services. Companies will also use sensors and other gizmos to monitor employees around the clock. And workers will mostly acquiesce to this digital leash, in exchange for job security, decent pay and important benefits.

The future’s so bright, I gotta drink whiskey like it’s going outta style.

This makes the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown so powerful. It's sad that some people have taken it to another level. http://t.co/oZnLDRRDhN

‘WELP:

WHITE SUSPECT

That’s how the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal chose to present the story of Amy Bishop, a former college professor who eventually pleaded guilty to killing three colleagues and wounding three others at a faculty meeting in 2010.

BLACK VICTIM

And that’s the headline AL.com ran about the shooting death of a 25-year-old black man in Alabama earlier this year.

WHITE SUSPECT

This is how the Staten Island Advance covered the case of Eric Bellucci, a mentally ill New York man who allegedly killed his parents.

BLACK VICTIM

Meanwhile, NBC News ran this headline during ongoing coverage of the Trayvon Martin killing.

More at HuffPo (h/t).

In depth:

Not at all helpful (quite the opposite, actually):

On Thursday, a name released by the hacking collective Anonymous began circulating, but St. Louis County Police said that the name was inaccurate. The same kind of thing happened Wednesday, as another name began floating around and gaining traction. Ferguson police said that that name was also inaccurate, telling The Post that these reports were false.

A spokesman with the St. Louis County Police was critical of the group Anonymous for releasing the information.

“People really need to harshly judge the accuracy of this group, given that they’ve now given false information about several important things,” Sgt. Colby Dolly said on Thursday.

Dolly said that authorities were trying to locate the person identified by Anonymous on Thursday to warn him.

Of course, such recklessness could easily be prevented by, y’know, releasing the name of the shooter (even the NRO, etc).

Late night Hump Day rawk out continues unabated:

(h/t)