See Slate’s complete coverage of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting and the arrest of Jared Lee Loughner.

Friedrich Nietzsche

If we never discovered that Jared Lee Loughner honed his murderous outlook while sitting alone in his bedroom, reading Nietzsche and thinking about nihilism, that would have been real news. Instead of real news, though, we’ve gotten a dreary iteration of a cultural cliché. The New York Times and other media are saying the addled and alienated young man arrested for trying to assassinate Gabrielle Giffords, and for the murders of 9-year-old Christina Taylor Green and five other people, took himself to be a Nietzschean. Of course he did. Continue reading →