Weekend Reading: Dzhokhar in Rolling Stone, Phantoms in Our Minds: The New Yorker What is most remarkable about Janet Reitman's new Rolling Stone profile of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev - aside from the notorious "rock star" cover treatment thoughtfully analyzed by Ian Crouch - is how it departs from what we've come to expect from stories about the alleged Boston Marathon bomber. Despite all that has been written about him, most accounts of his past hinge on two themes. The first is that the lives of Dzhokhar and his brother, Tamerlan were destroyed by historical forces, including Chechen nationalism, militant Islam, and the sometimes-false promise of the American dream, and this is what led them to destroy the lives of others. The second theme, exemplified by the Times article "The Dark Side, Carefully Masked," is that Dzhokhar, as the newspaper put it, is "a master of concealment" whose boyish brown locks, goofily inscrutable face, and over-all chillness hid a troubled inner life. Reitman, in contrast, portrays him as a (relatively) sympathetic victim who was influenced by a dysfunctional family beset by financial problems, and who lived not a double life so much as one that descended into disaster. I was reminded of the famous 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, in which the psychologist Philip Zimbardo demonstrated that everyday people, placed in certain circumstances, can be unthinkably brutal. Reitman's piece implies that the forces that shaped Dzhokhar are familiar, not foreign - and that his violent impulses might lie latent in us all. Shadowy elements of a different sort are on display in Julian Rubinstein's "Operation Easter," in the current issue of this magazine, in which two kinds of obsessives - collectors and environmentalists, each of them variants of a third kind, birders - face off in a British crackdown on a secretive network of egg collectors. If you're a fan of the article's Monty Python-esque absurdity, you might follow it up with Bruce Barcott's 2007 New York Times Magazine article on yet another rift in the animal-lover kingdom: "the strange Sylvester-and-Tweety feud between birders and cat fanciers." Barcott writes: Depending on whom you talk to, cats are either rhinestone-collared mass murderers or victims of a smear campaign waged by lowdown cat haters. The National Audubon Society has declared that "worldwide, cats may have been involved in the extinction of more bird species than any other cause, except habitat destruction." The American Bird Conservancy, a smaller, feistier group, runs a campaign to persuade cat owners to lock up their pets. Cat defenders respond: They're cats! They chase birds. Barcott's article focusses on the case of Jim Stevenson, a diehard birder who, in an effort to protect some endangered piping plovers - "tame, abiding little creatures," he says - kills a feral cat. Stevenson is entertaining, the sort of guy who, in the article's introduction, is scanning the horizon for spoonbills and orioles even as he explains his possible prison sentence. But he ends up as more of a narrative device in what is really an essay about a surprisingly complicated question: "What are our obligations to cats and birds?" For another weekend read, consider returning to one of the better, and grosser, pieces to emerge from the alt-weekly universe last year: Gendy Alimurung's "The Man Who Smelled Too Much," in LA Weekly, which was just awarded first place in the "feature story, circulation 50,000 and over" category at the Association of Alternative Newsmedia Awards. The article is about William Nowell, a homeless man with an unspecified health problem who, having come into a two-hundred-thousand-dollar legal settlement (its precise origins are unclear), moves into a luxury apartment building whose other tenants decide that he, yes, smells too much. How much? So much that the building tries to evict him, prompting a legal battle involving conflicting accounts of the intensity and origins of his odor. "Yes, the smell went to trial," Alimurung writes. Cassandra Smith, the nice leasing agent, testified that the stench was so powerful it traveled six floors up, from the fourth floor to the 10th. Read the article for the silliness of the proceedings, but also for their seriousness. Nowell, after all, isn't just a guy who smells - he's a homeless person who fails to adhere to the social conventions of luxury-apartment life in other ways, like refusing to wear shoes and socks. One possibility, it turns out, is that he actually doesn't smell nearly as bad as everyone says, and that the olfactory allegations are simply sublimated discrimination. Finally, during this week when so much of the news has centered on Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman, Ross Gay's "Some Thoughts on Mercy," in The Sun, should not be missed. Gay, who teaches creative writing at Indiana University, and who is black, writes about being pulled over by a police officer, presumably for no reason other than his race. "I ought to get over it," he writes. But it is also the familiarity of it all (black guy has unpleasant run-in with the cops) that makes my experience, and the many thousands like it, almost invisible - which makes the significant daily terror of being a black or brown person in this country almost invisible. There is much more to Gay's essay than this, but invisibility and visibility are its central themes. Gay has in mind, no doubt, Ralph Ellison: "Too often," he writes, "we exist, as Ralph Ellison's narrator in Invisible Man says, as "phantom[s] in other people's minds."" The solution, he writes, is that word from his essay's title - mercy: It seems to me that part of my reason for writing this - for revealing my own fear and sorrow, my own paranoia and self-incrimination and shame - is to say, Look how I've been made by this. To have, perhaps, mercy on myself. When we have mercy, deep and abiding change might happen. The corrupt imagination might become visible. Inequalities might become visible. Violence might become visible. Terror might become visible. And the things we've been doing to each other, despite the fact that we don't want to do such things to each other, might become visible. If we don't, we will all remain phantoms...