When I watched the news on Virginia Tech last night, I was reminded of Jo Ann Beard’s nonfiction essay: “The Fourth State of Matter.”
In 1991, there was a mass murder at the University of Iowa. The perpetrator was a graduate student named Gang Lu; he was in the Physics Department, where Beard was managing editor of a journal. Beard was not at work when the rampage began. Six died on that day.
Jo Ann Beard survived to write about what happened. Her colleagues and friends were not so lucky. Her writing on the subject reads like beautifully crafted fiction, but it’s not, of course, and that’s the horrible part.
Natalia A. 
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