"Normally, there is your life, and you turn on the television and there is news, and no matter how grave it is, or how deep in the toilet the world has fallen, or how relevant the information might be to your own existence, your life remains a separate entity from that news. You still have to wash your underpants during a war, don't you? And don't you still have to fight with your loved ones and then apologize when you don't mean it even when there's a hole in the sky burning everything to a crisp? Of course you do. As a rule, there's no hole big enough to interrupt this interminable business of living, but there are exceptions, grim instances in the lives of a few select unlucky bastards when the news in the papers and the news in the bedrooms intersect. I tell you, it's a daunting and appalling moment when you have to read the newspaper to find out your own struggle."
-Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole (108)

I'm reading this book right now, a Booker Prize shortlister, and it's a really exceptional book all around, but this passage was particularly notable for me.

I mean, there are going to be news stories that stop our daily lives, if only momentarily. But those stop the lives of a large mass of people. We all know the big ones. Attacks of nature, of angry college kids. What about the news stories, though, that most of us skip right over?

I remember one time a couple of years back watching the local news to find out that a friend of mine from elementary school tried to kill a bunch of people at a party on Halloween. Attacked a bunch of his highschool friends with a knife. Straight out of Scream or something. And then I realized that all the creepy serial killers don't really go by their full names, because they plastered his full name all over the screen, so that nobody gets confused. But I had never even heard his middle name before. And I thought, firsthand, "but he was such a nice kid". And now he's in jail. And people don't talk about it anymore, but I think we all remember it. It can't be just me.

WTF, right?