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Hello and welcome back to the Americano show, where we talk about power, politics and prejudices in American life.

Every week we will talk to at least one or two or possibly three or four American experts,

international experts about American affairs.

And you can also catch us on Spectator TV on YouTube as often as you like.

Please keep listening and watching.

I'm delighted to be joined today by Catherine D,

who is an internet ethnographer. Do you call yourself an internet ethnographer, Catherine?

Yeah, that's one way to put it. Yeah. Internet historian, you write about the internet,

very interestingly, on a brilliant subject called Default Friend, which I highly recommend to all listeners of the Americano podcast. And Catherine,

you've written a very moving piece about the school shooting. It's, well, it was a mass shooting

in a Catholic Mass. It was the first day back for the school,

the Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis.

And this terrible crime has happened.

Two children are dead, 17 injured, I think.

And as you say in this piece, you turned on the news for the first time in a long time and you heard about it and you found it very upsetting, which you found odd because you've been alive in America for a long time.

And there's lots of school shootings all the time.

There's sort of normal fact of American life, um, or American news life, I'd say.

And you found it particularly distressing why?

I'm a parent now.

So I think that's part of it.

You know, when I became a mother, these stories took on sort of a new salience. I live in the Midwest.

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