QUOTE OF THE DAY: MICHIKO KAKUTANI

"As for what appears to be Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s Amazon wish list page, it is a weird jumble of self-help books (Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People”), covert-operations-style manuals (“The I.D. Forger: Homemade Birth Certificates and Other Documents Explained”), Chechen history books (“Allah’s Mountains: The Battle for Chechnya, New Edition”), Mafia books (Nicholas Pileggi’s “Wiseguy”) and books about the Roman Empire (“The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”). There is Boethius’s “Consolation of Philosophy” — a staple of college curriculums that addresses ideas of good and evil and free will — and “Snatch,” the “inside story of the making of the smash-hit movie starring Brad Pitt. Did Tamerlan harbor macho dreams of being an action hero, or a Mafia operative? Did he want to read Boethius to grapple with deep existential doubts he was having, or was he assigned it in school? (The books all appear to have been added to the Amazon list in 2006 and 2007.) Did his interest in the Roman Empire have something to do with a conviction that the West was decadent and in decline? For that matter, does this Amazon wish list really belong to him? Or does our fascination with the list simply reflect our own desire to gain insight into his thinking, our hunger for more dots to try to connect?" — MICHIKO KAKUTANI, NYT

Or maybe just the deep-felt desire of columnists everywhere to tether their multicolored conjecture to what is known as — I believe this to be the term —  "the facts"? That last   sentence gives me pleasure every time I read it: a wonderful bit of ass-coverage.