Rolling Stone’s Boston Bomber Cover Is Brilliant

[Spider Jerusalem]

31. So?

The New York Times said the same thing:

Mr. Tsarnaev was a skilled deflector of curiosity about his personal affairs. He rarely talked about his background except to say that he was Chechen or had lived in Russia. He was popular — “he had a lot of girls hitting on him,” said Junes Umarov, 18, a close friend who is also of Chechen descent — but even other close friends could not say whether he had a girlfriend.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/us/dzhokhar-tsarnaevs-dark-side-carefully-masked.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

I don't see how that's "glorifying" as much as it is reporting facts; the idea that he was popular and well-liked by his fellow students and teachers, and by all accounts seemed like a promising young man, makes the case all the more troubling (there wouldn't be all this outrage over the photo and accompanying story if he'd been a pimply-faced geek and an eccentric and isolated introvert, like Adam Lanza or Jared Loughner); here's someone who seems to have a lot of things going for him, and in some ways to be an excellent illustration of America's promise to immigrants...and then, he goes terribly wrong and becomes a bomber and mass killer; the question of "why?" is one that it's useful to ask, if only because there may be other young men like him out there.