A guy obsesses over the mysterious vanishing of a woman he barely knew. A woman nobody seemed to know.

(from Dangerous Laughter)

This story has some interesting things to say, I think, about the need for a sense of common civility between people, to not ignore them or avoid them or let them simply fade away. We should feel obligated to keep everybody in the game. But it also hints at an extreme side effect of this proposed hard-wired empathy, that we become ravenous ghouls, hungry for mystery and grim truth, even about people we never met. And that’s, seriously, how we end up with vultures like TMZ and Nancy Grace, pecking at skeletons for every last morsel of meat, gaining sustenance by embracing only that which is as dead and ugly as the world that made them. We can do better, people.