I occasionally check out The Juilliard Journal online and wanted to compliment you on the October “Coming Out” feature (“Coming Out: Stories of Family, Liberation, and Love”). I thought they were moving and compelling, and I would imagine they perform a valuable public service to the Juilliard community and to anyone else like myself who might chance upon them.

Frank Shanbacker
New York, N.Y.
The writer is a producer for NBC News.

Virginia Tech Tragedy

I wanted to express my appreciation for Mitchell Crawford’s comprehensive inquiry into the Virginia Tech tragedy (September Voice Box: “Terror’s Many Faces”). While I found the article a provocative read all the way through, one line in particular struck me with greatest interest:  “Many Americans seem … no longer willing to invest emotional energy in what is, admittedly, a confounding and extensive problem.In the very next line of his concluding paragraph, he directs the reader’s attention to the topic of American indifference with an attempt to correlate such with a sense of “we’re the best” mentality. 

With regard to his Third Law of Motion (for every action there is an equal an opposite reaction), I think Newton would take note of Mr. Crawford’s natural writing style, as I would further suggest that it’s not so much an unwillingness of Americans “to invest emotional energy” but rather a consequence of being unable—likely due to Washington politics—to openly deliberate the necessities of restraints upon modern time-shifting devices such as iPods, iPhones, TiVos, and DVRs, which distort our sense of reality along the space-time continuum.

Michael Norton
Woodside, N.Y.