He is the picture, literally, of a relaxed, sincere, slightly mysterious young dude. He’s slumped against a white wall, wearing a white Armani Exchange T-shirt whose letters cluster like artful scribbles. The faintest ghost of a smile hovers around the corners of his mouth. A tangle of hair falls over one eye it’s very possible he worked for a minute or two to get that lock just so. In Tsarnaev’s selfie, he stares just off the camera’s eye-line with an opaque but calm expression. And the ones they release to the world are the masks they want us to see. There’s a reason that adolescents take selfies at the rate of about 100 per minute. You are engaging in persona management: the creation of a cuter, cooler, more glamorous you. When you take a selfie, you are imagining yourself as how you’d like to be - as who you’d like to be. It’s less a way of looking out at the world than reminding ourselves that the world is looking at us, even when it isn’t. The cellphone each of us carries on our person is a miniature but fully functioning portrait studio, one that many of us can and obsessively do use to document daily life and our own self-willed centrality to it. The choice of Tsarnaev’s selfie for the cover does nothing to clear matters up and everything to muddy the parsing of his meaning in the public square. What’s the difference between him and us? The more we know, the safer we feel. If we could connect those dots, could we stop it from happening again? Would we know what to look for next time? Or do we want to solve the puzzle so we can understand what made the kid a “monster” and be done with him? The seeming averageness of Tsarnaev, the boy who went to the same school as Matt and Ben, unnerves us. We’re drawn to it and disturbed by it, moved to explore it while hoping that someone, somewhere, will solve it. ![]() Our popular culture doesn’t quite know what to do with enigma. There is little to distinguish him from millions of other teenage boys in this country. He is an enigma: An Americanized son of immigrants who friends said played soccer, smoked a little weed, liked hip-hop, had a Twitter account, and professed few, if any, political opinions. The unseemly fascination with Tsarnaev - the reason he is a kind of rock star to a woefully naive (and hopefully very small) segment of the public - stems in part from his gentle good looks but more from the distance between those looks and the crimes with which he has been charged.
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