Six months ago, my yoga teacher decapitated his girlfriend. The police found her torso in the refrigerator of the RV he drove from New Orleans to Black Rock Desert every September for Burning Man. In this mid-size, decidedly regional Southern city — a site of national myth if not national importance — wars take place on Instagram rather than Twitter. There, the usual parties joked that “he tried Burning Man before Freezing Woman.” Injunctions not to read the comments are made for crimes like this, because they are where temptation lives. (I followed temptation.) Progressive commentators found it appalling that the murderer parked his crime scene in a gentrifying neighborhood, with no care for the residents’ fight against displacement. Rightists publicly brayed that he ought to be raped and murdered in prison. Novices on gender violence wondered aloud if they should have known — read the signs, assumed that belligerence was escalating towards murder. Self-appointed experts assured them that they should have. Somewhere in between, we agonized about whether to say they/them or he/his for an accused murderer whose pronouns shifted more than once in the previous year. I confess I chose “his” in the first sentence because once you heard about a dead woman you began looking, like any assiduous detective, for a man with blood on his hands. Both parties, I should note, are white. Despite the details — neck tattoos, semi-naked festivals, meth addiction, and fibrillating pronouns, all placed in a haunted gothic city — the story never attracted national attention. One might count as an exception Reddit, where Burners questioned one another about who had partied with the victim, the murderer, or both on the Festival’s Playa. It is hard to predict what crimes become “red balls”: police slang for cases with sufficient attention and resources to warrant closure, cameras, podcasts, new surveillance architecture, and think pieces. Certainly violence must surprise in order to terrify, but New Orleans is a high-crime city where tourists are warned to stay on the beaten path and to keep their wallets close. Crimes against visitors get more attention. Photogenic victims attract consistent coverage. Years into methamphetamine addiction, few people look good enough for the cable news B-reel. But how do we do the work of parsing reasons that are, by nature, multiple, in a political climate that encourages unitary, withering diagnostic certainty? I bear witness to violence. During the high crime 1980s, my parents moved their four children from New York to Appalachia in hopes of keeping us alive. The shift brought violence closer. Our neighbor in South Carolina murdered his uncle in retaliation for childhood abuse. At a laundromat near Clemson University — the nearest cultural institution — an international graduate student was kidnapped the year of our arrival. The only sign of foul play was a pool of blood on the concrete floor where she kneeled to switch her laundry from washer to dryer. Her skeletal remains were found a few months later on the grounds of the county’s nuclear power plant; the crime remains unsolved. A woman I grew up with was “murdered on the interstate,” as in Neko Case’s best murder ballad; my brother’s dear friend died in a drive-by shooting. By the time I returned to New York — upstate this time — for graduate school, a certain amount of violence felt quotidian. An FBI investigation exposed a child pornography ring on my campus. Cue the newspaper euphemisms: we can’t tell you what we saw on those hard drives, but it’s your worst nightmare. It interrupted my slow slog toward the dissertation, though this was hardly the most tragic outcome. Local news cameras appeared on campus. Amateur actors in search of accolades found the microphones into which they intoned that they felt so unsafe, though it was children — by definition, almost none of us — who had been harmed. “We” are in danger whether from strange men or familiar ones, whose bullying in the workplace or at home indexes far more pathological sexual impulses that we cannot see. The behavior is always “escalating”; the mundane manipulative boyfriend bears the seed of Ted Bundy’s evil. Victimhood does not hold as much capital as bullets dodged or predators outwitted. Potential victimhood — always waiting, kept at bay by our own will and ability to translate quotidian behaviors into “red flags” — pays emotional dividends. It is a boundless energetic well. Walking among us are people who have never been hurt; they are confident that they remain unhurt because they have taken care. (“Be careful!” they say, when we leave their company.) Meanwhile, many of us live hurt, live unprepared for future hurt. I am confident that I am living because no one wants me dead. And I call this optimism. 
In Conflict Is Not Abuse, her study of the damaging consequences of overstated harm, Sarah Schulman notes that the “fear of potential threat is not always based in actual experience…. It can also be a political construction, one that is fabricated and then advertised through popular culture, or enforced through systems of power.” Sometimes, we phantasmatically build those systems, imposing them on our own experiences and fleeting encounters. Consider the poem “On the Subway” by Sharon Olds, in which she imagines a young black man measuring the bodily signs of a white woman’s wealth. I look at his raw face, he looks at my fur coat, and I don’t know if I am in his power — he could take my coat so easily, my briefcase, my life — or if he is in my power, the way I am living off his life, eating the steak he does not eat, as if I am taking the food from his mouth. And he is black and I am white, and without meaning or trying to I must profit from his darkness, the way he absorbs the murderous beams of the nation’s head, as black cotton absorbs the heat of the sun and holds it. The
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence