Marina Keegan: A Yale grad made the most of her short life. - latimes.com

Marina Keegan: A Yale grad made the most of her short life. - latimes.com: News briefs can be cruel. Not because of what they say, but because of what they don't.

The Boston Globe ran an item Saturday headlined “Wayland woman dies in Dennis car crash.” It was breaking news, but not unusual. The Globe’s metro desk regularly runs tragedies in brief: struck pedestrian, fatal motorcycle accident.

This one told of Marina Keegan, 22, who died when the car she was riding in drifted off the road, hit a guardrail, veered back over the road and rolled over at least twice. The driver of the 1997 Lexus ES300 survived.

The accident backed up traffic for nearly a mile, the Globe noted. This was the news.

What the Globe didn’t mention, what wasn't news at the time, was that Keegan was a writer. A pretty good one. She had just graduated from Yale University. And one of the last things she ever wrote was about the importance of living life to its fullest.

Let's get one thing straight

"Internal deliberations of the executive branch" do not constitute due process. Particularly when it comes to ordering someone killed. Shame on Obama.

Two Thoughts

While in Chicago this weekend, I realized two new things:

1. We often talk about how stereotypes can damage or harm a person's ability or potential, but the reverse of that happened to me: I was the nerd who was "supposed" to succeed. It's a very strange kind of privilege, because that sort of praise is also isolating, but I hadn't fully realized it until this weekend.
2. I think churches need to start to explicitly welcome "friends" in addition to "members." Spirituality is a difficult topic, but churches do far too many wonderful things that go beyond embracing a creed. Some of the most loving people I know aren't explicitly religious, though I think their love of fellow man makes them more Christian than others who wear their faith on their sleeve.