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Fame offers many temptations. There’s a pervasive idea that if you become a celebrity, everyone will instantly become your friend. Fame seems to negate the tedious, daily work of making people value us, love us for some reason. Fame, if we can achieve it, seems to take care of love in one grand ges…

[...] Our hometowns become a kind of permission and hideaway, a place where we don’t have to be ourselves, where our actions don’t count and we get to be briefly less visible than we are in the adult homes we’ve made for ourselves elsewhere, the places where we expect ourselves to take action and a…

IX

If there’s supposed to be a take-home message from all of this, it must run something like: “Yes, the system is corrupt, but it’s all we have, and anyway, figures of authority can be trusted if they have first been chastened and endured terrible suffering.” Normal police let children die o…