I think people follow sensational news stories that escalate into media frenzies at least in part to try to figure out why the stories have been whipped up into frenzies at all. We wait for some news outlet to supply us with something genuinely revelatory, the newsworthy fact that will justify all the live feeds and up-to-the-minute rumor-mongering, correspondents in parkas before the hotel, the impounded car. Do we hear anything during these updates that sheds profound light on the human condition, or exposes some deep flaw in law enforcement, government, morality, ethics?

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We are pattern seekers and meaning makers: we cannot escape form. Even a depiction of chaos will be, in some fundamental way, formal. Indeed, chaos is simply the unfiltered and the uncategorized. As soon as I call this bit “this,” and that bit “that,” I have performed an act of creation. We cannot choose to be formal; we can only choose how heavily we lean into it. Seeking patterns and making forms is simply our minds in the work of comprehension.

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